Some groups objected strongly to the planned inclusion of the Black National Anthem in the pregame ceremonies of the recent Super Bowl. While I feel no need for that gratuitous act of the Super Bowl Committee, I find this controversy ironic. See the following:
Below is a copy of a letter to the local newspaper editor I wrote several years ago.
Dear Editor,
I write to complain about your description of Francis Scott Key in your May 4, 2019 editorial, “Kate Smith questions.” You specify that Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” owned slaves for a time and later freed them, and you also note that as an attorney, he represented both runaway slaves and “owners who were trying to recover their human property.” You also indicated that Key referred to blacks as an “inferior race of people” and backed efforts to send freed slaves to Africa. Then you asked, as a means of putting Kate Smith’s racist songs in context, “Does that mean we should stop playing his song as a national anthem?”
Unfortunately, you failed to mention a stronger reason not to regard the Star Spangled Banner as the national anthem—its third verse, which gloats over the fact that some of the ex-slaves fighting for the British and their freedom died in the battle at Fort McHenry. Francis Scott Key was so pleased with the deaths of the ex-slaves that he penned the third verse, the first three lines of which refer to the slaves who took advantage of the war to escape, but “their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.” His words rejoiced that there was “no refuge” for the “hireling and slave.”
These escaped slaves, these Colonial Marines, were true heroes as they fought not only for their freedom but for that of all American slaves. We should be praising them. The national anthem mocks them.
As blacks and white liberals denounced Jim Crow laws and lynching, the campaign for “The Star-Spangled Banner” became a way to wrap the ideology of the Confederacy in the red, white, and blue bunting of American patriotism.
In the 1920s, pacifists, liberals, and African Americans fought against elevating Key’s song because they objected to its militaristic and racist overtones. Confederate sympathizers responded by taking their cause to Congress, which in 1931 passed and signed by President Hoover, making the song the national anthem confirming President Wilson’s presidential order.
I include the third verse below.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave
In 1927, poet James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosamund composed a song to commemorate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, called “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The song’s popularity among African Americans made it known as the “Negro national anthem.” Johnson, also an NAACP activist, denied there was anything in his song to conflict with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But he couldn’t resist adding that “Banner” was “difficult to sing,” and that “its sentiments are boastful and bloodthirsty.”