The Blueback Speller

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

My stepfather discovered that I had a fine a financial value and so when the school opened he decided that he could not spare me from my work. The decision seemed to cloud my every ambition, made all the more severe by reason of the fact that my place of work was where I could see the happy children passing to and from School mornings and afternoons despite this disappointment. However, I determined that I would learn something anyway and applied myself with greater earnestness than ever to the mastering of what was in the blueback speller. "I have owned many kinds of caps and hats, but never one of which I felt so proud as Of the cap made by two pieces of cloth

Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915)^[1] was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary black elite.^[2] Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.