100 Objects #5: Blue Back Speller

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1:00The 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 asked 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 U. One ambitious school teacher looks around at all of this and decides this has to change.

1:41His 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 Imani 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 unwieldy title.

2:30It'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 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 reading through reading so um i have 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 let's describe 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 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.

3:41But 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 and 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.

4:25But his larger idea does succeed. At one point, the blueback speller 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. It could 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.

5:10It 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. Yeah. And that's evidenced throughout his work. And despite that fact, his Blueback Speller becomes something that is fundamental to African-American struggles for literacy.

6:00From 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 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.

6:37Before 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. 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 blueback speller, he's still enslaved.

7:21And 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. 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, Douglass teaches himself, and through teaching himself, frees himself.

8:08And he and countless other Black people take on that blueback speller. It insists 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.

9:06So 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.

9:47We 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.

10:46And 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.

11:26You 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 in two. Booker T.

12:04Washington 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.

12:43All 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 mines. 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.

13:43After 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, something like 500 miles to get to Hampton Institute. 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.

14:20On 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 an abandoned 100-acre former plantation, and he and the students build Tuskegee with their own hands, brick by brick.

15:05As 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 husbandry, agricultural work and the like.

15:51Things 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.

16:37Industrial 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.

17:30And 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 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 likely never happened before in that part of the country.

18:20This 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.

19:13As 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.

20:05But 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 work really hard and put their heads down and stop pushing against the way that society is becoming increasingly more oppressive and restrictive, then things will get better.

21:00And 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.

21:38There'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.

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24:32Available in chocolate, vanilla cream, cookies and cream, and strawberries and cream. Try the new great-tasting muscle milk today. Available in stores nationwide. Muscle milk. Protein for all. Booker T. Washington's ideas about Black education are about to meet their challenger, another intellectual heavyweight named W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois also has a philosophy whose origins can be traced back to the blue-backed 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.

25:08Du Bois. He reads this speech after it gets published. Where is Du 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.

25:53You 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 as 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.

26:40He 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 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, right?

27:27A comprehensive system of segregation, very different from the kind of racism that he experienced in Great Barrington. So at 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-back speller, as a young teacher with a room full of Black children in front of him.

28:09And 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 Their 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.

28:59And 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 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.

29:46And 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 Du 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 scathing critique of Booker T. Washington in a chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903.