Fresh Air - What The Color Blue Tells About Black History

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Award-winning author and scholar Imani Perry traces the history and symbolism of the color blue, from the indigo of the slave trade, to Coretta Scott King's wedding dress, to present day cobalt mining. Her new book is Black in Blues. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley. You know, sometimes there are ideas that make you reconsider the way you look at the world around you. My guest today, scholar Imani Perry, does that with her new book, Black and Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Perry weaves the gravitational pull of blue and black life, both literally and metaphorically, in sound and in color.

From the creation of dyed indigo cloths in West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century to the American art form of blues music and sartorial choices. Coretta Scott King wore blue on her wedding day. Fannie Lou Hamer wore a blue dress to testify before Congress. These examples could be seen as mere coincidences, but in this book, Perry weaves a compelling argument for why they are not. Imani Perry is the Henry A. Morris Jr. and Elizabeth W. Morris Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African-American studies at Harvard University.

She's also the author of several books and has published numerous articles on law, cultural studies and African-American studies, including Looking for Lorraine, which is a biography of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Breathe, a Letter to My Sons. Amani Perry, welcome back to Fresh Air and thank you so much for this fascinating book. Oh, thank you for having me. Can I have you read a passage, page 21, last paragraph? The truth is this. Black as such began in nobly through conquering eyes. Writing that makes me wince because I hold my black tightly, proudly even. Honesty requires a great deal of discomfort. But here's the truth, we didn't start out black, nor did we choose it first. Black was a hard-earned love. But through it all, the blue blues, the

certainty of the brilliant sky, deep water, and melancholy have never left us. I can attest, you might be thinking by now that this blue thing I'm talking about is mere device, a literary trick to move through historic events. And if blue weren't a conjure color, that might have been true. But for real, the blue in black is nothing less than truth before trope. Everybody loves blue. It is human as can be. But everybody doesn't love black. Many have hated it. And that is inhumane. If you don't already,

I will make you love it with my blues song. Thank you so much for that, Amani. I also want to say that this book is, I know you don't think of yourself as a poet, but it's very lyrical. It's really poetry. Thank you. How did meditating on the color blue help you come to a deeper understanding about the use of

the word black to articulate what we are? So, I mean, I have sort of a roundabout answer to that question. It's a beautiful question. And it may have more than anything to do with the blues. So it's the genre of music that is sort of the foundation of African-American music, certainly, and the foundation of American music generally. And it is, as I say, sort of a sound of the world's favorite color, meaning that it captures both the joy and the melancholy, you know, having the blues. When you have the blues, rather, playing the blues can act as a means of kind of curing

the blues. You know, it has this movement through the spectrum of emotions, this deeply human sensibility to it. And so there was something about the universality of the color blue and the power of the sound of the blues, the way the sound of my people coming out of the deep south, coming out of a history of enslavement, coming out of having this identity cast upon them and making something beautiful, creating beauty at the very site of wound. There was something about the way in which those two senses of blue

coincided so profoundly that actually for me became a pathway to thinking about blackness and in some ways the absolute tragedy of the failure to recognize its beauty. And so, you know, the book is a journey through that, a journey through both the anguish, but of course, which you have to acknowledge, but of course this remarkable beauty that actually has a resonance with everyone even when they deny it. So, you know, that I guess that's the the simplest way I can think about saying how, yeah, how that how that connection emerged for me. I want to talk a little bit about music. It's kind of the easiest way to get even deeper into this book and this thought. You know, I think the term blue note is so embedded in our understanding as something

that relates to jazz music. If you're not a musician, maybe you just know of it, but not really, at least I didn't know what it meant really until I was reading your book and I understood it to mean the in between. Yeah. I was just really curious how this definition of the in-between also allows you to deepen your understanding of how black people's creation of the art form of jazz itself came to be. It's a beautiful question because you know it's the in-between, it's the slurred note, it's that which isn't recognized on the western scale.

And of course it is recognized, you know there increasingly musicians have been talking about a blues scale and there are other scales in which what we refer to as blue notes in this context are, you know, are understood just as notes. And that's actually just a wonderful example because it, the blue note or the addition of the blue note to the sound of American music transforms it much in the way that there's something indispensable about the presence of black people in the United States and what it becomes. And at the same time, it is its own thing and also it has connections to these other genres of music. It's a beautiful example for me of actually the combination of African Americans being

American, becoming a people in the context of the United States and also having these connections that are like arteries to the rest of the black world. And so, you know, there are references in the book to Haitian history and Brazilian history and history of the Congo and all of these very deep connections that are present. And so is something that you are attuned to, you can hear. It operates intuitively, I think, for listeners of American music, and in some ways that is the whole globe because American music is journeyed everywhere, right? Even if you don't have its formal definition or even if you can't describe it. There's something to that as well in this story. There is a presence and a power that isn't necessarily fully articulated,

that comes through this particular history. So the music really does, it's not just metaphorical, it functions as a kind of representation or an example of the fact of being black and particularly being black American. I want to play an early reference that you write about. It's Louis Armstrong's 1951 recording of, what did I do to Be So Black and Blue?

Let's listen to a little. Wish I was dead What did I do To be so black and blue? Even the mouse Ran from my house, they laugh at you And scorn you too, what did I do To be so black and blue? I wipe inside, but that don is in my face. But just by saying yes, I would it end. That was Louis Armstrong's 1951, What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue? It was really fun to go down memory lane and listen to these old pieces, I'll say.

But what did you learn about how Armstrong really turned this song, which was several decades old by the time he sang it, into really a direct commentary for the time? Yeah. So the original version of the song actually took place in a black musical, and it was sung by a dark-skinned black woman who was actually talking about colorism in the black community and the kind of preference for lighter-skinned women. And the transition is beautiful, but what Armstrong does is it's this example of the sort of multi-layered

references that exist in both black and blue. So there's, and it's a song that bridges blues and jazz as well. So it has this blues phrasing and sensibility, but then with the horns and the scatting, you hear the kind of growing complexity of jazz. And we have black and blue in the sense of being bruised, and you have blues in the sense of melancholy, and of course the general sense of sort of the blues that exist along with blackness. And in Armstrong's personal life, you have this struggle around being a person who is actually,

you know, sent into the world as an advocate of, you know, the United States in the context of the burgeoning Cold War and as a kind of figure that is supposed to be an example of the glory of the United States. And yet, as was often the case, and we saw this in the context of World War I and World War II, even as black people served the nation valiantly, they were subject to deep inequality at home. And so the song actually is able to encapsulate all of those dimensions with these rather simple sentences, lyrics that are not directly about all of that, but absolutely are about all of that. So you get the sense of innuendo, of multilayered discourses. It's just so elegant and beautiful and profound. You also reference Nina Simone. You talk about her first album, which was in 1957.

There is this song called Little Girl Blue. I also want to play that. Let's hear a little bit. ["Little Girl Blue"] I'm sorry. Sit there and your little fingers That was Nina Simone singing Little Girl Blue. And Imani, as you write about, there was just a lot going on with this album. There was a lot of delays with the recording label. It kind of set her on the path, really her career path decisions from that point on. What did you learn about Simone and the recording of this song that made you want to explore it for the book?

I'll just say, you know, I grew up on Nina Simone. My mother loved Nina Simone, and so I've been listening to her literally for my entire 52 years of life. And, you know, we talk a great deal in some ways about the late Nina Simone and the world of sort of popular culture. Nina Simone as a woman who was both a musical genius and also a person who put politics in their music and also a person who struggled with her mental and emotional health after so many tragedies. And so I wanted to look at the beginning. I wanted to attend to early Nina Simone, a person who had already experienced extraordinary disappointment. She was a trained classical pianist.

She'd been denied admission to the Curtis Institute. She was certain that that denial was because of her race. And so she became this musician who was blending torch songs, show tunes, jazz as a performer, and then elements of the classical music. But she also was really struggling with, emotionally with the desire to have been a classical musician and the ways in which she was excluded from that.

And so there's something about in thinking and talking about this first album, I wanted to gesture to the complex emotions associated with her putting this work together and also its incredible beauty. It's yet again one of these sites where you see, you know, the process of creating beauty at the site of wound. It happens over and over and over again in black culture and life. And I was able to do it through the story of a really cherished musician, for me personally, but I think for the world. I actually reference something in my introduction,

and that's the sartorial choices of wearing blue throughout history. You reference how Coretta Scott King wore blue on her wedding day to Martin Luther King Jr. Carlotta Lanier was the youngest of nine children to desegregate a high school in 1957 and she wore a blue dress. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in his Dodgers blue. What's the argument for these examples

being anything more than a coincidence? Yeah. So part of the reason it started to feel like more than a coincidence to me, was actually encountering a letter written by a fabric trader in the 18th century in reference to a planter who was purchasing cloth for the people, he was purchasing cloth for the people enslaved on his plantation to make clothing. And the fabric trader mentioned that the planter said that he had to bring back blue cloth, otherwise the women, the black women who were enslaved, wouldn't want it. And so, you know, there's something extraordinary about these women who were enslaved insisting upon a particular color for adornment. And that has lots of roots, I think. You know, in some ways, blue is a color that has captivated

the whole world, which is why Indigo was so popular. But also there were, you know, spiritual and social meanings to the color blue in various parts of Western Central Africa, and that were probably sort of part of the root of that aesthetic desire. And so then when I see the repetition of the blue, and particularly the repetition among black women of the South, I think of it as a color that certainly had a kind of grace and elegance. It's not too, you know, frou-frou. It's pretty, but it's not, but it has a seriousness to it. And it's a color that's associated with power, culturally speaking. And so I don't, you know, I don't think it's coincidence because there are these unbelievably important moments where it appears and I don't think there's a kind of, I don't assume that for those women

they said, well, I'm going to wear blue because of this, but I think we are often drawn to colors and styles and forms of adornment as a way of communicating a message to the world and asserting something about ourselves. And so I, you know, I think those blues were powerful blues. They were, and they were also, you know, elegant blues and beautiful blues. Our guest today is scholar and award-winning author Imani Perry, who has written a new book, Black and Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. We'll be right back in just a bit.

I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. The end. I was thinking about the retort against Black Lives Matter back in 2020, and for some it was Blue Lives Matter. How are you thinking about the color blue as it relates to authority, to police, the military? Yeah, so I chart a course of that by initially thinking about the term the boys in blue, which we now think about as terms of policing, but in the context of the Civil War, or Union

soldiers. And there was the sense of promise when the boys in blue arrived and this sense of extraordinary, not just courage, but liberation when black soldiers were able to don Union blue and free themselves and free their people because they were so essential to the Union war effort to save the nation. So that blue was a kind of powerful sense of the boys in blue and a positive sense of the boys in blue. And I also, one of the things that I tried to talk somewhat about was also about, you know, the naval forces and the Marines in for black soldiers because that's the sort of under discussed part of the history of the Civil

War also in blue. Something happens to the color that coincides in some ways with the betrayal of the nation. Reconstruction is turned away from this abandonment of the rights and liberties of black people who have in many ways been central to saving the nation, allowing for Jim Crow to take hold. And then the blue uniforms that were part of the Civil War effort are turned into police uniforms because they're around and they're usable and they're easy and, you know, to turn into uniforms of a different sort. And it also is part of this history of a very difficult relationship between police forces and black Americans.

And I, for me, this is not a question of the sort where we usually discuss, you know, are police forces racist, but rather when you exist in a society that has in many ways posited you as inferior or threatening or undeserving, then of course the force of policing is going to not just be a warm and fuzzy relationship to you. Of course you're going to be under greater threat and suspicion and punishment. And so that becomes part of the story of this country. It's not as though that was sort of something new that emerged in the Black Lives Matter era.

You can look at newspapers a hundred years ago that depict the difficult relationship between black people and police forces. And so the retort to Black Lives Matter as Blue Lives Matter is extraordinary because it posits the idea that for black people to live is a threat to policing. That's essentially what the formulation is. It's pretty remarkable. Something you referenced in our conversation is indigo, the colonial export of indigo. And indigo was really instrumental in shaping the destinies of millions of Africans. What did you learn about the creation of indigo blue in the slave trade? Oh, I learned so much. What did you learn about the creation of Indigo Blue and the slave trade?

Oh, I learned so much. So here's the thing. I have spent much more time before working on this book in thinking about and studying, of course, cotton, but also tobacco, right? And so to turn my attention, and even sugar, and so to turn my attention to Indigo was something different. And part of what I learned, one, is these scenes from the historical record of people being exchanged for a block of Indigo were just absolutely devastating to me. People who were artisans and family members and skilled for who had been adorned in Indigo, now seeing their worth measured in dye. I mean, it's just this sort of unbelievably poignant sense of what it meant to be enslaved.

And then in the context of US slavery, and particularly South Carolina, having read about Eliza Pinkney, who is known as the person who sort of brought Indigo to the states, and a very young, precocious white woman plantation owner, and realizing that she struggled with the cultivation of indigo until an unnamed black person was brought to teach her how to cultivate it. And that the realization that that is part actually of the creation of, certainly part of the institution of slavery, but also part of the creation of race is that this person who actually was the educator would not be credited for allowing this trade to flourish in the United States. And also, at the same time, other black people's lives would, made really unbearable by virtue of the success of this

trade. Indigo is very hard to cultivate. It stinks. It makes you sick. There's flies. There's vermin. It's one of these really hard things to make. And so that to me, it just was so poignant how that industry could actually communicate something about what it meant for black people to be racialized as such.

My guest today is scholar and author Imani Perry. And we're talking about her new book, Black in Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. Your book really does take us through history using, it's a history book, but in the best way. Thanks. It's not a dense text, you know, think of like a history textbook. But this revisiting this time period, I mean, I was astounded to learn by 1775, South Carolina was exporting more than a million pounds of indigo annually. So it was like the colony's second most valuable export after rice.

And to your point, like when we learn about that history, the history of that time period, it's typically focused on those other exports like rice and cotton. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very interested in talking about products like indigo and sugar because, and not to the exclusion of things like indigo, sugar, tobacco, not to the exclusion of rice and cotton, but because those were luxuries.

And to think about what it meant for people's lives to be ground down in the service of something that was for another person's delight is really a powerful reckoning with some of the ugliest parts of what it means to be human. And I don't mean that simply in terms of the history of slavery. I mean, these are questions we can ask ourselves today. Why are we allowing for so many industries to flourish that allow human beings to suffer for our pleasure? You meditate on that thinking about, I think in the book you mentioned cobalt. You mentioned like what's used to create the technology that we use, the labor. Yes. Yeah. And the Congo, you know, it's, oh, the repetition is so painful.

You know, the people of the Congo die at extraordinary rates for us to have these phones and these computers. And, of course, for African Americans, so much of our culture comes from the Congo culture. Historically, we have, you know, much of the sort of blended culture that we have in the United States or in the Americas is derived from the root of Congo culture. And so it becomes part of the story, you know, that the story moves in multiple directions, but there is a repetition of suffering and, of course, also a repetition of people trying to figure out how not only to make do, but to live in profound and meaningful ways. One of the more powerful, perhaps also really painful things that you do is reflect on what our ancestors saw looking out into the deep blueness of the sea during the Middle Passage. I think we've heard these fables

that speak to this, that many chose to end their lives by jumping overboard, maybe transfixed. These are stories that really change this idea of the horrid nature of it, like transfixed by the blueness and possibility that the ocean gave, that maybe there was an underworld under the deep blue sea where our ancestors found liberation. What was this process like for you imagining what that deep blue sea offered to those during the Middle Passage? Oh, you know, it's hard. I mean, when we talk about the difficulty of writing, we often talk about the

crafting of sentences, which is of course hard, and the putting together structure. But there's also the emotional component. You actually, I think, do or you should try to grasp. And of course I fail, but try to grasp what it was to be snatched from everything, you know, to be thrown into the hold of a ship in unbelievably horrifying conditions, conditions chained together, sometimes chained people who were dead. And so, and of course that meant a kind of disorientation that is nearly unfathomable. And so, to then look to the sky and the water and think, well, maybe something there, right? Maybe there's something there, maybe there's, maybe that's a path to return is understandable and I think offers something much more kind of complex than simply saying people chose to end their lives because I think it was a much more, you their lives because I think it was a much

more, you know, I do think it was a much more complex reality. I want to fast forward to modern times. There was this period in the 80s, which was really like close to two decades after the civil rights movement. I'm thinking like the late 80s when it felt like, as you write, progress had stalled. And you called it a time when art took center stage as a way to make meaning. Can you say more about that?

Yeah, so I mean, there's almost an immediate backlash to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. And you get that in the context of the Reagan era pretty aggressively and of course an attack on the social safety net at the same time. And then much like the post-Reconstruction period, you also have this flourishing of black art. And in particular in the 80s, on the one hand, you have hip-hop, which is largely a kind of a masculinist form.

And you also, on the other hand, you have literature, which is heavily being made by black women, these extraordinary novelists, the ones we all know and love, you know, from Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, Paula Marshall, and Zaki Shange. They're producing this tradition in that period. Part of the reason, of course, in this book that I had to talk about is, is blue appears frequently in that work. But it's also just this remarkable

period, even as there is this full scale attack on, in many ways, and rejection of the progress of black people and that there is this sort of digging down insistence that we have something to say. And that work is so resilient. And I don't know, we don't necessarily like describe it as such, but that period was just unbelievable. And for me, as someone who was a voracious reader and who is still a voracious reader, I'm a reader first in some ways and a writer second,

that's the landscape in which I grew up. Let's take a short break. And that's the landscape in which I grew up. Let's take a short break. My guest today is scholar and author Imani Perry. And we're talking about her new book, Black in Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

You know, thinking about this time period that we're in, what is it like to be at this moment a professor of studies on women and gender and sexuality and Black American studies at a time when conservatives are fighting against having most, if not all of those things studied at higher education institutions? Yeah, I mean, so everything that I research is under attack from many sectors in the society. And I think of it as, on the one hand, you know, it's devastating, but not so much personally, but because I'm so aware of how much the generation immediately preceding mine, you know, my parents' generation, how hard they fought to have our stories and our history taken seriously.

How many of them were kicked out of school, how many of them, you know, devoted their lives to a struggle that they didn't survive to see, you know, when it didn't survive to see, you know, win, didn't survive to see actually take place. You know, there... This is a period where there is an effort to relitigate the 60s and 70s and all of the transformations of that period. So, for me, though, as a faculty member who studies these things that are under attack, I'm finding myself consistently turning actually to people from the past.

And this is what I mean. I'm turning to thinking about those enslaved people who learned to read despite the risk of death and who never, you know, despite that danger, insisted that this was a pathway to freedom. I'm thinking about those educators who, you know, insisted on the study of black people and black life and black history and black culture despite the fact that people were told, they were told that Black people had not contributed meaningfully to any civilization. I'm thinking about, you know, it being 99 years since Negro History Week was formally

established, and that celebration happening in underfunded, segregated schools, students being nevertheless given a glorious story of their own past. I'm thinking about it being 125 years since the writing of Lift Every Voice and Sing, which I wrote a book about called May We Forever Stand, you know, this song that became the national anthem for black people at a time when black people were systematically excluded from virtually every sector of society except for labor. And so it's not new to do this work under adverse conditions.

And I am standing in a tradition of people who did extraordinary work under adverse conditions. And so I feel equipped to do it despite that. And I will continue to do it even if by some, you know, turn of events, I can't do it in the same way or in the same type of institutions. This is my, you know, it's my life work. I'd like to end our conversation on a passage of your book that I feel is so rooted in the present moment. It's page 228, the last paragraph. It starts with an admission. An admission. I am very much an American and that is an uneasy title for me.

I have a culture and an identity tied to this land. I am without apology who and what I am. The unease is about the relationship between my citizenship and the rest of the world. My blackness is a conduit, but my Americanness is so often a betrayal of that connection with others. I know the classic response is coming from some. People want to come here from all over the world, the American dream is universal. I think that dream is of a castle of security that exists inside the palace gates. I come from inside the territory, but outside the gates, so I know better. But I have one take. There are many others. We are no monolith. This is my blues.

Thank you for reading that, Imani. I mean, I feel like this book and it's really, this meditation on the color blue has given me more language to understand by existence. So I want to thank you for that. And I also want to know, what has it done for you to spend this time on the color and the sensibility and the sound of blue. Oh, you know, it's, on the one hand, I will say I am endlessly sort of grateful and in disbelief that I get to do this thing writing books because, you know, books are so important to me.

I feel so fortunate to be able to write books. And this book was hard and painful at moments, but also an absolute joy to be able to offer to the world. But part of what it did for me and writing does for me in general is it helps me make sense of the world. It helps me make sense of my place in the world. It helps me develop a confidence that there is possibility. You know, there's something very hopeful about the act of writing because it's a thing that you hope to leave on the earth when you're no longer here in physical form. And because this book was so spiritually inflected and so dependent on ancestors and

the past, I felt really in tune with this journey that will end for me but will continue after my life. There's that Maya Angelou says that, said that thing, you know, that was so profound in an interview where she said, I didn't come here to stay. And that orientation, I think, is helpful as we try to figure out ways to tell the truth. And so it's, you know, so writing the book has really been a personal gift and I'm just deeply hoping that it feels that way to my readers as well. Amani Perry, as always, thank you so much for this thought-provoking conversation.

Thank you. Amani Perry's new book is Black and Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of my people. ["Loneliness"] Tomorrow on Fresh Air, we've been talking a lot about loneliness. Research shows we're spending more time alone than ever. Atlantic writer Derek Thompson joins us to talk about how all of this me time is having a profound impact on our personalities, our politics, and our relationship to reality. I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Thanks to Jose Yanes from WDET for additional engineering help. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Nkundee, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.

Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. The I'm gonna be a good boy. The The End