It seems to me, the entire focus on Colin Kaepernick not standing for the SSB seems totally out of context. With all respect to Professor Harry Edwards (a man whom I greatly admire) I don’t put Kaepernick’s kneeling out the playing SSB in the same category as John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s black fisted glove salute at the 1968 Olympics. Nor do I put it in the same category as Ali’s three-year fight against the draft and the Vietnam War. Nor do I agree with Jim Brown (another man whom I greatly admire) who said Kaepernick should choose between being an activist and being an athlete as if the two are mutually exclusive. See Ali or Kareem for this.
I say those things for several reasons: one is the vast majority of people who stand for the SSB seem to mumble the lyrics or don’t sing them all (which would include many athletes as well as spectators and which kinda defeats the patriotic purpose of playing it) or are more involved with taking selfies with their cell phones and the other is the entire ritual of playing the SSB before every sporting event seems, well, pointless. The reason it seems pointless is there is no ostensible connection between playing the SSB at every sporting event and the game or sporting event itself. What would be the connection between playing the SSB and a NASCAR event or a game between the Lakers and Celtics or Red Sox and Yankees? Unless there is another reason of which I am totally unaware, perhaps it is related to some pre-Columbian rite of sanctifying the grounds upon which the game or event is to be played. But if the playing of the SSB is not meant to sanctify the ball diamond or the football field or the basketball floor or the hockey rink or the racetrack, then what is the point? One might say it’s because we’re honoring the flag and the country for which it stands. Possibly, but if one isn’t going to sing, then merely standing around taking selfies doesn’t make a lot of sense either. Not only that, I would venture that very few Americans know there is more than one stanza to the SSB and playing all four would not only take away from valuable playing time, but befuddle the spectators completely.
For years, I’ve been bewildered by why the SSB was played and not just played, but often choreographed especially before major sporting events like the Super Bowl which is replete with soaring jets streaming red, white and blue exhaust and colossal flags draped across a hundred yards of turf. Where did all this come from? It would be one thing if Kaepernick were sitting out the SSB because Key was pro-slavery, though his biographer, Marc Leepson, has written that Key “also donated his legal services to some African-Americans who were fighting for their freedom under a 1783 law that prohibited slaveholders from other states from bringing their human chattel into Maryland to live. Key won several of those cases.” However, Key was also a member of the Colonization Society, a Society that “did not call for the abolition of slavery, but instead focused solely on sending freed blacks to Africa.” Freedom indeed.
Those could be legitimate reasons for sitting out or kneeling out the playing of the SSB, but I don’t think they are especially when one considers some bars across the country are boycotting the NFL because no NFL team wants to hire Kaepernick; however, Kaepernick’s own reason for not standing is less historical and more sociological in that he has stated, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” See Jackie Robinson. Given Key’s allegiance to slavery, his decision could be a legitimate reason not to stand and could be reason enough not to play, but one still has to question the reason for it to be why it has been played in the first place.
In an article by Fred Barbash and Travis M. Andrews they wrote, “As legend has it, singing the national anthem at sporting events began during the 1918 World Series, when the nation was at war. As recounted by the New York Times of Sept. 6, 1918, it was the seventh-inning stretch of the first game between the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox.” So as is the custom today, the spectators stood to stretch and, for some reason, the band began to play the SSB. According to the article, “First the song was taken up by a few, then others joined, and when the final notes came, a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the very end that the onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of the day’s enthusiasm.” Not only that, but the article goes on to say, “The Star-Spangled Banner” — which borrowed its difficult melody from a “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a British song about boozing and womanizing — wasn’t adopted as the official national anthem of the U.S. until 1931.”
Given that history, the SSB was played as a kind of intermission piece to keep the fans awake in what must have been a painfully boring ball game with the Red Sox winning 1-0 and Babe Ruth throwing a shutout. In fact, even though the Red Sox won the Series, they scored only nine runs in six games, the fewest runs by a winning team in World Series history. Perhaps, there might have been a patriotic reason for playing the SSB at that game since the world was at war, but it appears as if it were played as a spontaneous act and not a planned one and done more out of a need to get the spectators enthusiastic about an offensively effete game rather than a musical tribute to freedom and the flag.
Regardless, it all comes back to Kaepernick. If one believes it is unpatriotic not to stand and sing the SSB as an homage to Key, then one should also question the philosophical, if not ethical, motives behind the man who wrote the lyrics. In that sense, Kaepernick is probably much closer to the truth than one might imagine. (1061)