Tuskegee, Alabama
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Good morning, everybody! And hello to everybody on the livestream, good to have you.
Thank you, Morgan, for the introduction, and thank you for your leadership of Tuskegee’s chapter of Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Related Sciences—a crucial national organization for the advancement of underrepresented students and researchers in the sciences and one with whom USAID is proud to have signed a memorandum of understanding last year.
Dr. Olga Bolden-Tiller, whom I spent some time with earlier, serves as the national president of that organization and as Tuskegee’s Dean of the College of Agriculture, Environment, and Nutrition Sciences. It means a lot to us to have you with us here today as well.
I’d like to thank Dr. Rhonda Collier, the Director of the Global Office here, for her really hard work in making today’s memorandum of understanding between the University and USAID a reality.
And thanks of course to Tuskegee President Dr. Charlotte Morris, and to the assembled Vice Presidents, Deans, Board of Trustees, and student leaders who are present here this morning.
I also want to join others in singling out Alexious Butler, the driving force behind USAID’s partnerships with HBCUs, and Jim Barnhart, Assistant Administrator for Resilience and Food Security, who has made diversity, equity, inclusion, and accommodation a core priority for the Bureau of Resilience and Food Security, and is really helping us drive our DEIA agenda at USAID. So really grateful to you as well, Jim and Alexious.
Before I begin, I just want to acknowledge the deeply disturbing and unsettling reports of bomb threats made at several of our nation’s HBCU’s this morning.
It is despicable to think that in 2022, our nation’s best and brightest Black students, staff, and intellectuals are made to fear simply because they are present at institutions that welcome and nurture them as they so deserve.
I can say personally that I feel so privileged—and frankly so moved—just to be walking these grounds, and to be here with all of you at Tuskegee.
I have had a busy ten days of travel recently: trying to support U.S. efforts to shore up the fragile peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, traveling with Vice President Harris, America’s first woman Vice President—as you well know—to attend the inauguration of Honduras’s first female President, and now, my third trip in the last fortnight, to Tuskegee.
You might be saying to yourself, one of these trips is not like the others. But I believe they are inextricably related. I am here today because I believe Tuskegee, which has long made profound contributions to American life, has even more to offer the broader world than we have tapped so far.
I believe that the expertise that resides here at Tuskegee, this keystone of Black history, can help Bosnian farmers nourish their soils and sell more vegetables for export. I believe that expertise can help provide Honduran families more nutritious food for their children to fight malnutrition. And those are just a couple examples of all that this community has to offer the broader world.
It is here in this place, where the triumphs and the terrors of the Black experience, resound like few other places on earth.
It was here that Black scientists remade agriculture and restored the soil of the South back to health after it was drained by the cotton trade. Here that Black fighter pilots first took to the sky. And also here that innocent Black people trusted their health to their government, only to become unwitting subjects in a wicked experiment.
Through it all, the story of Tuskegee has been one of resilience, of uplift, of tapping into Black excellence to lift the prospects and prosperity of marginalized populations and peoples of African descent.
Since its founding, that story has taken many forms, from enriching the lives of the students and staff who walk through these halls, to expanding the reach of cutting-edge agricultural and technical science throughout this country.
And although Tuskegee’s impact has never remained contained within America’s borders—indeed, today I learned about George Washignton Carver’s travels with students to Togo in 1897 to strengthen local crop production. Today, nonetheless, there is an opportunity like never before to extend the reach of this institution’s talent and brilliance to any corner of the globe where poverty reigns, hunger looms, and a changing climate unwinds the lives of the overlooked and marginalized. We know it is possible—to tap into agricultural productivity to lift people from poverty because that is the story of Tuskegee’s founding.
Earlier this morning, I had the honor of paying my respects at the graves of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. It was Washington who, having been born into slavery himself, left home at age 16 on foot to seek an education, learning the practical value of agriculture at the Hampton Institutue. And it was he who hired Carver, then a nationally renowned botanist, to run the agricultural department at this institution, a man who would become one of the most famous scientists—not Black scientists, but scientists, of the 20th century.
In the classroom and in the fields surrounding us, Carver taught Americans the value of crop rotation, new techniques that could boost productivity, and helped transition the South’s agriculture from soil-depleting cotton to soil-restoring sweet potatoes, soybeans, and peanuts. But he didn’t just teach the students of Tuskegee—Carver was committed to empowering the impoverished Black sharecroppers of this country, engaging anyone who wanted to learn about the basics of agriculture.
I love the quote from Carver that I happened upon on our walk to this building a few minutes ago—I just scribbled it down: “No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him, distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.” That’s a high bar, we’re doing our best here. But I love the ambition in that—and that is what, of course, permeates this campus.
While there was only one George Washington Carver, I can’t tell you how many farmers there are out there in the world right now, far from here, who are asking themselves the same questions he posed, about crop diversification for example, wondering: How can I grow more food with less water? How do I protect my crops and my livestock from pests and diseases? How can I produce predictable yields with unpredictable weather? These are timeless questions, and they are urgent questions right now.
We are at Tuskegee to sign a historic MOU today because together, we hope to provide answers to the impoverished and marginalized farmers of our generation, just as Washington and Carver did in theirs. The faculty and students here at Tuskegee have the expertise to help hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, most of them women and most of them African, who currently toil, to escape the grips of hunger and poverty. Because we at USAID understand what has long helped fuel the mission on this campus: growth in agriculture is nearly four times more effective in reducing poverty than growth in other sectors.
It is this shared recognition that first sparked a partnership between Tuskegee and USAID nearly three decades ago. USAID has benefited from the work we have done with Tuskegee since 1995. It is work through which scientists here have authored studies on everything from improving access to livestock farming in Burkina Faso to strengthening soil health in rural communities in Ecuador.
In 2012, when the Obama-Biden Administration launched Feed the Future, a multiyear, multi-billion dollar global hunger and food security initiative, our relationship entered a new phase—the next phase. Working with Feed the Future Innovation Labs—USAID-funded research programs, based at land-grant universities and focused on agricultural breakthroughs—Tuskegee has worked directly with farmers in countries like Tanzania and Ghana to improve the agricultural and nutritional yields of their crops.
One of those projects, overseen by your Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Channa Prakash, helped educate Tanzanian women about growing and selling products made from nutritious orange sweet potatoes to combat malnutrition—echoing some of the earliest work of Dr. Carver himself.
But, the truth is, though we have done some good work with Tuskegee in the past, we have not done quite enough to enlist Tuskegee’s faculty and students, and those at other HBCUs, into the work of global agriculture. We haven’t put your experts in the lead of USAID-funded global development research projects, and in fact, we haven’t even circulated proposals or reached out to faculty about opportunities in the same way we have at the institutions we are more used to working with, and that we have worked with for longer periods of time—predominantly White institutions.
Despite the massive overlap that exists between the curricula and talent at HCBUs like this one and the needs that exist out there in the world, USAID staff have reported that they have little knowledge of the research expertise that resides here. So the burden ends up being on faculty here to find their way in the very, very difficult labyrinth of funding and research proposals and other matters.
It is a familiar story: We, at USAID, know what we know. We know what we already know. And it takes work, and time, and intentionality to access new domains and get the most out of them. Despite the well known drive and expertise of your students and researchers, we also have not been doing enough to recruit from, partner with, and initiate research projects with our nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other minority-serving institutions. This in the end makes our Agency less effective than it otherwise can be. When we don’t harness the creative thinking and innovation of institutions like Tuskegee sufficiently—because again, we are in partnership, but we can do more—we imperil our global fight against poverty. It’s that simple.
Ask any person working in global development how they got their start and they will tell you that the experience they got through internships or research projects as an undergraduate were critical. That’s certainly true of me. We are missing out on an opportunity to engage tomorrow’s development leaders today.
Under this new MOU, we are seeking to deepen the relationship between USAID and Tuskegee in new ways. First, we will expand outreach through informational workshops and forums to inform Tuskegee faculty and students about USAID’s work and research partnership opportunities, and to offer counsel on how to be successful applicants. It’s not that easy. We will also regularly connect with students to share job openings, internships, and other work opportunities. I’ve had the chance to interact with three students just so far, but I haven’t yet made the hard sell. That’s coming—just so you know. But what an impressive group of young people you have here on this campus. We will advise Tuskegee faculty on curriculum for the creation of at least two development courses to teach the issues USAID deals with every day, like climate change and rising food prices.
Today’s MOU signing is about expanding access to opportunities that can connect your love of learning, research, and service to our shared mission of ending global water insecurity, hunger, malnutrition, and poverty.
Before I close, I would like to issue a very important call, specifically to the students here: Whatever you are studying, please consider joining us at USAID. If you’re unsure where to start, I’ll just offer a few ideas: For current graduate students: the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement at Cornell University launched its application for something called the Thomas Wyatt Turner Fellowship just today. Check it out. This Fellowship provides students from 1890 land-grant institutions, like Tuskegee, a one-year graduate student mentorship program at Cornell focused on inclusive and sustainable agricultural development.
For graduating seniors: Please know that USAID is doubling the number of Donald M. Payne Fellowships, which pay for graduate school and allow students to work for USAID as Foreign Service Officers after earning their master’s degree. This is just an awesome program.
For those students unsure of their interest or just looking to gain exposure to our work: We are dramatically expanding the number of paid internships we offer so that those opportunities are more accessible to all.
On George Washington Carver’s epitaph, it reads: “He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.”
“Being helpful to the world”—contained in that simple ambition is the potential for a wildly rewarding life; an opportunity to uplift the underserved at the very time when the problems they face would benefit most from your skills and expertise.
Around the world, COVID-19 has shut down markets, disrupted food supply chains, and increased food prices dramatically, pushing tens of millions of people into extreme poverty and hunger. Climate change continues to devastate agriculture, dry up critical water sources, and subject people to untold human misery through fiercer hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and floods. You know all this.
The MOU we will sign today—and the closer partnership it will usher in between USAID and Tuskegee—can result in solutions that rise to meet these challenges. This is a chance to extend the legacy of Washington and Carver, and so many other legions of Tuskegee’s Black leaders and thinkers, to the overlooked and marginalized farmers worldwide who battle against hunger, lack access to the nutritious food their kids need, and remain trapped in lives of impoverished struggle while temperatures rise and fields dry up.
If you see this global battle as your chance to be “helpful to the world,” we want to help you fulfill the call. Together, we can cultivate a world that is more free, prosperous, and equitable—a world where the underserved are uplifted.
Thank you so much.
