99% Invisible - 100 Objects #5: Blue Back Speller

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

In this episode, Roman and historian Imani Perry follow the Webster Blue Back Speller from the early days of the United States, to the heart of Black intellectual life. Through the lives of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Roman and Imani uncover how a single object became a gateway to literacy, self-determination, and an enduring debate about what education, citizenship, and freedom should mean in America. A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The year is 1783. The Revolutionary War is ending, the fighting on American soil, finally 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 books 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 around at 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 Amani Perry, author and professor of African American Studies at Harvard University. And he complains about the classrooms being crowded and 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 unconstitutional. 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 blueback speller. So he really creates this book that is built for an autodidact. It's a way to self-teach literacy. He writes the blueback 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 would learn to read through reading is a leap. You know what I mean to teach yourself? How to read? How to read?

So I have a copy with me. Could you describe it for me, though? Like, what does it do? What does it look like? How is it not a dictionary that's describe its use? Yeah, it has some sort of basic phonetic lessons, entry points of 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 on 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 backspeller 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 once suggested that we start spelling daughter as D-A-W-T-E-R, which would have been nice, though that one didn't stick. but his larger idea does succeed. At one point, the blue backspeller was second only to the Bible in copies sold. And it also is 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 blueback speller could be carried with you wherever you wanted to go. literally fit into a jacket pocket or pants pocket or a small satchel. And so 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 are legally prohibited from learning to read. People, Amani says, that Webster. never intended this book for at all. Noah 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. And that's evidence throughout his work. And despite that

fact, his blueback 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 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the Webster blew back speller, how Black Americans transformed a schoolbook 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 slaveholding South, learning to read as an enslaved person, came with brutal consequences. But the blueback 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 someone like Frederick Douglass who is enslaved and fundamentally teaches himself to read, using the blueback speller. Douglas 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 blueback speller, he's still enslaved. And learning to read is dangerous. In the context of enslavement,

having one of these spellers for someone who's enslaved could put you at enormous risk of maiming, of death, of being sold. And if we know that here's Noah Webster who created this, he's someone who doesn't consider a person like Douglas as part of the American body, right, of not part of the relevant community of who Americans are. Noah 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 Douglas teaches himself, and through teaching himself, frees himself. And he and countless other black people take on that blue-back speller and insist upon becoming part of the literate American public, irrespective of what Noah 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 this 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 blueback speller offered a kind of mental survival during slavery. Then emancipation 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 formerly enslaved

that 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 there have to be schools. We see it in the contraband camps in the Civil War where there are even photographs of people holding blueback 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, there are 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 at 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 this incredible sense of threat for many to the project of black schooling. And so the blueback speller 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 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. Du Bois. Their 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? Through 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 to and from school mornings and afternoons from where he was working in the minds. So he asks his mother for help. His mother got her hands on a blueback speller for him, and he treated it 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. You know, so this passion, this 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 borrows some money to buy an abandoned 100-acre former plantation, and he and his 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 kiln fails, then the second, then the third. At one point,

he pawns 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 husband, 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, why not go all in on classical education? Why not Latin, philosophy? literature, 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 well. 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. And 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 sun is pouring into his eyes as he steps to the podium. Gilmore's band plays the star-spangled

banner, and 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 to. 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 foregoes advocacy for civil and political rights and instead 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 replays this moment where 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.

And 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 speech is a 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 really in many ways across the country. And by that I mean not just segregated facilities, but also segregated forms of employment, really control of the labor of African Americans. The beginning of we see sort of fundamentally unequals 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 were, 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 War. You might have learned about this speech in school. It becomes known as the Atlanta compromise, because compromise is what many people hear 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. And 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. Du Bois also has a philosophy whose origins can be traced back to the blue back speller. Only his experience with the book comes much later in life,

because Du Bois is born into a much different world than Booker T. Washington. Well, I want to bring in another historic figure, young W.E.B. De Bois. He reads this speech after it gets published. Where is De Bois in his life at this point, a little bit of his upbringing and how he sort of becomes an educator. Yeah, so part of what's really interesting about Du Bois is he and Washington are often positioned at odds, as they were. But it's important to remember that, you know, Washington is sort of almost two decades older than Du Bois.

It's actually only 12 years that separate Washington and Du Bois. But those dozen years between slavery and not slavery are a seismic shift. Washington, you know, is born in slavery. Du Bois is born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and has a very different kind of coming of age. You know, 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 Berkshires where he's aware of being different and made aware in elementary school when he 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 is extremely bright and talented.

And when he graduates from high school, his 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 these are really people who are amongst, you know, the best and brightest at that moment. He's at Fisk. And in the summer after his sophomore year, as many students at historically black colleges at the time do, he finds a school to teach at during the summer. This was a sort of routine process. And so if we say in Nashville in general, he learns about what Jim Crow looks like, great, a comprehensive system of segregation,

very different from the kind of racism that he experienced in Great Barrington. So once 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. So it's 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 Blue Black 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 blue-back 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 encountering these students and how extraordinary they are and how they're learning in a context

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. De 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 a child,

and Josie carrying the weight of all of it, working, working, working herself to death. And that loss clarifies 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 DeBois, this idea that Washington has, that economic progress and hard work will lead to racial equality just isn't real. And Josie is a lot of 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 of this into a scathing critique of Bookerty, 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, Du 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 little. 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 class, as it were.

I think you can sum up DeBoise's 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. Their self-respect. For Du 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? And he thinks Washington's focus on industrial education is part of the problem. Instead of practical skills. Du 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. Du 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 in the society people were saying, you know, black people should only have access to industrial education, which really was the norm, he's saying, 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 it sounds elitist, and in some ways it was, you know, in Du Bois, I think we can say in some ways was an elitist, but he's really trying to say we should not exclude black people writ large from any sector of the society. And that was a bold statement. Du Bois also thinks there are consequences to Washington's accommodationist beliefs. He sees a direct line between the Atlanta Compromise speech and what came after. Just a year after Washington announced that the races could be as separate as fingers on a hand, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson, making separate but equal the law of the land.

Du Bois thinks that Washington and the Atlantic compromise speech gives up something that he had no right to give up, right? And sort of presented it as though black Americans were willing to accommodate exclusion. And therefore that that was sort of allowed for Plessy 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, Plessy 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 turning. When Du 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 Amani 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 people, 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 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 Sears Roebuck and 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 have. attend. And this is transformative, right? And once the schools are built within 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 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, and 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 a nervous 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, is that, you know, after that Atlanta 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 was a man who carried a great deal of stress.

And Du Bois, 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, right, 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 20th century, black intellectuals across the board were centrally interested in educational issues 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 a 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 men of that stature. I mean, it's almost as like Du Bois's, you know, born, you know, a 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 what I mean? Like if kids aren't like advocating for something different, like that's what progress is. That's the point of progress. That's as natural as anything. 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 what you just said, that young people are bringing in new ideas. Yeah, that's their job, as far as I'm concerned. Like, that they have one job. It's to continue progress. It's worth noting that Du Bois continued 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. Yeah, so much so that he ends up in Africa and everything. He ends up in exile in 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 NACP organ, the crisis. And the NACP is a multiracial civil rights organization and national. 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 a very assertive pan-Africanist, at times because of his positions 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 the rest of his life. So I want to get back to this, the blueback speller, in many ways, was the initial seed for black formal education. What does it mean that the same object was the route for both Booker T. Washington and for W.E.B. DeBoise's sort of intellectual formation. 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 abolitionist.

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 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 understood as the key to personal transformation, but also community-wide social transformation. And so I think that word key is really significant because it's not just a 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 world of possibility? But it's also quintessentially American in the sense that its 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 as 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 man who had already done exactly this kind of reinvention with that little blue book. But what Douglas 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. Douglas 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. They said, this is a slaveholding document, so we shouldn't consider it something meaningful. And Douglas 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 then he says, and actually all human beings created equal, because Douglas 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 in it. But Douglas reinterprets that document to expand the conception of course. 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 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. Imani 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 a color tells the story of my people. In the dry desert of history books, Imani Perry's writing is like a cool sip of water. I cannot recommend her enough. A history of the United States and 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars.

This episode was produced by Priscilla Al-A-Vee. Our other producers are Ellie Lightfoot and Brenna Dahldorf. 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% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy 2.

From BBC studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Palet. And the production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright, artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the Serious XM podcast family, headquartered in Beautiful, Uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is 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.