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100 Objects #5: Blue Back Speller
Brief
The episode then follows the Speller’s afterlife through emancipation and into the Progressive Era as a seed of competing visions for Black advancement. Amani Perry documents how freed people, Black soldiers, and contraband communities demanded schools and how many Black students, adult and elderly alike, pursued literacy with Spellers in hand even as white supremacists burned Black schools. Two towering figures—Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois—both credit the Speller in their formation but drew sharply different lessons. Washington’s path (self-taught, night school, 1872 arrival at Hampton at 16, later founding Tuskegee in 1881 from meager public funds and student-built bricks) led him to champion industrial education, economic uplift, and a conciliatory public posture exemplified by his 1895 Atlanta address. Du Bois, raised in Massachusetts and trained at Fisk, encountered the Speller as a teacher in Tennessee; the fate of promising pupils like “Josie” convinced him Washington’s accommodation would not protect Black lives. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Du Bois demanded classical education for a 'talented tenth' and immediate political rights. The episode’s central argument — voiced by Perry and narrated by Mars — is a paradox: Webster designed the Speller for an American project that excluded Black people, yet Black Americans repeatedly reclaimed that object as a key to freedom, institution-building (including Washington’s Rosenwald-backed school campaign), and intellectual resistance, reshaping both literacy and debates over what freedom should mean.
Why it matters
Noah Webster published The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language (the “Blue-back Speller”) in 1783 to standardize American literacy and spelling; Amani Perry notes Webster promoted simplified spellings (e.g., dropping the 'u' in 'humor' and 'labor') and at one point the Speller was second only to the Bible in copies sold.
Key details
- The Blue-back Speller was pocket-sized and inexpensive, which Amani Perry says allowed it to be carried, hidden, and used secretly by enslaved people; Frederick Douglass taught himself to read using one despite the mortal risks of literacy under slavery.
- After emancipation freed people prioritized education: Civil War-era contraband camps showed photographs of Black people holding Blue-back Spellers, Black soldiers petitioned Lincoln for schools, and newly freed students ranged from children to octogenarians seeking literacy (Amani Perry).
- Booker T. Washington learned to read from a Blue-back Speller, walked roughly 500 miles to Hampton Institute, became Tuskegee’s first principal on July 4, 1881, and built Tuskegee from an underfunded start (Alabama gave $2,000/year); Washington emphasized industrial education and economic self-sufficiency.
- W.E.B. Du Bois encountered the Speller as a young teacher in rural Tennessee and later used the experience to justify his critique of Washington’s accommodationism in The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Du Bois argued for classical higher education and the 'talented tenth' to secure political power and rights.
- Perry and the episode highlight a paradox: Webster intended the book to shape a white, republican American identity that excluded Black people, yet Black Americans (Douglass, Washington, Du Bois, George Washington Carver) reclaimed the Speller as a tool of liberation—while Washington later partnered with Julius Rosenwald (Sears Roebuck) to build schools that helped close the Black–white literacy gap within a generation.