Current Affairs

“There’s an old adage ‘He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it.’ But what’s missing in that phrase is that there are the people who are in charge of keeping your history. And they can make you forget it. They can keep it from you. And then you’re doomed to repeat something that they want you to repeat.” — Samuel JamesSamuel James is a musician and storyteller from Portland, Maine, who specializes in blues and roots music. Samuel has a deep knowledge of American musical history and recently wrote a column in the Mainer magazine about the origins of the phrase “stay woke,” first heard on a Lead Belly record about the Scottsboro Boys. He shows that when we see attacks on “wokeness” like Ron DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act,” we should remember that it’s “an old, Black phrase being weaponized against the very people who created it.”Today, Samuel joins to explain how listening to the words of early 20th century Black songs provides critical context for understanding America today. From commentary on the prison sy