Historians consider legacy of Key, say bridge should be renamed
The question Wednesday night was not whether Francis Scott Key was a good man or a bad man.
A nearly three-hour panel discussion at St. John’s College examined the contributions, controversies and contradictions surrounding Key, a St. John’s graduate and lawyer whose overnight account of the 1814 Battle of Baltimore would become the United States’ national anthem.
Though the event had been planned for months, academic leaders acknowledged that the topic gained a new level of interest following the recent collapse of Maryland’s Key Bridge into the Patapsco River.
In the weeks after the tragedy, which killed six Hispanic workers, civil rights leaders across the state have proposed changing the name of the 1.6-mile bridge, citing Key’s status as a slave owner and his belief that Black Americans were “a distinct and inferior race.”
As a replacement, the Caucus of African American Leaders has proposed the structure be named after Parren J. Mitchell, the first Black Marylander elected to Congress and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Wednesday’s panel, consisting of three historians whose work has intersected with Key through a biography, an examination of early legal battles for slaves’ freedom and a cultural history of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was asked to address the issue at the end of the event.
All three participants — Marc Leepson, Dr. Mark Clague and William Thomas III — supported the idea of a new name, saying Maryland has a unique opportunity to modernize an important symbol, one of its gateways, by reflecting the state’s ambitions and hopes.
Thomas, a history professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said that symbolically the name has “a great deal of meaning both for the society we are and the society we want to be.”
Carl Snowden, convenor of the Caucus of African American Leaders and a guiding force in the renaming campaign, asked the panelists about the effort.
He called the support of the “three renowned scholars … a pleasant surprise.”
Wednesday’s event was part of an ongoing effort by the nation’s third-oldest college to examine its own ties to slavery and the colonialism that irrevocably displaced the country’s Indigenous people.
“It’s a discomfort we must face,” Nora Demleitner, St. John’s president, said in opening remarks.
Since 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, St. John’s has undergone this reflective audit through its College History Task Force, a collection of tutors, faculty, students and alumni. Together, the group is working to build a report on the 16 men for whom the Annapolis campus’ oldest buildings are named. The auditorium in which Wednesday’s panel took place, for instance, is named after Key and was dedicated in 1959 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said at the time that Key was “enshrined in the hearts, of course, of all Americans.”
Coming from several areas of focus, each panelist had encountered and explored Key in different contexts, which lent itself to a wide-ranging discussion on his merits, his faults and his relevance in modern society.
Leepson, a journalist, historian and the author of “What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life,” said he did not know much about Key beyond his Baltimore poem. When he looked to learn more, he discovered the most recent biography had been written in 1937. So, as he searched for the subject of his next book, he decided to examine the man himself.
The project forced Leepson to consider the entirety of Key, more than the surface-level heroism often relayed in early education. He learned, for instance, of Key’s avid support for colonization, an effort also endorsed by President Abraham Lincoln to relocate free African Americans to colonies outside the continent. Of course, there was also his and his family’s slaveholding in Frederick and the Eastern Shore to survey — Key’s fatherin-law, the continental congressman Edward Lloyd IV, was among the largest slave owners in Maryland.
“It’s one thing to know he enslaved people,” Leepson said. “It’s another to read a letter about an 8-year-old girl who would ‘be great for Mom’s kitchen.’”
Thomas came across Key in his research of enslaved people who fought in court for their emancipation. Explored in his book, “A Question of Freedom,” some of these battles took place as early as the 1780s and Key was one of the lawyers who represented them.
Though Thomas said Key was “zealous” in his work with Black clients, taking their cases pro bono, he admitted he had to quickly rid himself of the idea that Key was a “heroic attorney.” In his life, Key had called slavery a violation of natural law while also engaging in the practice. He never favored abolition or made any tangible sacrifice toward emancipation. In fact, he also represented slaveowners in court, for a fee.
“I’ve been both inspired and deeply troubled by this history,” Thomas said.
The third panelist Clague, a professor of musicology and American culture at the University of Michigan School of Music, said his journey with Key began with Jimi Hendrix.
The guitarist’s famed rendition of the national anthem at Woodstock rocked Clague’s “simplistic, commercial, idealistic relationship” with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In his ode to the counterculture of the day, Hendrix disassociated from the traditional melody, transforming the song into what Clague described as an optimistic expression — optimism that the country’s young people could transform the country just as he had transformed its national anthem.
That performance, the professor said, made him want to explore the anthem deeper and with it, his own relationship to America. His final product, the cultural history “O Say Can You Hear?” was released in 2022.
Moderator Chanel Johnson, the executive director of the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis and the Maryland Commission
on African American History and Culture, offered questions to each historian about Key’s understanding of freedom and the importance of revisiting classical interpretations of history.
Discussing a paradox for the man who called the United States “the land of the free,” Leepson said that when you talk about the republic, “you can’t avoid slavery.” Clague additionally recited a portion of the third verse of the national anthem that references slavery: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/ From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.”
The most cynical interpretation, he said, suggests Key was writing from an entirely white perspective. Without consideration of other races, Key may have been describing America as a society of white slaves to King George.
The real meaning, however, has been lost to time.
“What did he really think?” Leepson said. “It’s not a question that has a true answer.”
The historians also responded to the efforts of St. John’s to compile and present its own part in the uglier sides of America’s past.
Clague said a more honest relationship with its history would open St. John’s up to more people and make it more welcoming to people of color.
Thomas, who cited the need for more stories from new voices, said teaching and researching the past, acknowledging what’s broken, allows the college and the community to move forward together.
“If we can repair our history … we can repair ourselves,” Thomas said.
Just before 10 p.m., the final question presented to the panel came from a St. John’s student, who challenged the idea of renaming the bridge. He said a new name would only be symbolic, something to satisfy a “DEI quota” if leaders did not also address the power structures of the past and present.
Clague said the potential renaming of the bridge would not “end the story” and said reform is “continuous work.”
“All of these things are part of the solution, and we have to do them all,” he said.