We cannot escape history
Florida school bans Amanda Gorman’s Poem
Removing paintings, murals, statues, sculptures, etc. from our schools, streets, and governmental properties is taking place in several states. Escaping history will always be an issue. Should we appoint a Correction Commission to examine the backgrounds of the people who have street names from them? There’s plenty to cover in covering up America’s ugly history! Read my BLOG and feel free to leave a comment.
Amanda S. C. Gorman is an American poet and activist. Her work focuses on issues of oppression, feminism, race, marginalization, and the African diaspora. Amanda was the first person to be named National Youth Poet Laureate. She published the poetry book The One for Whom Food Was Not Enough in 2015. She rose to fame in 2021 for writing and delivering her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of Joe Biden. Gorman’s inauguration poem generated international acclaim. and shortly after that, two of her books achieved best-seller status, and she obtained a professional management contract.
She told The Washington Post book critic, Ron Charles, “My hope is that my poem will represent a moment of unity for our country” and”with my words, I’ll be able to speak to a new chapter and era for our nation.” [1]
Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer author, and amateur poet from Frederick, Maryland, best known as the author of the U.S. national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Key slowly gained popularity as an unofficial anthem, finally achieving official status more than a century later under President Herbert Hoover as the national anthem.
Key owned slaves from 1800, when abolitionists ridiculed his words, claiming that America was more like the “Land of the Free and Home of the Oppressed”. He freed some of his slaves in the 1830s, paying one ex-slave as his farm foreman to supervise his other slaves. He also represented owners of runaway slaves. At the time of his death, he owned eight slaves. [2]
In the Star Spangled Banner Key wrote (3rd Stanza), “No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave . . .” [3]
By now you’ve probably heard the claim that America’s national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” is an expression of racial hostility toward African Americans and should be either retired or at least acknowledged as a subject of national embarrassment. At the time Key was writing, the word “slave” had long functioned in English as a wide-ranging epithet, hurled at persons of any and all colors, nationalities, and conditions of servitude or otherwise. [4]
References:
- Compiled from Wikipedia.org
- Compiled from J. Mark Powell, Washington Examiner
- National Museum of American History
- Senior Fellow, Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute
By Willie J. Warren
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