National Anthem
Just a month after the British had burned the White House during the height of the War of 1812, Key was aboard a British vessel negotiating the release of a friend who was being held prisoner. During Key’s time aboard the vessel, the British commenced an attack on Fort McHenry, and the pair was not allowed to leave. So Key and his friend watched from the ship as the British bombarded Fort McHenry.
There are historians (notably Robin Blackburn, author of The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, and Alan Taylor, author of “American Blacks in the War of 1812”), who have indeed read the stanza as glorying in the Americans’ defeat of the Corps of Colonial Marines, one of two units of black slaves recruited between 1808 and 1816 to fight for the British on the promise of gaining their freedom. Like so many of his compatriots, Francis Scott Key, the wealthy American lawyer who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the wake of the Battle of Fort McHenry on 14 September 1814, was a slaveholder who believed blacks to be “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.” It goes without saying that Key did not have the enslaved black population of America in mind when he penned the words “land of the free.” It would be logical to assume, as well, that he might have harbored a special resentment toward African Americans who fought against the United States on behalf of the King.
| Lyrics | Definitions |
| And where is that band who so vauntingly swore | where is that flag who boasted and praised |
| That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion | The widespread destruction of war and confusion |
| A home and a country should leave us no more | Not sure about this one whose home (Britain) should leave us no more or the (New Britain) |
| Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep’s pollution | The British army stunk up the place with their foul footsteps, but we used their blood to wash the place out. Kinda militaristic and barbaric, |
| No refuge could save the hireling and slave | Let’s break this down by definition:
Refuge – A condition of being safe or sheltered; Hireling – A person employed to undertake menial work Slave – A person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them A slave by definition is very different from a Hireling |
Claudette Colvin
Rosa Parks is well-known for her refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in Montgomery, Ala., in December 1955.
Claudette Colvin was just 15 when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. It was nine months before Rosa Parks’ act of defiance in 1955. But Parks’ civil rights protest did have a precedent: Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, a student at a black high school in Montgomery, had refused to move from her bus seat nine months earlier. However, Colvin is not nearly as well-known, and certainly not as celebrated, as Parks.
“[The bus driver said], ‘Give me those seats,’” Colvin recalled. “Three of the girls got up and moved. But I remained seated.”
Colvin said she drew her strength from African-American abolitionists she had just learned about in school.
Who are the Americans
Let’s be clear; folks came to this place called New Britain raped, plundered and killed the inhabitant (Native Individuals) and claimed property. Then the grandfathers of the new land now known as America came and tried kill some of the people who left Britain, they lost and went back home but not without maintaining a great deal of authority and huge percentage tax of the dollars made here in this new land. For example – the Boston Tea Party happened as a result of “taxation without representation”, yet the cause is more complex than that. The American colonists believed Britain was unfairly taxing them to pay for expenses incurred during the French and Indian War. Additionally, colonists believed Parliament did not have the right to tax them because the American colonies were not represented in Parliament.
With a that said it still amazes me that black folk think this is their land and they have any rights to anything other than what is not needed by the folks who own “…this land is NOT your land.” We still perpetuate the Rosa Parks story as if Claudette never existed. Which brings me to another point, the same way we dismiss Claudette who was too black, too pregnant and not married enough – we embrace this behavior today in 2016 as the commenter asked Cornell, “why don’t you use 2016” – well there is it. We still look down of folks who have not come out of the projects; we shun folks who are not part of our cults, and we even shut our family members out when folks of another seem to embrace us.
Last note: If your new found friendship with an elitist group embraces you if they are “true”, they will embrace all of you, your illegitimate brother and sisters, jail-bound nephews, drug addicted aunts and uncles, holier than thou religious freaks, and the “plano” simple family member who could care less about degrees and dollars! But you see that won’t happen especially when #office and #wealth become the gods of a people, and the most unworthy and unfit most aspire to the former, and fraud becomes the highway to the latter, the land will reek with falsehood and sweat #lies and chicane. (Albert Pike)
WAKE UP!
Sources:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/before-rosa-parks-another-woman-defied-segregation/
http://thewhitedsepulchre.blogspot.com
