Excellent LWVSC blog article by Alice Fried reminding us how old "Woke" and how evil "Anti-Woke" really are
Excerpt 1
According to the dictionary and Wikipedia, woke or awake is a legitimate, useful word that means: to show signs of life; stir up; activate; stimulate; lift; boost; come alive. A derivativethe term stay wokewas first used in the 1920s when Marcus Garvey made the call, Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! in a plea for black people across the world to open their eyes to systemic racism and get in involved in politics.
In 1938, Blues musician Lead Belly, (Huddie Ledbetter) recorded the song Scottsboro Boys, a ballad that tells the true story of four black youths falsely accused and later freed for raping a white woman in Scottsboro, Alabama. Lyrics in that ballad, stay woke, were an advisory to blacks to be careful when down south, were used again in 1962 in a New York Times article titled If Youre Woke You Dig It: No Mickey Mouse Can Be Expected to Follow Todays Negro Idiom Without a Hip Assist. The black author, William Arthur Kelly, wrote the piece pandering to the 1950s and 60s beatnik social movement stressing self-expression highlighting Black American slang appropriated by white people who often missed or distorted the original meanings.
Excerpt 2:
I liken the stop-woke movement to living life in hospice care where morphine is used in to promote sleep to numb the pain of death. Ignorance in the stop-woke movement is used to numb the pain of living in the complicatedgood, bad, and ugly sphere of humanity. There is no political or moral justification for allowing our young to sleep through learning how to live.
For more of the above, including a linguistic timeline of the term, here's the link:
https://my.lwv.org/california/solano-county/article/lwvsc-blog-live-learn-learn-live-how-being-woke-went-black-bad#:~:text=A%20meaning%20that%20fear%20mongers%20utilize%20to%20hold,diluted%20and%20manipulated%20to%20justify%20an%20alternative%20perspective.