Streeter: Why I broke up with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’

About a decade ago, I, a proud Baltimore girl, broke up with another Charm City native: the national anthem.

We have yet to make up.

That break-up, over the complicated racial history of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” feels even more profound to me as a descendant of enslaved people as we approach America’s 250th anniversary.

Does that star-studded symbol of freedom indeed wave for me, or if I look too hard will I find lots of asterisks and fine print embroidered in its red, white and blue threads?

That question is particularly poignant in Baltimore, a city that has made both the anthem and its author, Francis Scott Key, part of its personality.

The very news publication this column appears in is a reference to the song. The Francis Scott Key Bridge was named for him. And if you drive along Key Highway on the way to Fort McHenry, near where the song was written, you’ll see its opening words — “O say, can you see” — in colorful bright lettering on the side of the American Visionary Art Museum.

It’s like running into an ex you can’t avoid. But I’ve tried, declining invitations to sing it as a featured performer at sporting events and only yelling the “O!” during Orioles games before going back to my overpriced pretzel.

My avoidance began in 2016, when football player Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem as a protest against police brutality brought greater scrutiny to the song’s hypocrisy. It was written by a slaveholder whose third verse reminded enslaved people and free Blacks that their fate was terror and death for assisting the British army’s efforts in the War of 1812.

Not something you’d wear on a T-shirt, huh?

“In Maryland, there’s a cultural identity connected to the anthem and Fort McHenry, because that history does exist,” said Robert T. Parker, chief curator and director of interpretation, visitor experience and education at Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture.

“We can’t negate that history, but I think this is an opportunity for us to talk about it. The notion of freedom attached to that song is a reckoning and a reconciliation,” he said. “It’s a duality we have to live with every day.”

Baltimore native Kim F. Hall, professor of Africana studies and English at New York’s Barnard College, grew up going to Fort McHenry on field trips but remembers nothing about slavery or any impact people who look like her played in the story of the national anthem.

“The great contradiction at the heart of the U.S. story is that the country wants to present itself to the world as an icon of human freedom and liberty, while ignoring that the US colonies were built on forced and enslaved labor as well as on indigenous genocide,” she wrote me.

I consider myself pretty well-educated, so I was embarrassed that it took Kaepernick’s protest to consider the disconnect between the anthem’s triumphant bombast, which I dug, and its celebration of my ancestors’ suffering.

This begs the larger question of how Black people and other marginalized groups should encounter the freedoms the song touts that were never meant to accommodate us. The systems it reveres prefer that we internalize our grievances silently, lest we cry on the fireworks. That ain’t festive.

Johns Hopkins professor and author Martha S. Jones penned a Philadelphia Inquirer essay in 2022 about her complicated feelings when encountering the replica of the flag at Fort McHenry that inspired Key’s words.

“Like some other Black Americans, I live with a sense that the American flag might not be mine, that too often it stands for a patriotism rooted in exclusion rather than in hope for the inclusive, interracial democracy that my forebears struggled for,” she wrote. “That I struggle for today.”

It’s a struggle we all bear in this state where Key’s brother-in-law Roger Taney wrote the Supreme Court decision that meant to bar Black people, free or otherwise, from legal rights.

But we kept on believing in this place, literally building the country, defending it on domestic and foreign shores “and then coming home to be lynched,” Parker said. “Black folks felt a sense of ‘I have fought for the idea of freedom, yet freedom is limited to me.’”

When I think about the members of my family who served in the military and dedicated their lives to this country as civilians and in office, I want to scream. You want to believe those bad old days are in the past, but the U.S. defense secretary is currently blocking Black people and women from promotions.

As maddening as this is, Parker thinks it’s possible to reflect on the anthem and its complexities without completely rejecting it. “It’s really about how we challenge what the American ideal of freedom truly is,” he explained. “It’s different for different communities. Freedom isn’t a moment. It’s a movement.”

He said that it’s helpful to juxtapose Key’s lyrics against the words of one of his contemporaries: freed slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was owned by Key’s wife’s family. The Marylander’s famous 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” pondered why he was invited in the first place.

“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” Douglass asked. “And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?”

In other words, he was asking why he should be touting the joys of a freedom that didn’t apply to him. It’s kinda like singing a song about liberty written by a guy who wanted your people to be in chains forever.

Perhaps then, it’s best for us, like Douglass, to keep asking questions. Our silence makes racists happy. And I never, ever want to do that.

Let’s insist on amplifying the truths of how we’re part of this story. Hall informed me about Grace Wisher, a young, free Black apprentice to seamstress Mary Pickersgill, who sewed the original star-spangled flag. That means when Key wrote those words wishing pain on Black people, the very flag he sought inspiration from was partially created by the small, nimble hands of one.

I wonder if that would have surprised him? Angered him? Changed his mind?

Whatever Key’s response, it’s a proud truth that might give me something to sing about.