How can an American not hear without national pride the ascending melody and stirring words, "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave," with which each verse closes? If your great-grandparents were slaves in the "land of the free," you may hear those words differently. Although The Star-Spangled Banner did not become our national anthem until 1931, Francis Scott Key wrote his stirring words about "the land of the free and the home of the brave" in 1814, when slavery was yet part of our nation. Key owned slaves himself, black people who were in the land of the free but not free themselves.
Key alluded to slaves, without irony, in the third verse, which only pedants know. I'll quote it in its entirety:
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.
Who are the "hirelings and slaves" of Key's verse? According to Robin Blackburn, a British socialist historian, the slaves of Key's verse are American slaves. The British army had freed the American slaves that it encountered, some of whom joined the British army to do battle with the nation that had enslaved them. Key's verses about "the land of the free" ignored the unfree in America, and mocked those that sought the same freedoms that Key himself, as a white slaveowner, enjoyed.
Every American should know Yankee Doodle, the most prominent song of our nation's independence. Every American should know the first verse of The Star-Spangled Banner and the coldly ironic story behind the other verses. There's a third patriotic song that every American should know. It's called Lift Every Voice and Sing. James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) wrote the words in 1899 and his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954) set it to music in 1905. It begins with these three lines:
Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Unlike the invocation of immediate peril in La Marseillaise, or the florid description of the battle in The Star-Spangled Banner, James Johnson's verse alludes only subtly to the slavery era:
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
The college classmate from whom I first heard the song many years ago said it was the black national anthem, and in fact the NAACP had so designated it in 1919. As an anthem it's a remarkable statement of hope. It's nearly as remarkable for what it doesn't say: it doesn't wish destruction on anyone, and it doesn't, unlike Key's song, celebrate freedoms that more than half of Key's compatriots couldn't enjoy.
Juneteenth is a fine day to celebrate the end of slavery and to remember what Francis Scott Key was too oblivious to see.
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