Puzzle #15: Agitate, Agitate, Agitate!

This puzzle commemorates Black History Month and was inspired by the recent newsworthy mentions of the late, great Frederick Douglass. The title also refers to a quote by Douglass, which was his reply to a young black man who asked him for advice about starting out in the world.

The density of the theme presented a bit of a challenge with regard to filling the grid cleanly, with the HYPH/YODEL/OPPOSE section being the trickiest. BORGE and ROSEY might be tough for younger solvers, but hopefully the crossings made them gettable and will lead them to YouTube. Borge’s “Phonetic Punctuation” is a personal favorite.

Astute solvers will notice the duplication of NAME and RIGHT in the grid and the clues, which I generally try to avoid. I did alter the clues for OBI to avoid a WAR dupe and RARE to avoid a DONE dupe. There’s no hard and fast rule about this, and I feel like dupes within the grid itself are a much bigger issue.