100 Objects #5: Blue Back Speller

tapering off. But what does it actually mean to be an American? If you ask anyone this question

“at the time, they more than likely wouldn't have a clear answer. Regular life is still chaotic.”

Classrooms, if they exist at all, are under-resourced, and the book students are using aren't even American. They're British, teaching British geography, British history, British ways of thinking. People are still spelling the word color with a 'you'. One ambitious school teacher looks from under all of this and decides this has to change. His name is Noah Webster. Noah Webster is fascinating because he's this person who takes on, as an educator, the problem of literacy.

That's a money-peri, author and professor of African American Studies at Harvard University. Any complaints about the classroom to be grounded in noisy and chaotic, and he is also sort of interested in trying to find a way to standardize American learning? Webster saw how inconsistent education was. No standard curriculum. No shared set of books or processes. He thought we needed a system. So long before his dictionary made him a household name,

Webster spends his own money to print a little blue book with an unwieldy title. It's called

the first part of the grammatical institute of the English language. A title so bad that nobody

ever used it. They just started calling it the Blue Back Speller. So he really creates this book that is built for an auto-diadact. It's a way to self-teach literacy. He writes the Blue Back Speller for people to teach themselves to read or to aid teachers who are teaching students to read, you know, he really is a kind of key figure in American letters. The idea that you have learned to read through reading is a leap. I have a copy with me. Could you describe it

“for me, though? What does it look like? How is it not a dictionary that describes its use?”

Yeah, it has some sort of basic phonetic lessons, entry points to pronunciation, short words, and then in the midst of it, this sort of moral lessons written. So it really is like a guide to learning to read and the way that later generations, you know, we had books like Hop-Won Pop, but in that period it was the closest thing and there's so many of them still around because there were so many printed once upon a time. Within a few years, the Blue Back Speller becomes one

of the most widely used school books in the country. Entire generations grew up with it. Even Abraham Lincoln learned to read from its pages. It taught literacy, yes, but it was also shaping a new American language in identity. Webster uses the book to introduce simpler, more distinctly American spellings. He drops the U from humor and labor, music and politics lose the extra K. He wants to suggest that we start spelling daughter as DAWTER,

which would have been nice, though that one didn't stick. But his larger idea does succeed.

At one point the Blue Back Speller was second only to the Bible and copies sold.

And it also, it's kind of like a Bible. Like there's these tools and lessons built into it.

“Could you describe its size and the relevance of its size?”

Yeah, I mean, it's wonderful to hold one because you realize it's pocket size. I mean, it was small enough to carry the Blue Back Speller could be carried with you wherever you wanted to go. It's literally fit into a jacket pocket or pants pocket or a small satchel. It was mobile. It was a tool that traveled with people. Yeah, and it could be hidden. It could easily be hidden, which was really important. Important because it means the book could be used secretly by people

who weren't supposed to have it, enslaved people who were legally prohibited from learning to read.

People, among you says that Webster never intended this book for at all.

No Webster is really trying to create an American identity that's based upon this notion of American democracy. He has this conception of what it means to be American that does not include black people in any measure. Yeah. And that's evidence throughout his work. And despite that fact, his Blue Back Speller becomes something that is fundamental to African-American struggles for literacy. From 99% invisible and BBC studios, this is a history of the United States in a hundred

the school book not meant for them into a tool for their liberation and how that little book

“became the foundation for a historic debate around what education is for and what it means to be free.”

Before emancipation, in much of the slave holding south, learning to read as an enslaved person came with brutal consequences. But the Blue Back Speller was everywhere. So common that some enslaved people managed to get their hands on it anyway. People like Frederick Douglass.

Part of what is powerful about it is if we think about some like Frederick Douglass who isn't

slave and fundamentally teach themselves to read using the Blue Back Speller. Douglass would go on to become one of the most influential writers and thinkers in American history. He'd become an advisor to Abraham Lincoln. But when he first encounters the Blue Back Speller, he's still enslaved

“and learning to read his dangerous. In the context of enslavement, having one of these spellers for”

someone who enslaved could put you at enormous risk of naming of death of being sold. And we know that here's no Webster who created this. He's someone who doesn't consider a person like Douglass

as part of the American body, right? Not part of the relevant community of who Americans are.

No Webster opposed the institution of slavery. But even still, the idea that this book was for Americans meant it inherently excluded enslaved people from its intended readership. And yet Douglass teaches himself and through teaching himself, frees himself. And he and countless other Black people take on that Blue Back Speller in the system

“on becoming part of the literate American public irrespective of what no Webster thought of Black”

people or intended. And that is this remarkable kind of motif through African American history of existing in the terms of the United States, understanding being marginal and excluded. And fighting to be recognized as part of that public, sometimes at great risk. So those drive for literacy was a kind of remarkable passion and conviction to be free in ways that you might not be free in body but you could be free in mind. So the Blue Back Speller offered a kind of mental

survival during slavery. Then a mancipation comes and suddenly education isn't just about being free in the mind anymore. So how does this little blue book change what comes next? Like what does

it represent after emancipation? Yeah, I mean so we know that one of the first things that the

former landscape at the Freed people wanted to do was to go to school or to be educated. And one of the early ways we see this is Black soldiers in the Civil War who become literate and immediately begin writing letters to Lincoln saying not only are they hopeful for land with their freedom but they have to be schools. We see it in the contraband camps in the Civil War where they're even photographs of people holding Blue Back Spellers of Black people who have

fled behind Union lines and are learning to read in the midst of battlefields. And then after emancipation, these schools that open up, their students who range from, you know, tiny children to octogenarians just passionate for literacy. And this is of course because literacy is tied to freedom because the idea was that literacy made someone unfit to be a slave. And so then to be free necessarily meant to become literate. And so you can imagine that on a day-to-day basis, even with

these new rights, the very idea of Black people reading was threatening to many white southerners. And so the same time as there's this passion for education, there was also this sense of danger and perhaps the most dramatic example of this is how frequently schools that served African Americans were burned to the ground. So there were school fires constantly and it's just a symbol of how on the one hand there's this passion for education and on the other there's

is something that became a particularly prized possession because it meant that even if one wasn't in a classroom, you could still continue to pursue the lessons of literacy. You know, so people carried them around with them almost like amulets from working all day and then reading it by candlelight at night or taking breaks from the field. And so it had this sort of almost mystical quality to it. This mystical book would play a transformative role in the lives of many Black

Americans. But the reason we wanted to focus on the Speller was because of the profound impact this

book would have on two of the most powerful Black men in American history. Two men who become

fierce rivals and whose disagreement essentially split the Black intellectual world into. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois. The rivalry wasn't personal. It was a battle over the most urgent question in America. What does freedom actually mean and how do you fight for it? Do you

“demand everything right now or do you work within the system inch by inch and wait for your moment?”

To their encounters with the Blueback Speller and the very different lessons each man took from it, you can trace the fault lines of a debate that is still very much alive today. Let's start. With Booker T. Washington. He was born into slavery and later freed when news of emancipation reached the plantation where he and his family were held. All Booker wants is to learn to read. But instead he has to work in a salt mine to help support his family. To make matters worse,

he could see and hear happy children passing two and from school mornings and after news from where he was working in the mines. So he asks his mother for help. His mother got her hands on a Blueback Speller for him and he treated it as, you know, as a kind of magical document. He taught himself to read with it and it really shaped his life. This is the very first book that Booker holds in his hand and it changes the course of his life. There's this trajectory from his mother

finding this book for him and he thinking that this is sort of the greatest possible, you know,

object that he could have and then becoming ultimately the most powerful black man in the United States.

After teaching himself to read using the Blueback Speller, he attends night school after working in the salt mines all day. Then in 1872 at age 16, he makes his way to Hampton Institute, which is one of the first schools established for African Americans in Virginia. He has to walk,

“I think it's something like 500 miles to get to Hampton Institute. So this passion is drive for”

education is extraordinary and then he becomes the first principal and then later on what would be president of Tuskegee Institute now Tuskegee University. On the 4th of July of 1881, Washington arrived at Tuskegee as its first principal, but the school existed in name only. The state of Alabama had allocated just $2,000 a year to pay the teachers. There was no land, no buildings, no equipment, just some cash and an idea on paper.

So Washington shows up and just starts teaching at first out of a one-room shanty. It was in such disrepair that whenever it rained, one of the students would have to hold an umbrella over Washington's head for the rest of the lesson. Shortly after that, Washington borrowed some money to buy and abandoned 100 acre former plantation, and he and the students build Tuskegee with their own hands, brick by brick. As in, they literally make the bricks themselves, but it isn't easy. The first brick

can fails, then the second and the third, and one point he ponds his watch for $15 just to keep the experiment going. For Washington, it's a lesson in the dignity of labor, and it gets to his core idea about education. Instead of teaching the humanities, he thought education should be focused on giving black people practical skills, a philosophy known as industrial education. So Tuskegee becomes this institution through the leadership of Booker T. Washington that is a

model of industrial education, so engineering, animal husbandry, agricultural work, and the like. Things like learning how to build porches, appropriate ventilation for housing.

“How do you grow crops to appropriately feed the community? How do you take care of the land?”

Not everyone agreed that these were the most important things to be learning.

For many black families, it felt like settling. After generations of being denied literacy,

Everything that had been kept out of reach for so long. But Washington was also thinking strategically,

in a country still shaped by Jim Crow where reconstruction efforts had failed and been abandoned, he believed pushing for industrial education was more likely to be tolerated, less likely to provoke backlash. Industrial education was conceived of as less threatening in many ways than classical education for black Americans, because classical education was what the most elite white Americans, that kind of education they received. Booker T. Washington was

“advocating for this education that keeps people working in relationship to the land, right?”

That's part of why it's seen as less threatening. Underneath that educational philosophy,

there was a more controversial political idea, Washington believed that economic self-sufficiency had to come before the push for full civil rights. He did not believe in immediately pressing for access to suffrage and other kinds of civil rights for African Americans, and instead focused on economic development, land acquisition and the like. In this philosophy, this philosophy was about to make him one of the most famous men in America, and the thing that would do it was a single

speech delivered on a single afternoon in Atlanta in 1895. The city was hosting a world's fair and had invited Booker T. Washington to speak. By then, Washington had become a rare figure,

“a black leader that southerners felt comfortable with, comfortable enough to put him on stage.”

Picture it. The late afternoon's son is pouring into his eyes as he steps to the podium. Geomor's band plays the star-spangled banner. Then, Dixie. Thousands are staring at this black man about to address a white southern audience on a national stage.

Something that had likely never happened before in that part of the country.

This famous or infamous speech that he delivers in 1895, in which he says that black and white Americans can be as separate as fingers on a hand, and implicitly for goals, advocacy, for civil and political rights. Instead, you know, encourages black Americans to cast down their buckets where they were, and don't worry about how their rights are being systematically denied

“them in the south. A reporter who was there wrote it up for the New York world, and he”

replaced this moment, or Washington lifts up his hand. His hand, representing society, he spreads his fingers apart and says to the audience, in all things purely social, we can be as separate as fingers on a hand. As in, white people and black people don't need to mix. We can stay segregated and still work towards the same goal. It was a simple and effective metaphor for the fiction of separate but equal. In white America loved it. It gave them exactly what they

wanted, the comfort of segregation without the guilt, social separation, without moral responsibility, and the crowd goes into what the reporter calls a delirium of applause. Hats in the air, handkerchiefs waving everyone on their feet. The speeches are rousing success in mainstream America, because in many ways, you know, it's 1895, so it's some years past the end of reconstruction, which, completely ended by 1877. But in the

intervening years, Jim Crow is becoming more deeply entrenched in the U.S. South, and in really many ways across the country. And by that I mean not just segregated facilities, but also segregated forms of employment, a really control of the labor of African Americans. The beginning of we see sort of fundamentally unequal experiences with relationship to law enforcement and the like. And so it is a speech that has this sort of mythology to it that if black Americans just work really

hard and put their heads down and stop pushing against the way the society is becoming increasingly more oppressive and restrictive, then things will get better. And it not only lets the South off the hook, but it lets the federal government off the hook, which is, in some ways has already abandoned African Americans in the advocacy for the rights that they were granted after the Civil

Compromise, because compromises what many people here in it, whether or not that's all Washington

“intended. I mean, it absolutely didn't represent the totality of Washington's thought, and he's”

certainly in many covert ways advocated for organizations that supported civil and political rights for African Americans. There's no question that he was maneuvering politically in public and behaving differently in private. The speech makes Washington a national figure,

practically overnight. He becomes the most powerful black man in the United States, but it also

opens a kind of schism. In Washington is about to meet an opponent who would challenge him over what freedom should look like, someone unwilling to compromise, someone ready to fight. Bookerty Washington's ideas about black education are about to meet their challenger. Another intellectual heavyweight named W.E.B. Dubois. Dubois also has a philosophy whose origins can be traced back to the blue backspeller. Only his experience with the book comes much later in life,

because Dubois is born into a much different world than Bookerty Washington.

While I want to bring in another historic figure, young W.E.B. Dubois, he reads this speech,

"Shepherick is published." Where is Dubois in his life at this point? A little bit of his upbringing and how he sort of becomes an educator. Yeah, so what's really interesting about Dubois is

“he and Washington are often positioned at odds, and as they were. But it's important to remember that”

you know, Washington is sort of almost two decades older than Dubois. It's actually only 12 years that separate Washington and Dubois, but those dozen years between slavery and not slavery are a seismic shift. Washington, you know, is born in slavery. Dubois is born in great bearing in Massachusetts, and has a very different kind of coming of age. You know, it doesn't have to walk 500 miles to get to school. And he is, you know, well educated, a member of a very small

black community in the Berkshire's, where he's aware of being different and made aware in elementary school when he gives tries to give a valentine to a little girl who rejects it, and this becomes his moment of racial awareness, a racial reckoning. But understood as extremely bright and talented and when he graduates from high schools, mother dies when he's 17, and so members of the local community put money together and sent him to Fisk University, which is the School of Classical

Education for African Americans at the time in Nashville. He wanted to go to Harvard undergraduate. He winds up at Fisk, and Fisk is an extraordinary experience for him. It's an outstanding

institution, and also for him the first time he's around large numbers of African Americans.

And he's a really people who are amongst, you know, the best and brightest of that moment. He's at Fisk, and in the summer after his sophomore year, as many students at Astorically Black Colleges at the time do, he finds a school to teach at during the summer. This was sort of routine process. And so, if we say in Nashville in general, he learns about what Jim Crow looks like. A comprehensive system of segregation, very different from the kind of racism that he experienced

in Great Barrington. So, at one's Fisk is this remarkable place that he falls in love with,

“and also the place where he really understands what life is like for the majority of African”

Americans. Since one level, but Nashville is a city, you know, in the summer he goes out to rural Tennessee. Very different kind of landscape. People are really living at a subsistence level. And it is here in this rural village that Du Bois will have a transformative experience with the Blueback Speller, as a young teacher with a room full of Black children in front of him. And he teaches at this school, and he talks about beautiful children with these

bright and curious minds, and he describes them sitting in front of the Blueback Speller and teaching them. Years later, Du Bois writes about those students. They're bright, but mischievous faces, bare feet swinging from rough benches, hands wrapped around the Speller. And he writes about

where the nation is supposed to be engaged in this progress, but Black people are being held back.

“And then many years later, he returns to the school and finds that his prized pupil Josie has died.”

And so much of the promise has been snuffed out. Du Bois doesn't actually say how Josie dies, but in the intervening years her family has fallen apart. A brother in jail, a sister returning home with the child, and Josie carrying the weight of all of it, working, working, working herself to death. And that laws clarify something for Du Bois. This story in some ways encapsulates why he becomes so resistant to his elder scholar,

Booker T. Washington, because what he shows is that even with all of the hard work, all of the possibility,

all of the intellect and imagination, the brutality of the Jim Crow Order is such that it destroys people's lives, and without access to suffrage, without access to full civil and political rights, no matter how hard you work, you're going to wind up with these devastating consequences. To de Bois, this idea that Washington has, that economic progress and hard work will lead to racial equality just isn't real. And Josie is proof of that. He understands to a certain extent what

Washington is trying to do, but he finds his acceptance of the constraints of Jim Crow

unacceptable given the consequences of those constraints. He channels all this into a skating critique

of Booker T. Washington in a chapter of the Souls of Black Folk published in 1903. So he, you know, this is a really bold thing he does to write this book and to have this public criticism of, you know, this divide. Yeah, I mean, you know, De Bois, he has a chapter in the Souls of Black Folk called of Mr. Booker T. Washington and others, and he has a very direct and unflinching critique of Washington. In some ways, his personal reflections are a bit gentler than what he publishes,

“but I think what he's trying to do is give voice to what a lot of black intellectuals and activists”

and organizers are saying, which is what Washington is saying cannot be seen as speaking for black people writ large and certainly not the black leadership classes it were. I think you can sum up the voices critique like this. He believes that Booker T. Washington by encouraging black Americans to just focus on their own skills and financial independence and to wait for civil rights to go slow that Washington is asking them to surrender something fundamental. There's self-respect. For

De Bois, the fight for civil rights and the vote cannot be pushed off into the future. How can someone defend his rights as a landowner or a business owner if he has no political power to do so? Anything's Washington's focus on industrial education is part of the problem. Instead of practical skills, De Bois thinks that education for black Americans should be broader, a classical education, Greek, Latin, literature, philosophy, the kinds of subjects that could train a class of black

scholars, writers, and leaders. He called this idea, the talented tenth. De Bois gets a lot of criticism for his concept of the talented tenth that is also in that book in which he says essentially, you know, there's 10% of any community that are going to function as the leadership class and those people in the black community should have access to, you know, the highest level of education and classical education in particular. And on the one hand while,

“I think some of the critique is understandable. I think given the context, it's important to keep”

in mind that if in general, the society people were saying, you know, black people should only have access to industrial education, which really was the norm he's saying in this at least 10% of the black population should have access to higher order education because if not, then who is going to be in the rooms with white elites to advocate for black people, right? And so, so it sounds elitist and in some ways it was, you know, in De Bois, I think we can say in some ways,

wasn't elitist, but he's really trying to say we should not exclude black people, writ large for many sector of the society. And that was a bold statement. De Bois also thinks there are consequences to Washington's accommodation as beliefs. He sees a direct line between the Atlanta compromise speech and what came after. Just a year after

ruled in Plusy versus Ferguson, making separate but equal the law of the land. De Bois thinks that Washington and the Atlanta compromise speech gives up something that he had no right to give up, right? And sort of presented it as the black Americans were willing to accommodate exclusion and therefore that that sort of allowed for Plusy versus Ferguson to be decided without any anxiety on the part of the court.

“Now I think the reality is that regardless of what Washington had said, Plusy would likely have”

been decided the way that it was, I think a better argument would be that Washington, you know, saw the way the wind was blowing and sort of said what he needed to say in order to continue to get financial support given the way the society was was turning. When De Bois publishes the souls of Black folk in 1903, it lands hard. The book is reprinted twice

in its first two months. In some ways, it helps cement a certain kind of legacy for

Booker T. Washington, who is mostly remembered for his accommodationism. But a money says he's actually much more complicated than that because of what he's doing behind the scenes with money he got from white donors, particularly when it comes to public education for Black children in the Jim Crow South. So Black students have fewer schools to attend, they often have shorter school terms and they get much less money than schools for white students. Many places, particularly

rural places don't have access to public schools at all and southern states do not require schools that have been slated for white students to admit Black students even if they don't have an access to a local school. And it's sort of a a long-winded way of getting to the point which is that Booker T. Washington initiates a school building program with the support of Julius Rosenwald. Julius Rosenwald had built his fortune as president of Seer's robot in company. By the early 1900s,

he was one of the wealthiest men in America. And what that means is that they are actually physically building schools across the South for Black people to attend. And this is transformative, right? And once the schools are built with in a generation, the literacy gap is closed between Black and White children. So Washington is complicated because on the one hand, he's known for his accommodationist posture, his willingness to forego advocacy of civil and political rights

for African Americans. But on the other hand, he is centrally responsible for the access to education for African Americans across the South. I mean, it strikes me like, I don't want to reduce the works of two great men to just like basic psychology, but it seems like both of them are saying that the path of Black liberation is my path. You know, like both of them are saying that in their

“own ways, you know? I mean, I think that's sort of, you know, these people who become extraordinary”

leaders have to have unbelievable conviction. And if you think one way to think about this is Washington, you know, right before he dies, he dies at age 59, he has an harvest breakdown. He's been carrying such extraordinary burdens trying to sustain Tuskegee and trying to advocate in his own way for Black freedom. And one of the challenges was that, you know, after that

land to compromise speech, many people misinterpreted him as saying that Black people should never have

access to civil rights. And even in that moment, he was just saying, we'll go a kind of go slow agenda. And so there are people who were angry at him once he said, okay, well, now is the time to start to move towards access to civil and political rights. So he, he was a man who carried a great deal of stress and to boys likewise, you know, experienced he had his passport taken away. He was penniless at various times of his life because of retaliation for his politics. So these

“people endured so much stress. And in order to endure that kind of stress, I think they had to have”

an incredible courage of conviction. Part of what I think though is interesting about them

is that besides their shared conviction, even though they had very different agendas, they also shared a real serious interest in Black education, which was really something that, you know, in the early

and not just, you know, higher education, but K-12 education, education of kids was seen as a

central concern. And so even in the midst of their debate, they're trying to think about how do we prepare children for a world for future that does not yet exist, but a future that they deserve. And that shared conviction is something that I think of as pretty remarkable for the men of that stature. I mean, it's almost like, to boys, you know, born generation later in a different environment. If he's not doing, like, if kids aren't freaking me out, then kids aren't doing their job.

“Like, you know, you mean, like, if kids aren't advocating for something different, like, that's what”

progress is. That's the point of progress. That's natural as anything. We, I agree with that,

but, you know, even today, right, young people start to push for things outside of the conventions of, you know, mainstream politics and older people, like, you know, get really rough on young people who are bringing in new ideas and unwilling to just go along. There's a lot to learn from that story. If we're willing to really pay attention to things like, like, which just said that young people are bringing in new ideas. Yeah, this is their job. This is for our time. It's like that they have

one job. It's a continued progress. It's worth noting that the boys continue to sort of push very hard at the limits of Black politics all the way until his death in 1963, you know, and

is frequently on the outs with those who are most powerful and, and, yeah, so what's so that he ends

up in Africa and everything you're like, he ends up in exile and Ghana at the end of his life. Yeah, he's a pan-Africanist. He's a socialist. He, you know, one of the founders, first of the Niagara movement, which is the precursor to the NAACP, one of the founders of the NAACP, the first editor of the NAACP organ, the crisis, and the NAACP is a multiracial civil rights organization initially. And he pushes that organization so hard at various moments that he is repeatedly

fired and then brought back in. And at times, it's because, you know, of his position where he becomes in sort of a very assertive pan-Africanist at times because of his position on capitalism, at times it's because he is, he's just so outspoken about American racism. And so, that he takes on Washington as a young man in some ways is an indication of who he will be over the course of rest of his life.

So, I want to get back to this, the Blueback Speller in many ways was the initial seed for block form of education. What does it mean that the same object was the route for both

“Booker T. Washington and for W.E.B. devices sort of intellectual formations?”

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'm so taken by the fact that the same object, it's Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois for whom the Blueback Speller matters. It's also Frederick Douglass, you know, like most famous abolitionists, also George Washington, Carver, this brilliant scientist and artist who does all this transformative work at Tuskegee and also, like, really saves the land

in Alabama after it has been so destroyed by the cotton economy with crop rotation techniques. They all start with this, this book. It's a really interesting story about what access can do, right? So, that just access to literacy, having a tool to access literacy,

“opens up these worlds for these extraordinary thinkers, right?”

Who might otherwise not have had that kind of access. It also says something about the power of the intellect and the depth of their convictions to be learned people who do meaningful work, right? So that holding this book close tells you something about their character and tells you something about resiliency and I get very emotional and inspired, you know, reflecting on what it meant to, you know, carry this book in one's pocket and that being

And so I think that word key is really significant because it's not just the key for people to learn

“to read but it is a key I think for us to understand something about the building of the”

African-American intellectual and political tradition. That gets to something bigger because this isn't about a book anymore. It's about what people can do with a tool once they claim it for themselves. There's something quintessentially American about the Blueback Speller. You know, what more kind of democratic instrument than an object that you can use to make yourself literate and it opens up this a world of possibility but it's also quintessentially American in the sense

that it's creator Noah Webster did not consider black Americans as part of the American project.

That's also quintessentially American and then the other layer of something that's quintessentially American is black Americans taking that which is not intended for us and reinterpreting it in a way that not only includes black Americans but actually then becomes something different in the hands of black Americans. Right? It becomes not only a way to learn to read but actually a tool for entry into all kinds of arenas where they had not been contemplated. No one understood this

better than Frederick Douglass. A manhood already done exactly this kind of reinvention with that little blue book but what Douglass learned to do with the Speller to take something that wasn't

meant for him and transform it into something liberating. He would ultimately do that on a much larger

scale. Douglass actually does something with what it means to be American that's really profound. You know when he becomes an abolitionist, most abolitionists at that time really rejected the U.S. Constitution is that this is a slave holding document so we shouldn't consider it something meaningful. Douglass says no no let's reinterpret the Constitution. Let's hold on to its principles and yet interpret it to actually be a document that supports the concept of all men being

created equal. And he says and actually all human beings created equal because Douglass is also

“this sort of foundational feminist and I think there's an analogy there with the Blueback Speller.”

So, you know, here's a society that does not consider black people part of the body politic. Here's a foundational document that does not not only does not consider black people but has the racist three-fifths compromise and it but Douglass reinterprets that document to expand the conception of who should be considered American. There's something that you get about the American story through the Blueback Speller that we find repetitions of in all these different kinds of ways

that I do think of as as a really distinctive part of the Black American story. Thank you so much for talking with me. I just enjoyed it so immensely. Thanks, it was a great conversation. I appreciate you. Emani Perry is the author of nine books including the National Book Award winning New York Times bestseller South to America and the inspiration for this episode Black and Blues how color tells

the story of my people in the dry desert of history books and money Perry's writing is like a cool sip of water I cannot recommend her enough. A history of the United States and a hundred objects is a production of 99% of visible and BBC studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Morris. This episode was produced by Priscilla Alabe. Our other producers are Ellie Lightfoot and Brenna Daldorf. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown

and Courtney Harrell, mixing by Charlie Brandon King, fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% of visible our executive producer is Kathy too. From BBC studios our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Chan Palay and the production manager is a maple phenagan right art work by Stefan Lawrence. 99% of visible is part of the serious XM podcast family headquartered in beautiful, uptown,

Oakland, California and BBC studios has headquartered in beautiful, white city, West London.

“If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider email us at 100 objects at”

99PI.org.