“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”
Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,”
The California chapter of the NAACP has a solution for the NFL take-a-knee flap: Get rid of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The organization is urging Congress to jettison the national anthem after passing a resolution at its Oct. 26-29 state conference describing the tune as “one of the most racist, pro-slavery, anti-black songs in the American lexicon.”
A second resolution was passed in support of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, a leader of last season’s protests during the national anthem.
“We owe a lot of it to Kaepernick,” California NAACP President Alice Huffman told the Sacramento Bee. “I think all this controversy about the knee will go away once the song is removed.”
The NFL kneeling began as a protest against the deaths of black men at the hands of police, not the lyrics of the national anthem, and has since grown to encompass social-justice issues in general.
Those who argue the song is racist point to a rarely sung and little-known line in the third verse that says, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.”
