In 1939, Billie Holiday gave voice to a nation’s darkest truths with Strange Fruit, her haunting lament for the bodies of Black men and women hanging from trees in the Southern states. The year before, bluesman Lead Belly had recorded Scottsboro Boys, a ballad chronicling the prosecution of nine Black teenagers falsely accused of rape. At the end of his song, he offered a warning — “stay woke”— a phrase that would enter the Black lexicon as a call to vigilance, a reminder to remain alert to the dangers of racism, especially in the South.