True Left

Before you fight over the word 'woke,' learn its surprising, musical history

'Woke' has been hijacked by white people left and right. It's a great American word that should be restored to its original meaning.

Yahoo News · us.yahoo.com

The word woke is seminal to our larger culture in ways most of us have never understood.

It’s one of the great words in American English and it should be preserved in its purest form.
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In Lead Belly's song "The Scottsboro Boys," the nine African-American young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, he admonishes his listeners to, “Best stay woke!”

It’s believed to be the first recorded instance of the word.

As Huddie Ledbetter used “woke,” it meant that when you’re a Black person travelling through a deeply racist state such as Alabama, you need to know what you’re dealing with – a highly refined form of evil.

Ledbetter would know. He travelled the byways of Louisiana, Alabama and Texas singing his songs and confronting white bigotry and its violence against Black people.