“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.”

Those words of course are the lyrics of the 3rd verse of The Star Spangle Banner written by Francis Scott Key. It’s the American flag song; the national anthem, thanks to Hoover who’s only other notable gift to the United States was the Great Depression.

What theses words describe is the vow, threat, warning!, that any slave who dares escape to the British (who offered slaves freedom in the War of 1812) will face terrifying punishment, perhaps execution, from the authority of American justice. America won the war and no doubt recaptured fugitive slaves were returned did and suffer severe retribution.

Francis Scott Key, who wrote this awful song, was a slaveholder himself. He was a District Attorney and pit bull lawyer for slave owners fighting for Fugitive Slave Law enforcement and the return of their “property” from free states. And that’s not all.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision which precipitated the Civil War by declaring Dred Scott a non-citizen thereby nationalizing slavery, was Key’s brother-in-law. Key’s grandson was pro-Confederacy/slavery newspaper editor Frank Howard Key arrested on Lincoln’s order and ironically imprisoned in Fort McHenry where Key witnessed “the bombs bursting in air”.

I’d like to see some black singer surprise us all at the Super Bowl and sing the third verse of Keys’ national anthem instead of the first. “The people” might get a better idea of what kneeling down during the national anthem, before the flag, is all about.