Lead Belly, the Scottsboro Boys, Staying Woke, and Class

 

When African-American folk and blues legend, Huddie Ledbetter, known professionally as Lead Belly, recorded a version of his song about the Scottsboro Boys case for the Smithsonian Institute in 1938, he told black people visiting Alabama to “Stay woke, keep your eyes open.” The term had been in use in African American vernacular in its sense of political engagement and political awareness for perhaps a century by then.

Two years into the Great Depression, the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case involved 9 black teenage migrant workers – the youngest being 13- who had jumped a freight train in order to look for work and who were falsely accused of raping 2 white women. The sentence for black men raping white women in Alabama at that time was death, and in the rushed trials that were accompanied by baying lynch mobs, all but the youngest were handed the death sentence.

The NAACP and others campaigned against the miscarriage of justice and forced retrials, but the impact on the youths’ lives was devastating.

Lead Belly had met the men and wrote the song in order to warn other black people to “stay woke”, as he puts it in the Smithsonian recording. And his political engagement and anti-racism had a class consciousness to it too, as shown in his song Bourgeois Blues, which he wrote about the racism he faced on a visit to Washington to record for the Library of Congress’s folk collection. Lead Belly’s cry for change addresses poor blacks and poor whites alike. His commentary had a class as well as a race awareness.

“Home of the brave, land of the free

I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie”.

In contemporary mainstream commentary race and class have been separated in a strange way. To many commentators, class is something that it seems only applies to whites. We are used to the media using the phrase “white working class”, and we are used to the implied disparagement for assumed reactionary views that are projected onto that group. But those same commentators are blind to the effects of class on black people and other groups. We hear of “black communities” and “community leaders”, but no class division in those communities, as if only the white population is affected by class.

We in the ACN are very clear that our class, the working class, is made of people who are black, white, gay, straight, trans, cis, Asian, disabled, and of all genders. What binds us together is the experience of the effects of class under capitalism. All working class people have to sell our labour to live, and we all have our surplus value appropriated. We are all, in Lead Belly’s words, “mistreated by the bourgeoisie”.

We cannot ignore the other oppressions that people face, and we must ensure the revolutionary movement listens to all the voices of our class. But we must use the power of those voices to draw attention to the economic injustices of capitalism, and the environmental destruction it is doing, felt for longest in the Global South. And we must not allow the class analysis with which we examine those injustices to be knocked off the agenda by the liberal establishment.

Lead Belly knew anti racism and class consciousness were stronger together. So when we take up the magnificent Kathy Burke’s war cry, “I’d rather be woke than an ignorant twat”, we join with Lead Belly in forging that awareness in the fire of class consciousness.

By Duncan Dundonald