Henry A. Wallace was born in Iowa in 1888 to an activist family. His grandfather founded an influential magazine, “Wallace’s Farmer,” and his father would later serve as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. When Henry A. Wallace was young, his father invited one of his Black graduate students to live with them because racial segregation kept him from living in the dorms.
That’s how young Henry began a friendship with the brilliant botanist George Washington Carver, a relationship that would influence his views on race and ecology for the rest of his life.