The defiant ones
2nd October 2017 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
I have to be honest: I never ever thought I would live long enough to see the day when such a large number of $60 million slaves would have their minds de-colonized while still playing professional sports.
I mean, witnessing the election and re-election of President Barack H. Obama and the Saints winning the Super Bowl were one thing, but this is entirely another thing.
But these are strange times, made all the more strange by the election of an egomaniacal millionaire with no filter and no impulse control to the highest office in the land.
Never in the history of “everdom” did I ever fathom that a day might come when the revolutionary spirit would make its way all the way down to New Orleans where the mark of the rebellious slave (fleur de lis) adorns the football team’s helmets and the tourism industry waxes nostalgic about the good old days that are never forgotten in “Antebellum Disney.”
On Sunday, Sept. 24, during the singing of the national anthem in Charlotte, North Carolina, we saw 10 Saints players refuse to stand and four others stand near them to show their support during the national anthem.
To top it all off, Saints wide receiver Brandon Coleman had the audacity to throw up the “Black Power” fist in the end zone after catching his first regular-season touchdown pass.
Needless to say, many white New Orleans Saints fans, including elected officials, are livid about Saints players having the gumption to think they have the right to stand up or kneel down for what they believe in during the singing of the national anthem.
The lieutenant governor is having a hissy fit in London, where the Saints were preparing to play the Miami Dolphins on Oct. 1. He says he won’t attend the game as a result of the protest. Several state lawmakers and the attorney general are pushing for the legislature to do away with tax incentives that benefit the organization and its owner, Tom Benson, for failing to keep his players in line.
With all this talk about “our anthem,” “our flag” and “our country,” it’s a little hard to tell if this is 2017 or 1817.
President Donald Trump, NFL fans and many of the nation’s elected officials can’t believe that NFL team owners are letting their millionaire gladiators get away with exercising their First Amendment rights and acting like they are free and equal human beings who are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
It’s a touchy issue for NFL team owners, who are used to bossing people around instead of being taken to the woodshed by Donald Trump, who may have an axe to grind with the NFL since his unsuccessful attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills back in 2014.
Mind you, these are the same team owners who told players to stop dancing and celebrating in the end zone after they score, to stop wearing pink accessories on their uniforms after the annual breast cancer campaign has run its course and that they weren’t allowed to wear purple cleats to raise awareness of domestic violence.
It is mind-boggling that in this day and age there are still white people — including the president, lawmakers and everyday folks — who think they have the power and the right to take ownership of someone else’s thoughts, priorities and actions. Despite the legacy of white privilege and white supremacy, that’s a hard sell in 2017.
No one in this country has the power or authority to tell someone else when and how to peacefully protest or express themselves. No one has the market cornered on patriotism or the right to dictate how someone else feels about this nation and its legacy of racial injustice, domestic terrorism and bigotry.
In a poem titled “Ku Klux,” acclaimed writer Langston Hughes, perhaps best captures the mindset of an age gone by during which white supremacists routinely imposed their will and beliefs on people of color:
“They took me out/To some lonesome place./They said, ‘Do you believe/ In the great white race?’
I said, ‘Mister,/To tell you the truth,/I’d believe in anything/If you’d just turn me loose.’
The white man said, ‘Boy,/Can it be/You’re a-standin’ there/A-sassin’ me?’
They hit me in the head/And knocked me down./And then they kicked me/ On the ground.
A klansman said, ‘Nigger,/Look me in the face —/And tell me you believe in/The great white race.’”
Now that the cat is out of the bag, the revolutionary spirit has been spreading to other professional sports, especially basketball, where NBA great Stephen Curry and his teammates refused to visit the White House as part of their NBA championship celebration.
Upon learning of Trump’s decision to rescind the invitation to Golden State, Cleveland Cavaliers forward and fellow NBA great LeBron James, who found a racial epithet spray painted on the gate to his family’s home in Brentwood, California, posted the following message to the president: “U bum. @StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!
“The thing that frustrated me and pissed me off is the fact that he used a sports platform to try and divide us,” James added.
Even New Orleans Pelicans center DeMarcus “Boogie” Cousins got in one the act, telling a reporter last week that the president “needs to get his sh*t together.”
Cousins used words like “goofy” and “silly” to refer to the president.
Elected officials, political groups and white business leaders are still scrambling to find a way to get NFL team owners to get these rebellious bucks back in line instead of making trouble for decent white folks.
Good luck with that.
Things will likely settle down eventually and many players may go back to whatever they were doing before the president started selling “wolf tickets,” but it’s also likely that the spark that ignited in the minds of some of these outspoken athletes will remain lit and compel them to do more in the name of justice and equity.
Just as it makes absolutely no sense for people in a so-called Christian republic to allow white supremacists to get away with burning crosses, it is the height of hypocrisy to claim to revere the American flag but remain silent as white supremacists parade around with Confederate flags once carried by those who used every weapon at their disposal to destroy the United States.
By the way, we should not be so hasty to dismiss the description by many whites of the national anthem and the American flag as “our anthem” and “our flag.”
History certainly supports such claims.
The third stanza of “The Star Spangled Banner” isn’t exactly a celebration of freedom, justice and equality for all. It reads as follows:
“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 wash’d out their foul footstep’s 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.”
On its website, Snopes.com points out that a number of historians, among them Robin Blackburn (author of The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848) and Alan Taylor (author of American Blacks in the War of 1812), that the third stanza celebrates American troops’ defeat of Corps of Colonial Marines, one of two military units of Black slaves fighting on the side of the British to gain their freedom.
Francis Scott Key was a wealthy slaveowner who was born on his family’s plantation, Terra Rubra, in Frederick County, Maryland.
Like many of his peers, Key believed Blacks to be “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.”
As a slaveowner who celebrated America’s wealth and power, he clearly did not gaze fondly on the strivings for freedom of those he and others bought, sold, traded and worked like cattle.
In his mind, and in “The Star Spangled Banner,” the British were the oppressors and the American colonists were the righteous freedom fighters who had God on their side.
After the United States and the British signed a peace treaty in 1814, the U.S. demanded the return of their property, the estimated 6.000 enslaved Blacks who fought on the side of the British. The British refused to return their allies to their former lives of servitude, instead sending them to establish new beginnings in Canada and Trinidad, where, to this day, their descendants are called “Merikins.”
Key was clearly a conflicted man. He bought and owned slaves, although he later set some of those slaves free and hired at least one of them to work for him. He also agreed to represent a number of slaves seeking their freedom in court, earning him the nickname “The N*gger Lawyer.”
He didn’t, however, want those Black freedmen to remain in the U.S. Instead, as a member of the American Colonization Society, he worked to send them back to Africa.
According to Wikipedia, Key used his position as U.S. Attorney to suppress and undermine abolitionists. In an address to a grand jury in Washington, DC, Key asked “Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?”
Throughout the remainder of his life, Wikipedia reports, Key remained a staunch proponent of African colonization and unwavering critic of the antislavery movement.
Incidentally, Key’s sister, Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, married Roger B. Taney, the man who would later become the Supreme Court Justice who decided in the Dred Scott case that Black people had no rights that whites were bound by law to respect.
For these reasons and more, all of those who claim that “The Star Spangled Banner” is their national anthem can have it.
What they can’t have are my or anyone else’s First Amendment rights or any of the other protections guaranteed by the United States Constitution.
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the October 2, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
