LOST BLACK HISTORY
By Don Valentine
The idiom “Stay Woke” is the popular phrase du jour. Lost in the banter between the Right and Left is the Black history story of these words. The words began as a cautionary Negro warning in the post Emancipation, Jim Crow era. Succinctly defined, it was a warning to be mindful of every detail going on when you were amongst White folks.
The Library of Congress in the 1930’s set out to memorialize “American Folk” music in the South. Nearly a 100 years later we can be bold and just call the project “Black American Folk” music in the south. If you know your history, most of those songs came from slaves. Some of the music was reshaped by their descendants to suit the contemporary tastes of the time. The archivists from the Library interviewed dozens of Blues singers and guitar players about their songs. They interviewed “Lead Belly,” who would become the seminal singer/guitar player of that generation. He wrote a song about the tragic story of the “Scottsboro Boys.” That was another cruel misrepresentation of a purported Black crime in the South. Nine young boys in Scottsboro Al, were falsely accused of raping two White women on a train in 1931. The website History.com reported, “The trials and repeated retrials of the Scottsboro Boys sparked an international uproar and produced two landmark U.S. Supreme Court verdicts, even as the defendants were forced to spend years battling the courts and enduring the brutal conditions of the Alabama prison system.” In the song Ledbetter wrote is the refrain “Best Stay Woke.” The recording by the Library of Congress is the first known documentation of this vernacular. An in-depth article by the Arizona Republic’s Phil Boas noted, “…Ledbetter used ‘woke,’ it meant that when you’re a Black person traveling through a deeply racist state such as Alabama, you need to know what you are dealing with- a highly refined form of evil.”
That would be akin to a present day NAACP admonishment to avoid traveling through a state like Florida. Lost over the past 100 years is the historical ominousness of the warning. It has been replaced with, as the Urban Dictionary defines it, “When this term became popularized, initially the meaning of this term was when an individual became more aware of social injustice. Or basically, any current affairs related like biases, discrimination, or double-standards.” By contrast the mainstream Merriam Webster definition is, “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)…”
“Best Stay Woke” original usage is a platitude that will always be relevant for Blacks. The term has morphed into various depictions, but in the annals of the Black press it will never be lost. The Black press has been part of our history since 1827 with the New York Freedom’s Journal. That is 196 years and proudly still printing!
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