What do Coretta Scott King’s wedding dress, jazz and the middle passage all have in common? Scholar and author Imani Perry explains — it’s the color blue. In her new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, Perry explores blue as a symbol of both hope and melancholy throughout Black history.

“There was something about the universality of the color blue and … the way in which those two senses of blue coincided so profoundly that actually, for me, became a pathway to thinking about Blackness,” Perry says.

Perry says it’s no coincidence that King wore blue on her wedding day, and that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer wore a blue dress to testify before Congress in 1964.

“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,” she says. “It’s pretty, but it has a seriousness to it. And it’s a color that’s associated with power, culturally speaking.”

Blue is also the color of the slave trade: Dyed indigo cloths in West Africa were traded for human life in the 16th century. But it’s also a color that Perry associates with hope, especially when she imagines blue sky and sea visible to enslaved people as they were brought to America during the middle passage.

“I fail but try to grasp what it was to be snatched from everything you knew, to be thrown into the hull of a ship in unbelievably horrifying conditions, chained together, sometimes chained to people who were dead,” she says. “And so to then look to the sky and the water and think, maybe there’s maybe that’s a path to return.”

Interview highlights

On the “blue note” in jazz It’s the in-between. It’s the slurred note … that which isn’t recognized on the Western scale. … Increasingly musicians have been talking about a blues scale … and that’s actually just a wonderful example because 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 in 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. The music, 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.

On Louis Armstrong’s version of the song “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue?” 

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.

We have black and blue in the sense of being bruised and you have blues and the sense of melancholy and of course, the general sense of sort of the blues that exist along with Blackness.

On the significance of blue clothing among Black women

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 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. There’s something extraordinary about these women who were enslaved insisting upon a particular color for adornment. … I think we’re 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.

On indigo blue dye and the slave trade 

These scenes in the historical record of people being exchanged for a block of indigo were heartbreaking to me. People who were artisans … who had been adorned in indigo now seeing their worth measured in dye. … And then in the context of U.S. slavery, and particularly South Carolina, having read about Eliza Pinckney, who was 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 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 be 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.

On the mining of cobalt in the Congo for smartphone batteries 

The people of the Congo die at extraordinary rates for us to have these phones and these computers. Of course, for African Americans, so much of our culture comes from the Congo culture. … So it becomes part of the story, 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.