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United States of America – Commemorative Half Dollar
Booker T. Washington & Washington Carver
1952 P Silver 50 Cents (Half Dollar) 30.6mm (12.34 grams) 0.900 Silver (0.3617 oz. ASW)
Reference: KM# 200 | Engraver: Isaac S. Hathaway
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA * E PLURIBUS UNUM * IN GOD WE TRUST/GEORGE W CARVER LIBERTY BOOKER T. WASHINGTON HALF DOLLAR 1952, Booker T. Washington; and botanist, George Washington Carver profiles looking right with two rings of lettering encircling their portrait.
*FREEDOM AND OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL* *AMERICANISM*ั, Map of the continental United States(48 out of the 50) with the letters ‘USA’ superimposed, in capitals, over said map. One ring of lettering encircling the map of the continental US.
Coin Notes:
The last design released for the early commemorative coins was the George Washington Carver Half Dollar (Buy on eBay). The authorizing legislation passed in 1951 called for the melting of all unsold Booker T. Washington Half Dollars and the recoinage into coins bearing conjoined profile portraits of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington.
Part of the impetus for the approval of the final commemorative coin program seems to have been the intended purpose to “oppose the spread of Communism among Negroes in the interest of national defence.” Models for the design were prepared by Isaac Scott Hathaway, but both were initially rejected. The obverse featured a three quarter profile portrait of Booker T. Washington behind the profile portrait of George Washington Carver. The reverse featured the American Legion seal with inscriptions including “United Against the Spread of Communism”.
The revised and later approved models featured both portraits in profile, surrounded by lengthy inscriptions. On the reverse was a simple map of the United States of America, curiously with Delaware omitted.
Coins were issued in three-coin sets containing one of each mint mark for each year of issue. Prices were $9 or $10 per set, and later $12 per set for the 1954 coins. In 1952, there was some attempt to issue the coins broadly through banks, but many were eventually distributed at or near face value. By the end of the program, more than one million coins would be distributed.
For nearly three decades, no additional commemorative coins were approved within the United States. Any proposals were met by the Treasury Department with a long list of complaints that had arisen due to past abuses. Thus ended the era of early commemorative coins.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
 Booker Taliaferro Washington (c. 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African American community.
Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Washington was a key proponent of African American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League. His base was the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Tuskegee, Alabama. As lynchings in the South reached a peak in 1895, Washington gave a speech, known as the “Atlanta compromise”, which brought him national fame. He called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South.
Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle-class blacks, church leaders, and white philanthropists and politicians, with a long-term goal of building the community’s economic strength and pride by a focus on self-help and schooling. But, secretly, he also supported court challenges to segregation and restrictions on voter registration.
Black militants in the North, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, at first supported the Atlanta compromise, but later disagreed and opted to set up the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to work for political change. They tried with limited success to challenge Washington’s political machine for leadership in the black community, but built wider networks among white allies in the North. Decades after Washington’s death in 1915, the civil rights movement of the 1950s took a more active and militant approach, which was also based on new grassroots organizations based in the South, such as Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Washington mastered the nuances of the political arena in the late 19th century, which enabled him to manipulate the media, raise money, develop strategy, network, push, reward friends, and distribute funds, while punishing those who opposed his plans for uplifting blacks. His long-term goal was to end the disenfranchisement of the vast majority of African Americans, who then still lived in the South.
 George Washington Carver (1860s – January 5, 1943) was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. He was the most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century.
While a professor at Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. He wanted poor farmers to grow other crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes using peanuts. Although he spent years developing and promoting numerous products made from peanuts, none became commercially successful.
Apart from his work to improve the lives of farmers, Carver was also a leader in promoting environmentalism. He received numerous honors for his work, including the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP. In an era of high racial polarization, his fame reached beyond the black community. He was widely recognized and praised in the white community for his many achievements and talents. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed Carver a “Black Leonardo”.
Color film of Carver shot in 1937 at the Tuskegee Institute by African American surgeon Allen Alexander was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019. The 12 minutes of footage includes Carver in his apartment, office and laboratory, as well as images of him tending flowers and displaying his paintings. The film was digitized by The National Archives as part of its multi-year effort to preserve and make available the historically significant film collections of the National Park Service. It can be seen on the US National Film Archives YouTube channel.
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