Walter 1.0 was crazy
Four score and seven years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the official end to the fleeting fad of giving a fuck about Black people, “the musical genius known as Walter Boyd” shared a piece of advice that would go down in the annals of Black-American history:
Avoid white people. All of them. They are not to be trusted.
Boyd’s prophetic advice seemed to contradict the fearlessness he displayed in real life. Before his fame as “the king of the 12-string guitar,” Boyd served two separate stints for murder. He was convicted of attempting to kill two more people and survived Sugar Land and Angola prisons, two of the most violent penitentiaries in American history. He carried two pistols, a knife, a harmonica, a guitar and an impressively sized penis. According to his contemporaries, Boyd was skilled at using them all. He sang his way out of a death sentence, took a shotgun blast to the stomach and lived to sing about it.
And on Sept. 29, 1915, with his ankles and hands in shackles, Boyd escaped from a Texas chain gang. Under heavy gunfire, with his legs and wrists shackled together, he made it to a nearby farm and convinced a Black sharecropper to break his irons. After “laying low” for a few weeks, Boyd began playing in juke joints and spent the rest of his life avoiding white people.
In December 1938, Boyd spent an entire day in a studio with a musicologist from the Library of Congress who wanted to record the songs of this legendary pioneer of American music. During the session, Boyd sang “The Scottsboro Boys,” a song he had written about nine Black teenagers who were falsely convicted of raping two white women.
According to Boyd, after he met the Scottsboro Boys, he began preaching his “don’t trust white people” message to everyone he met. As he strummed his guitar, the original gangsta of Black music condensed the lesson of the Scottsboro Boys down to two words that kept him alive as a fugitive, a musician and a Black man in America:
“Stay woke.”
“Walter Boyd” was the alias for Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter.
“Here’s the advice I gave Joe Louis…all the Harlem colored people…and all the good colored people,” Lead Belly explained. “Them boys was with them white women. That was the trouble…”
Contrary to popular belief, when the pioneering musician etched the phrase into the Black cultural lexicon, he was not talking about racism, the South or “being aware.”
He. Was. Talking. About. White. People.
Being “aware” of racial injustice helped Jack Johnson become the first Black heavyweight champion of the world. But because he didn’t stay woke, he was imprisoned for messing with white women. “Staying woke” summarized the “seven commandments” that allowed Joe Louis to remain “inoffensive to white Americans” on his path to becoming the greatest fighter in the history of the world.
In 1940, Negro United Mine Workers promised to “stay woke” longer than the white co-workers trying to prevent them from unionizing. “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” was the title of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most frequently used speech for Black audiences. The Black musicians who made songs about it were singing to Black people. I began co-hosting the “Stay Woke Show” more than a decade ago.
This was woke 1.0.
Then, white people found out about it.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smugly referenced a tweet from New York City councilmember Chi Ossé, she was using a phrase that was created by Black people whose only intention was to keep it out of her mouth.
This is woke 2.0
Regardless of AOC’s intent, by kee-keeing about “wokeness” using the colonizer’s definition, she was delving into an area historically known as “none of her goddamned business.” As William Melvin Kelley explained in a 1962 New York Times article, “negro idiom” didn’t just originate from Black culture; these words and phrases were intended to be culturally exclusive to prevent white folks from colonizing the terms.
“A few Negroes guard the idiom so fervently they will consciously invent a new term as soon as they hear the existing one coming from a white’s lips,” Kelley wrote. “My grandmother told me that ofay, a word for white man, was ‘foe’ in pig Latin. This would mean that the language was used primarily for secrecy, exclusion and protection. If your master did not know what you were talking about, or planning, he could not punish you, and could maintain your innocence and ignorance.”
While white conservatives deserve the lion’s share of blame for weaponizing “woke” by turning the idiom into a political slur, one could argue that it was white liberal Karen-splainers like BIPOC Barbie who bastardized the term in the first place. It’s not like Christopher Rufo and Tucker Carlson heard the phrase while hanging out with their Five Percenter homeboys and ran back to the white headquarters (which, I assume, is called the Whitest House) to inform their conservative counterparts about their colloquial discovery.
It was white liberals and progressives who co-opted the phrase, removed its historical context and casually colonized the expression. Black Americans had been using the term for a century before white wokesters saw the video of George Floyd’s murder and suddenly stopped ignoring the systemic inequality we had been battling for years. Aside from redesigning syrup bottles, accepting a few DEI policies they never intended to follow and performatively blacking out their social media profile pics, their greatest gift to the struggle was altering the definition of “woke” to include themselves.
To be clear, alienating the No Kings rally goers who have joined the fight against authoritarianism, police brutality, racism, mass deportation and other forms of inequality is not my intent. I understand the need for a multiracial coalition as much as anyone. However, there are some rules and protocols that this new class of habitual linesteppers should understand. So, instead of calling out the Karen-Come-Latelies who have positioned themselves as political allies, I’d like to present an open challenge to AOC, Ossé, Joe Scarborough, James Carville or anyone in the Caucasian cinematic universe who is distancing themselves from a centuries-old cultural warning that was never meant for their lipless mouths.
Can you name a single issue, policy or belief now considered “woke” that Black people have been fighting for at least 50 years?
Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
Supporting LGBTQIA+ issues and fighting for transgender rights might seem like an update to the woke operating system to people who don’t know shit about Bayard Rustin, the Gay Liberation Front or Marsha P. Johnson’s Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
“Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women—and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups—we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion,” explained Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton in 1970. “We know that homosexuality is a fact that exists and we must understand it in its purest form: that is, a person should have the freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants.”
Reparations sound like newly woke nonsense to people who don’t know it’s been discussed by every significant civil rights leader, from Frederick Douglass to MLK. Universal, government-funded health care sounded crazy when Obama raised the issue in 2007, as it did when Jesse Jackson made it part of his platform in 1988 or when the Panthers called for it in 1972.
How about this crazy woke idea of defunding the police?
Was Martin Luther King Jr. crazy when he spoke about the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality”? Was Malcolm X too woke?
“Police departments fail to speak to [Black people’s] needs in a meaningful way,” Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton wrote in their 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. “We must devise new structures, new institutions to replace those forms or make them responsive. There is nothing sacred or inevitable about old institutions…Therefore, timidity in calling into question the boards of education or police departments will not do.”
If an institution was responsible for the criminalization, marginalization and disproportionate death of one group of people, expecting that community to continue funding its own destruction would be absolutely insane.
Is critical race theory too woke?
Teaching the scholarship of a civil rights attorney and Ivy League law professor can’t be crazier than letting a Karen with a 10th-grade education set the standard for every textbook in America. Celebrating freedom on Juneteenth is less “woke” than celebrating a rapist (Thomas Jefferson), a genocidal maniac (Christopher Columbus) or insurrectionist traitors (Confederate Memorial Day, Robert E. Lee Day or the Jan. 6 “heroes”). If AOC thinks Francesca Hong’s Thanksgiving diss was crazy, please don’t tell her what Black people have been saying about Colonizer Cookout Day for years!
Were the people protesting George Floyd’s murder crazier than the MAGA mob who tried to overturn an election? What’s crazier: systemic racism or rescinding an executive order meant to address systemic racism? Were the wokesters who called Elon Musk a Nazi crazier than Musk’s inauguration day Nazi salute?
Here’s what’s crazy:
White people.
Ignoring 250 years of evidence, Black people’s pleas and a mountain of peer-reviewed data that proves racial disparities is insane. Believing a corrupt billionaire convicted felon is going to fight for you is crazy. Calling yourself a Christian and voting for an adulterous, pussy-grabbing felon who hangs out with pedophiles but can’t quote a single Bible verse is crazy.
It’s also crazy to believe, with no evidence whatsoever, that backpedaling away from “wokeness” will attract the moderate, unseasoned turkey-eaters to vote Democrat when it’s never ever ever ever ever happened. It’s crazy to believe that Hakeem Jeffries and Kente-cloth-wearing white folks have the temerity to stand up to Donald Trump, a fascist Supreme Court, the world’s wealthiest oligarchs or a U.S.-backed genocide while they’re willing to treat the lives of their most loyal constituency like a punchline to a nigger joke.
Woke 2.0 is craaazy.
Only a crazy person could believe they can snicker and giggle at the very tool Black people have used to keep themselves alive for four centuries while our theoretical allies clamor for power, votes and proof that they are down for the cause. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is batshit bonkers if she thought we would let that shit slide.
How the fuck does she think we got here?
To be clear, no one is mad at AOC (at least I’m not), nor am I saying that she is the equivalent of the MAGA supremacists who want to kill us. But I’m also not dumb enough to believe that she cares if we die. I have never been under the illusion that Democrats, Republicans or the entire contingent of ex-woke liberals were ever my friends. I don’t have to like her or agree with everything she says.
AOC is just a politician who wants to win.
I want to be free.
To white people, that might sound crazy.
Then again, white people believe Huddie Ledbetter wrote a song called “The Scottsboro Boys.”
On Aug. 13, 1937, Lead Belly debuted a song that was written for an event honoring the mothers of the Scottsboro Boys. While he performed it in front of mostly Black audiences, he never actually recorded the song for commercial use. The recording that contains the phrase “stay woke” was recorded in 1938 by John Lomax and his wife, a “collector of folk songs” who robbed Ledbetter blind after helping him get a pardon from prison. In fact, Lead Belly never actually met the Scottsboro Boys. That was just some shit he told white people.
The song was called “The Scottsboro Boys Got Here,” and it was meant for Black people.
In 1937, during an interview with the Daily Worker, Lead Belly sang the song for an article by Black writing hall of famer Richard Wright. While most of the article focused on the blues singer’s music and his hardscrabble life, it also explained how Lomax got Lead Belly pardoned from prison and why those Library of Congress recordings were part of the “most amazing cultural swindles in American history.”
Lomax used the influence of his official position with the Library of Congress to get into prisons and get songs. But he knew that a white man would have great difficulty in getting Negro prisoners to confide their folk culture in him; so he used Ledbetter as his guide and entree.
Ledbetter and Lomax traveled through Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and gathered folk songs which later were compiled into a book, “American Ballads and Folk Songs.” And the only credit Ledbetter got for that book was the “high honor” of seeing his name in print.
In addition, Lomax, in order to make engagements and more profit, gave out a vicious tirade of publicity to the nation's leading newspapers about the Negro folk singer. Ledbetter was represented in the New York Herald Tribune, Time Magazine and over the radio as a half sex-mad, knife-toting, black buck from Texas. Time Magazine, March of Time and the newspapers generally featured him in such tones.
Lomax’s unauthorized book is how we know that “Walter Boyd” was the alias that Lead Belly used in his previous life. It’s why Lead Belly was broke. And this is why Life Magazine described Lead Belly as a “bad nigger.”
I bet AOC would think that was hilarious.
To Ocasio-Cortez, white people and performative attention-seekers, caring about Black people is a stepladder for their careers or just another phase that the country went through. Even if they actually care, their concern is theoretical and as temporary as the disco era, the poodle-skirts craze or the “bad nigger” phase that temporarily enraptured the nation.
But for us, being aware of the whimsical violence that whiteness radiates is necessary for our survival.
The idea of wokeness sounds crazy because the issues and struggles it embodies are new to white people. Then again, if I had a monopoly on the global fuck supply, I still can’t imagine giving a single fuck about Sharia law, Haitians eating my pet or the racial demographics of fictional mermaids. That would be crazy.
In 1939, Ledbetter was arrested in Manhattan for allegedly stabbing a man who broke into an apartment where Ledbetter was sleeping. Unable to afford an adequate defense, Ledbetter was convicted of third-degree assault. The trial judge knew that Ledbetter was on the run, so he delayed sentencing until the court heard back from the states where Ledbetter had fled justice. “The court was looking at his past and seeing him as just another middle-aged, knife-wielding black man who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble,” wrote Wolfe and Lornell.
It turns out, the statute of limitations had expired on Lead Belly’s prison escape, so he was not a fugitive on the run. In fact, the letters from the prisons where he had been incarcerated insisted he had never been pardoned; he had been released early for good conduct. Lomax just made up the story to hold it over Ledbetter’s head.
While Ledbetter passed away in Bellevue after he was stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), he reportedly died from—and I swear this is true—a lack of sleep, telling doctors: “You put me in that bed and I’ll never get out.”
I guess anyone can be woke.
Staying is the thing.
Master class, Mr Harriott. Well done.
Wow.
Thanks for researching the actual skinny on the life of Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter.)
It is still a jolt how exploitation reaches so far down into relationships which have a power imbalance.