Colin Kaepernick and the Legacy of the Negro National Anthem<br />Well before then, however, black communities across the Jim Crow South were instead embracing the soaring, aspirational lyrics of “Lift Every Voice<br />and Sing” — otherwise known as the Negro National Anthem — which was sung in churches, at civic events and even in schools, where substituting the song for “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a quiet act of rebellion against the racist status quo.<br />The passage reads in part: “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.” Contemporary thinkers disagree on whether the word “slave” was used as a generic insult<br />that could be applied to people of any race or as a direct reference to African-Americans who joined the British side in the War of 1812.<br />They argued that Key should have described America as the “land of the free and home of the oppressed.”<br />The professional football player Colin Kaepernick appealed to<br />that same sense of injustice last year when he knelt during “The Star-Spangled Banner” to protest police violence against African-Americans.<br />Satirists pounced, lampooning the song with lyrics<br />that depicted a man who staggers home drunk and sleeps well past “the dawn’s early light” — that light through which Key had seen an American flag still flying above the fort that had repulsed the British invasion.<br />The lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key embraced the pop cultural tastes of his day when he wrote “The Star-Spangled<br />Banner” to commemorate an American victory over the British at Baltimore during the War of 1812.<br />By the late 1960s, many of us who had grown up black in an era when African-Americans were locked into Northern ghettos<br />and murdered in the South for seeking the right to vote registered our grievances by refusing to stand for the anthem at sporting events.
