O Say Can You See That Francis Scott Key Was a Racist?
by John Lawrence
When Francis Scott Key wrote the "National Anthem," he was a slave holding lawyer from an old Maryland plantation family who spent his life in court fighting against abolitionists. The third stanza of his song written aboard a British ship mentions "slaves and hirelings," a reference to the fact that escaped and emancipated slaves fought on the side of the British in the War of 1812. The British promised refuge to any enslaved Black people who escaped their enslavers, raising fears among White Americans of a large-scale revolt. The final provocation was that men who escaped their bonds of slavery were welcome to join the British Corps of Colonial Marines in exchange for land after their service. As many as 4,000 people, mostly from Virginia and Maryland, escaped. They were later given land in in Trinidad and Tobago to resettle with their families. Their descendants, called “Merikins,” still live there today.
Who else fought on the side of the British and likely prevented Canada from being annexed to the US? Indians. They were later abandoned by the British, and, with the death of Tecumseh, the Indians' hopes for a confederation were largely dashed. Hero of the war, Andrew Jackson, later as President presided over the "Indian removal" as Indians were forced off their traditional lands onto the Trail of Tears. At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida–land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. By the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and sometimes deadly journey is known as the Trail of Tears.
Oppressed people of the young nation fought in a war that was fought over British "impressment", a practice of the British who captured American seamen and made them work on British ships. This practice was actually ended before the war started, but due to the fact that transatlantic communications took weeks, the war was started before word was received that impressment had been ended.
The third stanza of The Star Spangled Banner contains the words
"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."
Many rewrite the last line as "the land of the oppressed and the home of the slave." When he wrote the poem that would, in 1931, become the national anthem and proclaim our nation “the land of the free,” Key not only profited from slaves, he harbored racist conceptions of American citizenship and human potential. Africans in America, he said, were: “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.”
So was Colin Kaepernick right? Were Tommie Smith and John Carlos right when they raised their fists on the victory stand in the 1968 Olympics during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner? Did they even know about Key's racist past at that point? Recently, Gwen Berry, a contender for a medal at the Summer Olympics this year in Tokyo, has already raised her fist on a medal podium at a competition, and at the selection meet for the U.S. Olympic track team she turned away as the national anthem was played, drawing worldwide attention. When you consider Francis Scott Key's life of virulent racism, it's not hard to understand why.
The Smithsonian magazine reported:
Ironically, while Key was composing the line "O'er the land of the free," it is likely that black slaves were trying to reach British ships in Baltimore Harbor. They knew that they were far more likely to find freedom and liberty under the Union Jack than they were under the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Additionally, Key used his office as the District Attorney for the City of Washington from 1833 to 1840 to defend slavery, attacking the abolitionist movement in several high-profile cases.
In the mid-1830s, the movement was gaining momentum and with it came increased violence, particularly from pro-slavery mobs attacking free blacks and white abolitionists, and other methods to silence the growing cries for abolition. In a House of Representatives and United States Senate inundated with petitions from abolitionists calling for the ending or restriction of slavery, pro-slavery Congressmen looked for a way to suppress the voices of abolitionists.
In the same year, shortly after a race riot in Washington, D.C. when an angry white mob set upon a well-known free black restaurant owner, Key likewise sought to crack down on the free speech of abolitionists he believed were riling things up in the city. Key prosecuted a New York doctor living in Georgetown for possessing abolitionist pamphlets.
In the resulting case, U.S. v. Reuben Crandall, Key made national headlines by asking whether the property rights of slaveholders outweighed the free speech rights of those arguing for slavery’s abolishment. Key hoped to silence abolitionists, who, he charged, wished to “associate and amalgamate with the negro.”
Though Crandall’s offense was nothing more than possessing abolitionist literature, Key felt that abolitionists’ free speech rights were so dangerous that he sought, unsuccessfully, to have Crandall hanged.
During the Andrew Jackson administration, Key served as the district attorney for Washington, D.C., where he spent much of his time shoring up enslavers’ power. He strictly enforced slave laws and prosecuted abolitionists who passed out pamphlets mocking his jurisdiction as the “land of the free, home of the oppressed.” So is it fitting and proper to stand during the National Anthem when it's composer was a virulent racist? The Star Spangled Banner, although written in 1814 didn't become the National Anthem till 1931, over 100 years later primarily due to the efforts of the Daughters of the Confederacy. “The elevation of the banner from popular song to official national anthem was a neo-Confederate political victory, and it was celebrated as such,” according to Jefferson Morley, author of “Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835. “When supporters threw a victory parade in Baltimore in June 1931, the march was led by a color guard hoisting the Confederate flag.”
American history needs to be reexamined in the light of the atrocities perpetrated on African Americans and native American peoples. We can honor the lofty rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, but we must remember at the same time that its author, Thomas Jefferson, was the owner of 175 slaves and the father of some of them. The composer who wrote the inspirational words of the Star Spangle Banner also spent his life as a lawyer defending white supremacy and fighting against the abolition of slavery.
