meaning of the star spangled banner song

Significantly, he was also a slave holder. The American flag flying over Fort McHenry, illustrating Francis Scott Key’s ‘The Star Spangled Banner’.įrancis Scott Key was many things: a poet, lawyer and author. It wasn’t until 1931 that it was adopted as the official US anthem. The two were put together and it became a drinking song.

And now we do it under the guise of ’legacy.’”Īround 40 years earlier, British composer and early musicologist John Stafford Smith wrote a tune called ‘The Anacreontic Song’. We do it first because we knew what we were doing, and we wanted to be sexist and racist. “And so, I do side with the people who say that we should rethink this as the national anthem, because this is about the deep-seated legacy of slavery and white supremacy in America, where we do things over and over and over again that are a slap in the face of people of colour and women. But then there are these young people who say that America needs to live up to its real creed. He says: “The 53-year-old in me says, we can’t change things that have existed forever. Speaking to Parker, historian and scholar Daniel E.

President Obama supported Kaepernick’s right to protest, saying it was his ‘constitutional right’ to stay seated.Īn article by Yahoo Music’s Editor in Chief, Lyndsey Parker, asks if it’s time to adopt an anthem with a “more inclusive message”. Four years ago, San Francisco 49’ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick famously refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem. One American student recently refused to sing it at her virtual graduation ceremony, instead performing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, often referred to as the ‘Black national anthem’.

Meaning of the star spangled banner song