Legacy of the Blue Back Speller

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Pacific Life insurance compompany Omaha Nebraska and in New York, Pacific Life Annuity Phoenix, Arizona The year is seventeen eighty three The revolutionary W 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 U 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 indeducator, the Pm 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 It's called The firstirst 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 backack 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 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 mean to teach yourself How to read? Reading through reading. Yeah. So I have a copy with me. Could you describe it for me though? L what does it do, What does it look like? How is it not a dictionary that 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 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 onnce upon a time Within a few years, the Blue backack speller becomes one of the most widely used school books in the country. Entire generations grew up with it. Even Abraham Lincoln learned to read from its pages It taught literacy, yes, but it was also shaping a new American language in identity. Webster uses the book to introduce simpler, more distinctly American spellings. He drops the U from humor and labor music and politics lose the extra K He 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 back speller We second only to the Bible in copies sold It also's kind of like a Bible, like there's these tools and lessons built into it. Could you describe its size and the relevance of its size Yeah, I mean, it's wonderful to hold one because you realize its's pocket size. I mean it was small enough to carry the bluebags spell it could be carried with you wherever you wanted to go. It could literally fit into into a jacket pocket or pants pocket or small satchel and so It was mobile. It was a tool that traveled with people 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 evidenence throughout his work And despite that fact his blue backack speller becomes something that is fundamental to African American struggles for literacy. Fr fromom ninety nine percent invisible in BBC studios. this is a history of the United States in a hundred objects. I'm Roman Mars Today, the Webster Blue backack spepeller 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 what it means to be free Before emancipation, and much of the slave holding south learning to read as an enslaved person came with brutal consequences The Bluebeack speller was everywhere, so common that some enslaved people managed to get their hands on it anyway peopleople like Frederick Douglas Part of what is powerful about it is if we think about Some like Frederick Douglas. who is enslaved and fundamentally teaches himself to read usings the blue backack 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 no Webster who created this. He's someone who doesn't consider a person like Douglas as part of the American body, right 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 It 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 Bve expeller 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 they have to be schools We see it in the contraband camps in the Civil War where there are even photographs of people holding blue backack spellers of black people who have fled behind union lines and are learning to read in the midst of battlefields And then A emmancipation, these schools that open up, there are students who range from, you know, tiny children to octyogenarians, 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 onn a day to day basis, even with these new rights, the very idea of black people reading was threatening to many white southerners. so At the same timees there's this passion for education. There was also this sense of danger. and perhaps the most dramatic example of this is how frequently schoolchools 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 Back schooling. And so the Blue backack spepeller 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. 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. Washington and W. E. B. Du Boise 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 Blue Back spepeller 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 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 mines So he asks his mother for help hisis mother got herer hands on a blue backack speller for him And he treated it as, you know as a kind of magical document he taught himself to read with it. and it really shaped his life This is the very first book that Booker holds in his hand, and it changes the course of his life. There's this trajectory from his mother finding this book for him and he thinking that this is sort of the greatest possible 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 Blue backack speller, he attends night school after working in the salt mines all day thenen in eighteen seventy two, at age sixteen, 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 five hundred miles to get to Hampton Institute. 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 fourth of July of eighteen eighty one Washington arrived at Tuskegee as its first principal But the school existed in name only. The state of Alabama had allocated just two thousand dollars 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 one hundred acre former plantation And he and the students build Tuskegee with their own hands. By Bick 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 fifteen dollars 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 Back 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 thingsings 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 Back 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 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 access to suffrage and other kinds of civil rights for African Americans and instead focused on economic development, land acquisition and the like In this philosophy, this philosophy was about to make him one of the most famous men in America And the thing that would do it was a single speech delivered on a single afternoon In Atlanta in eighteen ninety five. The city was hosting a worldld'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 them 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 then ixie 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 This famous or infamous speech that he delivers in eighteen ninety five in which he says that Black and white Americans can be as separate as fingers on a hand and implicitly, Ges Advocacy for civil and political rights. and instead you 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 Wor, and he replays this monent. or Washington lifts up his hand his hand representing society. He spreads his fingers apart and says to the audience, In all things purely social, we can be as separate as fingers on a hand as in people and black people 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 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 speech is arouousing success in mainstream America because In many ways, you know, it's eighteen ninety five, so it's some years past the end of Reonstruction, completely ended by eighteen seventy seven. But in the intervening years Jim Crow is becoming more deeply entrenched in the US South and really in many ways across the country. And by that, I mean not just segregated facilities also segregated forms of employment really control of the labor of African Americans. The beginning of we see is 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. It not only lets the South off the hook, but it lets the federal government off the hook, which has 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 compompromise 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 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. someomeone ready to fight Fide Mth is important for us so we can allow students to understand that your space in this The world is important. They have to feel the freedom. who they are. 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It's high quality complete protein designed to support healthy muscles with fewer ingredients than the previous formula and twenty six to forty two grams of protein. for when you're stuck in meetings, or need a post workout recovery, available in chocolate, vanilla cream, cookies and cream, and strawberries and cream Try the new G tasting muscle milk today, available in stores nationwide. Muscle Milk, protein for all Lookerty Washington's ideas about bllack education are about to meet their challenger. another intellectual heavyweight named W. EB. Du Boise Dub Bois also has a philosophy, whose origins can be traced back to the blue backack speller Only his experience with the book comes much later in life, because Du Boise 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 Boise. He reads this speech after it gets published. Where is Dub 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 and as they were But it's important to remember that you know Washington is sort of almost two decades older than the boys It's actually only twelve years that separate Washington and the Bys, 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, know, doesn't have to walk five hundred 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 heiv tries to give a Valentine to a little girl who rejects it and this becomes his moment of racial awareness or racial reckoning Understood as extremely bright and talented. And when he graduates from high school, his mother dies when he' seventeen. And so members of the local community 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 FIisk and FisCk 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, right? 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 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 Duubois will have a transformative experience with the bllue backack 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 backack speller teaching them Years later, Duubois 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 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 brother in jail, a sister returning home with a child and Josie carrying the weight of all of it king 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 deboise 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 of this into a scathing critique of Broker T. Washington in a chapter of The Souls of Black Folk published in nineteen oh three So he, you know This is a really bold thing he does to write this book. And to have this public criticism Oh yeah, you know 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 lot of black intellectuals and activists and organizers are saying, which is what Washington is saying cannot be seen as speaking for Back people at large and certainly not the black leadership class as it were. I think you can sum up Du Bois'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 There's self respect For Du Boise, 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 Boise thinks that education for Back 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 talented temp The boys 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 ten percent of in a community that are going to function as the leadership class and those people in the bllack community should have access to 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 in this, at least ten percent of the black population should have access to higher order education. becausecause 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, and 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 wr large from any sector of the society And that was a bold statement De Bois also thinks there are consequences to Washington's accommodationist beliefs. He sees a direct line between the Atlanta compompromise 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 Plessie vvers. Ferguson, making separate but equal The laaw of the land voice thinks that Washington and the Atlantic compomromise speech gives up something that he had no right to give and sort of presented it as though black Americans were willing to accommodate exclusion and therefore, the that sort of allowed for Pessy versus Fergusson 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, Pessy would likely have been decided the way that it was better argument would be that Washington 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 nineteen oh three, 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 becausecause of what he's doing behind the scenes with money he got from white donors, particularly when it comes to public education for black children in the Jim Crow South So Black students have fewer schools to attend. they often have shorter school terms. and they get much less money than schools for white students. Many places, particularly rural places, don't have access to public schools at all. and southern states do not require schools that have been slated for white students to admit black students even if they don't have an access to a local school That'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 Robuck and compomany. By the early nineteen hundreds, he was one of the wealthiest men in America. And what that means is that they are actually Pysically building schools across the south people to 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. Washington is complicated becausecause on the one hand, he's known for his accommodationist posture, his willingness to fgo advocacy of civil and political rights for African Americans But on the other hand He essentially responsible for the access to education for African Americans across the South? I mean, it strikes me like I don't want to reduce the works of two great men, 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 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 fifty nine, 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 After the Atlanta comppromise speech, many people misinterpreted him as saying that black people should never have access to civil rights. I mean, even in that moment, he was just saying, well 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 was interesting about them is that besides their shared conviction, even though they had very different agendas, they also shared a real serious interest in black education, which was really something that You know, in the early twentieth century Black intellectuals across the board We're centrally interested in educational issues and not just, you know, higher education. K twelve education, education of kids was seen as essential concern. and so Even in the midst of their debate, they're trying to think about how do we prepare trend 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 The boy' you know born you know generation later in a different environment. if he's not 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.'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. 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 just said, that young people are bringing in new ideas. Yeah, that's their job, as far as I'm concerned, like they have one job. It's to continue progress. It's worth noting that do boys continue to sort of Push very hard at the limits of black politics all the way until his death in nineteen sixty three, you know quently on the outs with those who are most powerful and ye, so much so that he ends up in Africa and everything or like 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 NAACP Oggan the Crisis. and the NAACP is a multiracial civil rights organization initially And he pushes that organization so hard at various moments that he is repeatedly fired and then brought back in. and at times it's because, you know of his position where he becomes sort of a very assert of pan Africanist, at times because of his posions on capitalism. at times it's because he's just so outspoken about American racism. 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 blue backack expeller in many ways was the initial seed formal education. What does it mean that the same object was the root? both Booker T. Washington and for W. EB. DuBois's sort of intellectual formations Yeah, I mean I You know, I'm so taken by the fact that The same object, it's Booker T. Washington and W EB Du Boise, for whom the Blue Back speller Matters. It's also Frederick Douglas, you know, like most famous abolitionists. Also George Washington Carver, this brilliant scientist and artist who All this transformative work 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 cess 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 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 spepeller. You know, what more kind of democratic instrument than an object that you can use to make yourself literate and it opens up a 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 that's quintessentially American is bllack Americans in That which is not intended for us and reinterpreting it in a way that not only includes Back Americans, but actually then becomes something different in the hands of Back 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 Douglas, a man who had already done exactly this kind of reinvention with that little blue book Douglas learned to do with this 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 He said, this is a slave holding 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 a blue backack speller