The NFL and the other anthem
The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing” have very few things in common, other than both being difficult to sing. Yet both hymns uniquely shout America.
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem, speaks of and celebrates a fake, false and idealized America whose flag survived a Fort McHenry assault in the War of 1812. “Lift Every Voice and Sing”— often referred to as the Black national anthem — pays tribute to the Black people whose thankless, uncompensated — and later continuously under-compensated — toil propped up America with it’s illgotten gains and “chastening rod.”
In “Lift Every Voice,” Black Lives Matter. In “The Star-Spangled Banner,” they do not.
Much has been written about the national anthem of late. As a protest against police brutality, San Francisco 49ers Black quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled on one knee as the national anthem played during the start of NFL games in 2015 and 2016. Blackballed, he has not worked in the NFL since.
But in the wake of the police actions that caused the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis this year, sweeping anti-racism reforms captivate America. Now, the NFL commissioner has apologized for “not listening” to Black players, but did not mention the much-maligned Mr. Kaepernick. And the league announced that it will play both anthems, the black one first, at the start of every Week 1 game this season.
Of course, when white slaveholder Francis Scott Key wrote his patriotic anthem there was no NFL. But the young United States of America had withstood a British assault on the fort at Baltimore harbor, and the 35 year-old marked the carnage in verse, first as “The Defense of Fort McHenry.”
Peonage, Black Codes and Jim Crow had viciously descended from chattel slavery in 1899 when African American James Weldon Johnson wrote the Black national anthem as a poem, later set to music by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, in 1905. The song is a first-person plural autobiographical opera that documents the tragic — nonetheless hopeful — life journey assigned to Black Americans by white Americans in service of the wealth and comfort of white people. “Lift Every Voice” challenges African Americans to “march on ’til victory is won.”
Born in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1871, Johnson was the older son in an immigrant black family from the Bahamas. After graduating from Atlanta University in 1894, returning home to teach at his alma mater Stafford Prep School and becoming principal, as well as the first Black person to take and pass the Florida bar exam, his career as educator, poet, impresario, writer and activist was launched. He and his brother headed for New York City and the great white way ... literally. Gifted in musical theater, the brothers Johnson found success on Broadway in 1901.
Political advocacy for Theodore Roosevelt landed Johnson diplomatic posts as consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua from 1906 to 1913. When he returned to New York, he and his composer brother were the toast of the early
Harlem Renaissance. Johnson encouraged other African American artists, writers and musicians, seeking publishers and outlets for their creations.
More profoundly, in 1920 he became the first Black head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, previously under whites-only leadership since its 1909 formation. His big crusades were against the American lynching epidemic and for equal justice for Black citizens.
He had already written “Lift Every Voice” in tribute to Booker T. Washington; 500 Stafford School pupils first performed the composition as a recited poem 120 years ago for the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. In 1919 the NAACP pronounced the song its anthem.
The young Maryland aristocrat Francis Scott Key had been dining with the enemy on a British ship in Baltimore Harbor when the British foes transferred him to an American ship to watch them bomb Fort McHenry on the night/morning of Sept. 14-15, 1814. When the dawn broke and the deluge of rain and rockets subsided, America’s flag of stars and stripes was visible enough above the fort to inspire the poem that was written within days and published as a song to be sung to an existing tune that is familiar to Americans 216 years later.
In 1931 Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the hymn America’s national anthem.
Following his graduation from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Key became an attorney. President Andrew Jackson appointed him U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He prospered as a lawyer and heir to a fortune built on the backs of Black plantation slavery.
He was a white supremacist, who, as a member of the American Colonization Society, believed that free — even nativeborn — Black people should leave the America they helped build and go colonize in west Africa.
Even though he would go on to represent in court both slaves seeking freedom and “owners” of runaway slaves, he had contempt for abolitionists and Colonial Marines — former American slaves who fought for the British, who in turn freed them during the war of 1812.
In the virtually unheard of third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Key hatefully denigrates, mocks — and rejoices in the death of — those freedom seekers: “Their blood has washed out their foul footstep’s pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.”
Whether Mr. Kaepernick, who graduated high school with perfect grades, knew of that part of the anthem, he clearly is on the side of the angels.
I stand with those who go a step further. Congress should repeal the anthem that celebrates the death of brave freedom-loving slaves. Not waiting for courageous legislative action meanwhile, no stadium should again feature the “The Star Spangled Banner.”