What does Woke mean? The expression “stay woke” first emerged in the spoken afterword of the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by the Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, also known as Lead Belly. The concept of “wokeness” is linked to the awakening of Black consciousness to an activist perspective, and is a warning to be aware of the politics of your situations and surroundings.
The term “woke” has its roots in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), where it originally meant being awake or alert to societal issues, especially those related to social justice and inequality. It has been used in this sense for decades within African American communities.
We can thank Lead Belly for a lot of things including popularising the iconic folk standards “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?/In The Pines”, “In New Orleans/The House of the Rising Sun” (1944), “The Midnight Special,” “Goodnight Irene,” “The Bourgeois Blues,” and “Black Betty” (1939).
We can also thank Lead Belly for the first recording of the term “woke” in its present day context. Lead Belly talks about the Scottsboro Boys and his 1938 song about them, saying “best stay woke, keep their eyes open”, from the 2015 box set ‘Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection’.
“I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
Lead Belly
The more recent popularization of the term in mainstream culture, particularly in discussions about social and political awareness, can be traced back to the 2010s. “Woke” gained traction as a term to describe heightened awareness of social injustices and issues such as racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.
The Scottsboro Boys
The 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys” by Leadbelly is about nine black teenagers who did “hard time” in an Alabama jail after they were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in 1931. The song warns “colored” people to watch out if they go to Alabama, saying that “the man gonna get ya”, and that the “Scottsboro boys [will] tell ya what it’s all about.”
The incident took place near Scottsboro, Alabama, and the false accusations and subsequent legal proceedings highlighted the racial tensions and injustices of the time.
The nine Scottsboro Boys soon after their arrest in 1931. The nine black youths arrested at Paint Rock were: Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, brothers Andy and Leroy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson and Eugene Williams.
At the height of the Great Depression, on March 25, 1931, nine black teenage males were riding on a freight train with several white males and two white women on the Southern Railway line between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee. A disagreement occurred, the white youths were thrown off the train and they went to the police complaining that they had been assaulted.
Heavily-armed police boarded the train in Paint Rock, Alabama and found two white women riding the train. During the commotion, the women claimed they had been raped by the nine black teenagers.
The pace of the trials was very fast before the standing-room-only, all-white hostile audience. The judge and prosecutor wanted to speed up the nine trials to avoid mob violence, so the first trial took a day and a half, and the rest were tried and found guilty by all-white juries in just one day. All but the youngest boy was sentenced to die in Alabama’s electric chair.
Left: Victoria Price (left) and Ruby Bates (right) in 1931. Bother women were travelling with their boyfriends. Price, aged twenty-one and married three times, had been a prostitute in Tennessee, with both black and white clientele. 17-year-old Ruby Bates later admitted she had fabricated the whole story.
Middle: International Labor Defense fund raised for the legal defence by selling stamps in 1933.
Right: On appeal the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that there was no proof that a mob was standing outside the courtroom trial of the Scottsboro Boys. The photo on right proved that such a mob did exist.
The case gained national and international attention, sparking outrage and protests from various groups, including the Communist Party USA, which played a significant role in advocating for the Scottsboro Boys’ defense. The legal battles that followed, marked by inadequate legal representation, discriminatory practices, and false testimonies, continued for years.
Eventually, the United States Supreme Court intervened, and in 1935, in the case of Norris v. Alabama, the Court ruled that the systematic exclusion of African Americans from juries had denied the Scottsboro Boys their constitutional right to a fair trial. The decision led to new trials for some of the defendants, and over time, the charges against most of them were dropped or they were released.
The Scottsboro Boys’ case is often cited as a symbol of racial injustice, highlighting the flaws in the American legal system and the pervasive racism of the era. It also contributed to the broader civil rights movement, as it brought attention to the need for reform in the criminal justice system and the protection of the rights of African Americans.
In 2013 the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles officially cleared the last of the Scottsboro Boys. The Alabama legislature passed laws specifically targeting the case, allowing the parole board to issue posthumous pardons for old cases.
Lead Belly
As for Lead Belly, his 1938 usage of “woke” was likely a repurposing of the key line in “Sawmill Moan,” a song recorded a decade earlier by the great blues artist Willard “Ramblin'” Thomas:
If I don’t go crazy, I’m sure gonna lose my mind
Willard “Ramblin'” Thomas
‘Cause I can’t sleep for dreamin’, sure can’t stay woke for cryin’.
Lead Belly styled himself “King of the Twelve-String Guitar”. Woody Guthrie once described Lead Belly as “the hard name of a harder man,” referring to his friend and fellow American music icon born as Huddie Ledbetter (c. 1888–1949).
Emerging from the swamplands of Louisiana, the prisons of Texas, and the bustling streets of New York City, Lead Belly and his musical contributions stood as pivotal elements in American folk music, leaving an indelible mark on the cultural legacy of African Americans.
Bob Dylan acknowledges Lead Belly as the catalyst for his introduction to folk music. In his Nobel Prize Lecture, Dylan recounts the transformative moment, stating,
“somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Lead Belly record with the song ‘Cotton Fields’ on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. It transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off.”
Bob Dylan
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