Do you ever do any historical research prior to posting, or even considering an issue...
"I am sure Key had it in his mind when he wrote it, "I can't stand black people. In fact, they are not really people".
Do you know ANYTHING about Key? As an attorney, Key was notorious for representing slaveholders in court as they sought to reclaim their (escaped) property. He prosecuted abolitionists and forced anti-slavery newspaper publishers like Ben Lundy and his assistant William Lloyd Garrison (ever heard of him?) to flee Wash DC.
In a trial that attracted national attention, he prosecuted a Doctor from NYC that arrived in DC with a trunk full of anti-slavery material. You were being facetious when you claimed he felt that Black people "are not really people". But the truth is he placed the property rights of slave owners above the human rights of slaves... From an account of that trial...
"In the courtroom, Key emotionally denounced the abolitionists who wanted to free all enslaved people.
They “declare that every law which sanctions slavery is null and void and that obedience to it is a sin,” Key
declaimed.
“That we have no more rights over our slaves than they have over us. Does not this bring the Constitution and the laws under which we live into contempt? Is it not a plain invitation to resist them."
Our current difficulty in reckoning with our racist national anthem strongly suggests that we are still a long way from laying slavery to rest.
theintercept.com
Did you notice his use of specifically inclusive terms like "we", "our slaves" and"us"?
Can you see how Black people might have a different view of Key beyond just your point of reference to him as the "composer" of the SSB? When Key writes of the "Home of the Free", he's not considering ALL Americans...
And then there is the infamous 3rd verse, with its reference to "hireling and the slave". Another fun fact you likely don't know, the British welcomed escaped US slaves and had a special military force of US and other former slaves known as Colonial Marines. There was a detachment of Colonial Marines among the British forces that occupied DC and burned the WH during the War of 1812, and a lot of Historians believe THAT is what Key is referring to with the "hireling and the slave".
It's also noteworthy that a famous pro-slavery poem in 1855 entitled "the hireling and the slave", celebrated the benevolence of slavery (a blessing for Africans) and also introduced the term "master race". For these and other reasons many folks in the North (led by Oliver Wendel Holmes) felt that before the SSB could be adopted as a Union Standard it needed a new stanza rejecting Key's overt racism...
"Tellingly, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. felt that if the song were to belong to the North, it would need a new stanza — one he provided, invoking “the millions unchained who our birthright have gained.” By contrast, supporters in the South did not believe it required any changes. “Let us never surrender to the North the noble song, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’” the Richmond Examiner editorialized in 1861 in the capital of the Confederacy. “It is Southern in origin, in sentiments, in poetry, and song. In its association with chivalrous deeds, it is ours.”
The resulting CULTURE WAR between the post war North and South over whether or not to include Holmes's stanza, makes the current battle over CRT look like nothing more than a mild disagreement...
