Lead Belly, Wikipedia.

It was a warning — a spoken-word portent of the dangers lurking in plain sight. A call to vigilance. A whispered watchword passed between those who knew the system was not built for them. From churches to courtrooms, ballrooms to drinking fountains, every institution was wired against them.

“Liberty and justice for all” was a hollow mantra, a borrowed line from movie scripts, not a manifest reality. A promise that never crossed the color barrier. A refrain as empty as the bridge of a vapid pop song, sung past the millions it excluded. The very same who weren’t included in the declaration that claimed that all men were created equal and who were barred from the promised unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there [Alabama]—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

The word is short. It bursts from puckered lips and explodes in a dead-end consonant. It’s a four-letter epithet, one that its user might not even fully comprehend. Its deliberate morphosyntactic rebellion only adds to its iconoclastic aura. It refused to follow the rules and didn’t care whether it was misunderstood and today it challenges those that use it to grapple with its depth and true meaning.

It was in 1938, during the segregated black-and-white days of the American South, that this zeitgeist word was first recorded. Linguistic history was made by a man who carried a thousand songs in his memory from across generations and was himself a product of the nineteenth century. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, the self-described “musicianer” (to avoid pigeonholing tags like bluesman or folk singer) was first recorded using the word in this context, warning his listeners to be vigilant against a system raised against them. He finishes his song with a warning, a stark reminder to northern blacks that the freedom they believed they possessed was fragile; in the segregationist South, those rights could vanish in an instant. He intones that they best stay ‘woke’.

The song preceding the warning is deceptively cheerful, the kind of tune that might get your foot tapping while your civil rights disappear. It jumps, it swings, it practically begs for a dance floor. You can picture Lead Belly smiling as he plays it, which only adds to its cunning. The genius lies in the bait: rhythm first, truth second. The listener is already halfway to the chorus before the full weight of the message sets in, this charming little ditty is a canary in the coal mine.

“Be careful. Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.” He wasn’t offering travel advice. He was sounding the alarm. The subject of the song? The Scottsboro Boys: nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women in what was, at the time, not so much a miscarriage of justice as it was standard operating procedure. The evidence was flimsy, the trials........

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