Their struggle speaks to the concept of double consciousness, described by W.E.B. In 1959, at the Pan Am Games, Rose Robinson is believed to have been the first black athlete to refuse to stand for the national anthem.
At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos famously held up their fists during the national anthem. Kaepernick and Robinson aren’t anomalies for tackling the anthem’s key role in the reconciliation of what it means to be black and American. No, that isn’t a Colin Kaepernick quote - Jackie Robinson said those words in his 1972 autobiography. I know that I am a black man in a white world." A famous black athlete once said, "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. There’s also the phrase “the land of the free”: Key wrote the poem that would eventually become the national anthem in 1814, during a time when black Americans were not free slavery ended in 1865, making it even clearer that this anthem was written to celebrate the land of the free - white Americans.
Then there’s the American anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was written by a slave-owning Washington lawyer, Francis Scott Key, who referred to African-Americans as “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.” In the national anthem’s lesser known third stanza, he wrote: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.” In 2009, when the University of Mississippi attempted to stop playing another Dixie-related song, “From Dixie With Love,” due to fans chanting “the South will rise again” as it played, a group of Ku Klux Klan members responded by holding a rally.
Still, letting go of the Southern anthem hasn’t been supported by everyone. It’s only been during the past few years that high schools and colleges in the South have started to reconsider their relationship with the song.
0 kommentar(er)
