Democrat criticizes Super Bowl crowd for not standing during Black National Anthem | The Hill
By: Sarah Fortinsky (The Hill)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
by Sarah Fortinsky - 02/12/24 1:01 PM ET
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) on Sunday criticized the Super Bowl crowd for not standing during the performance of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," widely known as the Black National Anthem.
"Very very few stood at Super Bowl for 'Lift Every Voice and Sing'. The Negro National Anthem," Cohen wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
"Not a pretty picture of Super Bowl crowd," he added.
This year marked the second time the anthem was performed in an official capacity at the Super Bowl. The anthem was performed by Grammy-winner Andra Day, and Reba McEntire performed "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The Black National Anthem was originally written as a poem by former NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900. Last year, it was performed for the first time at a Super Bowl by Emmy-winner Sheryl Lee Ralph, following heightened scrutiny of the traditional national anthem's connection to race and slavery.
Cohen, who represents Memphis, Tenn., in Congress, defended his original statement in response to some criticism in the replies to his post.
"I stand for both," Cohen said, in response to an X user who said people should only stand for the traditional national anthem. "And in Memphis, most do."
Cohen responded to a different user who said the traditional national anthem "doesn't see color" and who criticized Democrats for "dividing this country with race wars."
"Well, I honor our national anthem and respect it as representing our country and in our pride in it," Cohen wrote. "However if you look at the history and some of the verbiage, it does relate to slavery and not in a questioning manner."
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Seems like America already had a national anthem.
Do we really need two or more?
I want one for the 83% Italian and 17% other (according to Ancestry.com)
Yes. In today's world, the US is not a melting pot where diversity unites into common goals. Anything less than recognition of every diverse group is considered discrimination.
Consider it kind of like gender. Until recently, the majority of the world was content with two - male and female.
These days, the number of genders is whatever one individual decides it is and everyone else has to agree or be deemed unfit for social interaction.
So, in order to truly be inclusive and not discriminate against any group in the US, it is probably best just to scrap all anthems before sporting events in order not to hurt anyone's feelings if they are not recognized as being a special segment of US population.
Or:
You are correct.
Personally, I refuse to engage in such buffoonery.
Great, now the buffoons are going to want their own National Anthem.
If you are white and stand for the Black National Anthem isn't that cultural appropriation?
Someone had better get Cohen an updated leftist slide rule fast!
LMAO!!!!
That's a good one!
"Well, I honor our national anthem and respect it as representing our country and in our pride in it,"
If you honor OUR National Anthem, then what the hell are you doing trying to replace it?
"However if you look at the history and some of the verbiage, it does relate to slavery and not in a questioning manner."
If it would please His Honor, show us, in the text below, just exactly WHERE does it relate to slavery.
O! say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the Rockets' red glare, the Bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our Flag was still there;
O! say does that star-spangled Banner yet wave,
O'er the Land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream,
'Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
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.
O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand,
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation,
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n rescued land,
Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto—"In God is our Trust;"
And the star-spangled Banner in triumph shall wave,
O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Francis Scott Key may have owned slaves at some point--or (gasp!) knew someone who did. Off with his head!
Does that really matter? And to who?
People that see race every time they open their eyes.
My God, man, where have you been?
Didn't you get the memo that we are to judge every person in history by today's standards?
That any accomplishment is forever and irrevocably tainted by something else?
Maybe we should name NOTHING after ANY human--no song, star, school, product, holiday, street, park, city, county, town, or state to placate future generations. Not a single logo connected to anything human. Wouldn't want to get their panties in a wad.
I'm not too concerned with that. The idiots making that a big deal are half assed attempts anyway
Maybe we should name NOTHING after ANY human--
An AI national anthem!
It just seems that many liberals know a whole lot of things that are simply not true and spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convince us they are right.
What makes anyone think we can accurately judge historical figures by today's "standards" when the entire world was different then?
As a farm girl, AI refers to how cows were bred when we didn't have a bull in the field. LOL!
A lot of alcohol? Multiple concussions? Stroke? Mental deficiency? Delusional? Drugs? Inbreeding? Being liberal?
Honestly, outside of those, I can't think of a single valid reason to judge them by today's standards.
All were pretty good guesses, but I think you nailed it here.
Lets see how well you know history.
According to Stevenson University: At least three possible answers regarding why Key used the words slave and hireling in his poem. The first is that Key was a racist and was happy to see enslaved blacks in fear and the grave. The second is that Key was specifically referencing former enslaved Black who now fought against the US forces as part of Britain’s Colonial Marines. The third is that Key’s use of the words slave and hireling were simply a rhetorical device.
In today's world, who really gives a damn about that crap?
All hopped over something in existence for decades, only NOW is it magically a problem for a few disgruntled fools.
The Congresscritter can suck eggs.
The Corps of Colonial Marines played a significant role during the War of 1812 . These were two distinct British Marine units raised from former black slaves for service in the Americas , at the behest of Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane 1 2 . Let’s delve into their contributions:
First Corps (1808-1810) :
Second Corps (1814-1816) :
In summary, the Colonial Marines were a unique force that challenged societal norms and contributed significantly to British military efforts during the War of 1812.
These men were escaped slaves who were given their freedom by the British in return for fighting for the British. This is believed to be the meaning of the controversial passage written by Francis Scott Key. Note the location of one of the battles these troops fought at - Fort McHenry.
So they were traitors to America.
I dont know why you people are so hell bent on denying historical reality.
Words fail at times like this.
If you were an escaped slave would you go back into slavery to fight for America? Or would you accept freedom where you could find it?
These people didnt owe America a damned thing.
Then why reply?
A traitor is a traitor, and I know how much you usually hate them!
Please define traitor.
I dont know why you people are so hell bent on denying historical reality.
He's obviously calling troops who fight for King George slaves. It's plain as can be.
If you read this and think Keyes just suddenly switched from taunting the soldiers who swore to deprive Americans of a home and country to commenting on black slaves who weren't involved in the battle, there's really nothing that can be said.
Did YOU stand for the black national anthem?
nope
[deleted as taunting]
In today's world, who really gives a damn about that crap?
Racists who are trying to prove they are not racist?
That's what I figured.
The ugly reason ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ didn’t become our national anthem for a century
It was September of 1814. The British had sacked Washington and torched the White House. The conflict became known as the War of 1812, even though it was in its third year.
The British had also taken prisoners, including a popular doctor from Prince George’s County in Maryland. A friend of the doctor sailed on a ship flying a truce flag to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the Royal Navy.
The mission was successful; British commanders agreed to free the doctor. But while on the ship, the man — a 35-year-old lawyer named Francis Scott Key — overheard plans for a surprise attack on Baltimore. He and the doctor would not be allowed to leave until the attack was over.
That’s how Key ended up witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry while aboard a British ship. He couldn’t tell from his vantage point who had won or lost. But at dawn, he saw the American flag , 15 stars and 15 stripes at the time, still waving over the fort and was inspired to write a poem. Soon, it was set to the tune of an existing song.
That’s the short version of how “The Star-Spangled Banner” came to be.
The longer version — of both the song and the story of the man who wrote it — reveals not only why it has become controversial now, in this season of racial reckoning, football and presidential campaigning, but why it was too controversial to become the national anthem for more than a century after it was written.
First, a few things to know about the War of 1812: One of the main issues was the British practice of impressment — the forced conscription of American sailors to fight for the Royal Navy. Plus, the British promised refuge to any enslaved Black people who escaped their enslavers, raising fears among White Americans of a large-scale revolt. The final provocation was that men who escaped their bonds of slavery were welcome to join the British Corps of Colonial Marines in exchange for land after their service. As many as 4,000 people, mostly from Virginia and Maryland, escaped.
It’s important to know these things because “The Star-Spangled Banner,” originally called “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” has more than one verse. The second half of the third verse ends like this:
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.
These lyrics are a clear reference to the Colonial Marines, according to Jefferson Morley, author of “ Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 .” They are clearly meant to scorn and threaten the African Americans who took the British up on their offer, he wrote in a recent essay for The Washington Post. Key surely knew about the Colonial Marines, and it’s even possible he saw them among the contingent of British ships that sailed into Baltimore Harbor.
But Mark Clague, a musicologist at the University of Michigan and an expert on the anthem, disagrees. In 2016, he told the New York Times : “The reference to slaves is about the use, and in some sense the manipulation, of Black Americans to fight for the British, with the promise of freedom.” He also noted that Black people fought on the American side of the war as well.
Whether manipulation or not, the British kept their word to Colonial Marines after the war, refusing the United States’ demand that they be returned and providing them land in Trinidad and Tobago to resettle with their families. Their descendants, called “ Merikins ,” still live there today.
And even if these lyrics aren’t meant to be explicitly racist, Key clearly was. He descended from a wealthy plantation family and enslaved people. He spoke of Black people as “a distinct and inferior race” and supported emancipating the enslaved only if they were immediately shipped to Africa, according to Morley.
During the Andrew Jackson administration, Key served as the district attorney for Washington, D.C., where he spent much of his time shoring up enslavers’ power. He strictly enforced slave laws and prosecuted abolitionists who passed out pamphlets mocking his jurisdiction as the “land of the free, home of the oppressed.”
He also influenced Jackson to appoint his brother-in-law chief justice of the United States. You may have heard of him; Roger B. Taney is infamous for writing the Dred Scott decision that decreed Black people “had no rights which the White man was bound to respect.” A statue of Taney and a school named after Key have been recent subjects of scrutiny during the protests following the police killing of George Floyd.
Although “The Star-Spangled Banner” and all of its verses were immediately famous, Key’s overt racism prevented it from becoming the national anthem while he was alive, Morley wrote. There was no official anthem, and many people chose to sing other songs, like “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
Key’s anthem gained popularity over time, particularly among post-Reconstruction White Southerners and the military. In the early 20th Century, all but the first verse were cut — not for their racism, but for their anti-British bent. The United Kingdom was by then an ally.
After the misery of World War I, the lyrics were again controversial for their violence. But groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy fought back, pushing for the song to be made the official national anthem. In 1931, President Herbert Hoover made it so.
Woke fools
Despite playing no role in the bombardment.
And there we have it....
Washington Is Burning, by Andrew Cockburn (harpers.org)
By 1813, when he first arrived in Chesapeake Bay, Cockburn was forty-one years old and a rear admiral. His mission was straightforward: to inflict as much damage as possible on this economic heartland, thereby dissuading pro-war Democratic-Republicans (as opposed to antiwar Federalists) from their rash attack on the British Empire. “I have no hesitation,” he wrote to a superior officer, “in pronouncing that the whole of the shores and towns within this vast bay, not excepting the capital itself, will be wholly at your mercy, and subject if not to be permanently occupied, certainly to be successively insulted [raided] or destroyed at your pleasure.”
This ruthless scheme, which Cockburn was to follow to the letter, would have been absolutely impossible without first-class intelligence operatives to alert his raiding parties to enemy forces and guide them around the tortuous shoreline. Fortunately, volunteers for such a mission soon appeared: slaves. At first they were single men, eagerly welcomed by the British as the pilots and guides they needed. But the numbers quickly grew as entire families made their way to the ships. At this point the invaders made a crucial decision: they would accept any slave — man, woman, or child — and guarantee they would not be handed back to their owners.
It was a shrewd assault on the young republic, which at the time was really two nations: a free people, intoxicated by their new democracy, and an enslaved people, ill-fed, clad in rags, and routinely brutalized. In fact, the revolution had in many ways made the lives of enslaved Americans even worse. For example, among the goals of Virginian Founding Fathers such as Jefferson had been the breakup of big landed estates. Whereas in colonial times such estates passed to a single heir (the eldest), they could now be divided equally among siblings. This meant that slave families, too, were increasingly broken up. In his pathbreaking history The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832, Alan Taylor points out that “the revolution had produced a tragic contradiction by promoting greater equality for white men while weakening the security of black families.” In addition, observes Taylor, “by diffusing slave ownership, the new laws also broadened public support for slavery.” A nascent movement in favor of emancipation that had flickered during the years of the revolution soon died away.
In Taylor’s view, family separation was the most onerous of all the miseries inflicted on enslaved blacks. Perpetually indebted Virginia and Maryland planters were happy to breed and sell surplus bodies, regardless of family ties, to the expanding cotton plantations of the deep South. So enslaved black men, especially those living within easy reach of the coast, led their families to the British in large numbers.
The British understood very well that slavery was their enemy’s Achilles’ heel, and when Cockburn and his fleet returned to the Chesapeake in the spring of 1814 after wintering in Bermuda, he was determined to take full advantage. His orders read:
O n May 29, horrified planters had their first look at the next stage of the British scheme. A raid on Pungoteague, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, featured the Colonial Marines, a regiment of former slaves now armed and trained on Tangier Island, Cockburn’s base in the middle of the bay. The rags in which their owners clothed them had been replaced by bright red uniforms, and they were eager for battle, rapidly putting the defending militia to flight. “I was highly pleased with the conduct of the Colonial Marines,” reported the raid’s commander, “every Individual of which Evinced the greatest eagerness to come to Action with their former masters.”
Cockburn, delighted with his recruits, noted happily that they excited “the most general & undisguised alarm” among the populace. He was certainly correct. “Our negroes are flocking to the enemy from all quarters, which they convert into troops, vindictive and rapacious — with a most minute knowledge of every bye path,” wrote an American commander in early August. “They leave us as spies upon our posts and our strength, and they return upon us as guides and soldiers and incendiaries.”
Yes, more of the usual.
They took a deal that was good for them and fought on the enemy's side, same as Benedict Arnold
None of that has a damn thing to do with the article and some Congresscritter upset over someone not standing when HE thinks they should have.
This is about America having two national anthems--a truly stupid idea that only PERPETUATES the very racism you decry regularly.
We HAVE a recognized national anthem--The Star Spangled Banner.
Nobody is denying it. They just aren't making it their identity. We understand the history. We've vowed to never allow it to happen again in this country. And yes, that can happen without it being thrown up at every opportunity.
and then became the enemy and deserved to be called out in a patriotic song
You know any criticism of a Democrat must be met with deflection and distraction. No matter how unrelated it is.
Nothing like a little superbowl virtue signaling.
I wonder if he had the same feeling about standing for the national anthem when players (and others) were kneeling during it.
Good point
Not only that, but where are the "National Anthems" for the LGBQT/Gay/Hispanic/Asian/all others????
I totally agree. I had the same thought when I commented above.
Dylan Mulvaney has time on his hands, I hear he is writing his version now.
Your comment brought this video to mind. I'm thinking that Dylan has yet to rise to this level of mediocrity so I sincerely hope his version is not released until at least the next century.
If they all get one; then I want a personal one for being a true American mutt!
75% percent German/Dutch/English/Norwegian mix- and 25% French/African American/Asian/Native American(2 maybe 3 tribes)/Latino.
The American Mutts deserve their own anthem.
It is just shit like this that makes me laugh when Democrats start squawking about "unity" and that we need to come together in some "kumbaya" moment. Sometimes it seems they want us all close so we are easier to stab in the back!
Bunch of hypocrites.
It appears to be the long-range plan of the left.... demonize white people, proclaim that white Christian nationalists and supremacists are a threat to our democracy, say that the US is a racist nation, and that racism is systemic and wide spread, etc., etc.
It seems to be a blatant attempt to divide the races by spreading false doctrine and fake history inspiring mistrust and hatred between the races.
Have you noticed that they cant back up any of those claims in todays US society ? They always have to go back 50 - 60 years to find something.
Hey, you know the mantra:
"America is a racist country.
America has always been a racist country."
And all "non-whites" are perpetual victims.
Maybe fitting that in someplace in the existing national anthem will make them happy with the one anthem.
Only if the author never did anything wrong ever in their whole life to taint any of the good things.
Well, so long as the author didn't do anything that was legal at the time but that successive generations decided was a moral transgression.
Which is why we shouldn't probably name anything at all ever after any human.
It is unfair to judge past generations on today's "standards".
Imagine in the future--No President's Day, no MLK Day, not a single reference to any person!
No Washington, DC or Washington state.
No Monticello, no Lincoln Memorial, no Mt. Rushmore, no statue of Iwo Jima.
Sounds like John Lennon
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
The official National Anthem of the United States is the Star Spangled Banner ( ). Why stand for any other "wannabe" Anthem?
Because some dem rep no one has ever heard of says you are racist if you don't. Same ole same ole.
It is funny that the party that gave us the KKK and Jim Crowe laws are supposedly "supporting" the people they have discriminated against.
Now they spend all their time trying to convince you that you are racist because you don't buy into their virtue signaling bullshit and using their virtue signaling bullshit to try to convince you that they are not racist.
One big "look at me" circle jerk.
With no happy ending in sight, it seems many are always miserable.
That has to be a terrible life.
Why would anyone stand if they weren’t asked to stand?
And why would you even ask that? It’s just a random song that has certain meaning for certain people. I didn’t even know they were supposed to be doing some Black national anthem shit until I heard about it later. It looked like just another pregame musical performance to me.
We all stand for the National Anthem because 1) we are asked to stand, and 2) it is played to honor all of America.
Ya know what people are not going to do? Stand for like 20 fucking minutes while you trot out every fake niche national anthem for every arbitrary ethnicity. Fuck that. Get on with the game.
That's when I go get another beer and some food.
You mean you don't go to a movie theater at the time it is supposed to start so you can watch 20 minutes of coming attractions?
Even better if I can stand during all the previews.
BNA? I don't even think about it, it's not mine or something I'm concerned about so I treat it like the military taught me to treat religion, it may not be your but it is someone's , so show the minimum respect by remaining silent and professional.