Below is a letter to the editor of the local newspaper that I wrote a month ago. It was published today.
Dear Editor,
I write to complain about your description of Francis Scott Key in your editorial on May 4, 2019, “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 deaths of the ex-slaves 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 President Hoover signed the bill making the song the national anthem confirming President Wilson’s presidential order.