What Colin Kaepernick Taught Me

Before my fraternity brother, San-Francisco 49er Quarterback Colin Kaepernick took his brave stance and decided not to stand for the playing of the Star Spangled Banner ,because of the way Black people are being treated in this country at present...I and most people ,Black or White never knew much about the song's author, Francis Scott Key...

I knew what most people ,Black and white are taught in school...Francis Scott Key wrote the song known as our National Anthem while on a boat, observing a terrific battle during the war of 1812...

Here is some things I did and did not know...

He was a lawyer (I knew that), but also a slaveowner (I did not know that).He owned about six or seven slaves!

• As a prosecuting Attorney in Washington D.C. ,Francis Scott Key used to prosecute abolitionists(people who protested slavery) in court for helping enslaved blacks run north to freedom. I didn't know that!

• During closing arguments in a case against Dr. Reuben Crandall, a white man charged with sedition for distributing anti-slavery pamphlets, This same Francis Scott Key was quoted as saying:

"Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?"

• Toward the end of making America for whites only, Francis Scott Key was a member of the American Colonization Society, a group committed to sending (Only) free Blacks back to Africa.

• Most Americans are indoctrinated from childhood to sing the first verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner"; two of the more famous renditions of the song were sung by the late black singers Marvin Gaye and Whitney Houston.


But both Marvin Gaye and Whitney Houston may have declined had they known about verse three (because I sure did not, until recently), which boasts of killing slaves who joined ranks with the British during the War of 1812 to secure their freedom, as follows:

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 wash'd out their foul footstep's 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.

It is clear, then, that the "free" that Francis Scott Key spoke of was not Black People...

So the author of the Star Spangled Banner was a Slave Owner and a White Supremacist... When you look at the truth of the matter..It does seem pretty silly for a conscious African-American to be singing a song written by a man who didn't think they were human or equal to his race....and who owned some of their ancestors...

This song didn't become our National Anthem until 1916...by the executive order of President Woodrow Wilson...Another card carrying White Supremicist....

Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner and history professor by trade, was a vile racist who rolled back gains of blacks in the civil service system and lauded the wickedly racist film "The Birth of a Nation," one that made blacks the villains in a post-Reconstruction South and the Ku Klux Klan the heroic figures who saved white women from lustful black men, as "writing history with lightning."

Congress, in 1931, formally enacted Woodrow Wilson's order into law, which was signed by then-President Herbert Hoover.

So, it is clear that Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and a man whom I and countless other Americans of all races were brainwashed into believing was a hero, was nothing of the sort; He was a slaveholding racist.

Some people will argue that Francis Scott Key was just a "man of his times"  So was John Brown....and he fought against slavery! 

Colin Kaepernick's protest has nothing to do with all of this...I'm doubtful that even he knows the sordid history of Francis Scott Key...But his protest made me do something that millions of Americans can do with a single keystroke..but seldom do...Fact check.