About the attacks on “The Star-Spangled Banner”

Critics keep claiming that Francis Scott Key used a racially charged swipe in the seldom-sung third verse of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The vandals who attacked his statue in Eutaw Place, Baltimore this summer seemed to think that too, scrawling “Racist Anthem” at the statue’s base. But, I argue at National Review, there’s plenty of reason to think it’s the modern wave of racial revisionists whose interpretation is off Key.

More about the controversy at PRI last year (“Historians disagree”) and Snopes; contemporary English-language references to “slave” as a politically subordinate person, unrelated to race or to chattel slavery, are routine in the literature known to readers of that and earlier periods (as in “Rule Britannia”). On Francis Scott Key and persons of color, see also Key biographer Marc Leepson.

In miniature, October 12

• Maryland Redistricting Reform Commission held a lively hearing in Rockville Oct. 10 [Douglas Tallman, MCMedia] U.S. Supreme Court declines to speed up review of Maryland gerrymander — Lyle Denniston on what that could mean for wider issue [Constitution Center; more on Gill v. Whitford from Amy Howe, SCOTUSBlog]
• We still need heroes: Lauren Weiner on statues and state songs [Law and Liberty, my earlier on Taney statue]
• Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh — a Republican — signs up with trial lawyers to sue opioid makers. Not a good look [Capital Gazette, my other blog on law firm Motley Rice, which helped orchestrate the tobacco caper]
• Also to Frederick County, Maryland: “Montgomery County Wage Hike Will Drive Business to Virginia” [Emily Top, Economics 21]
• “Hundreds Of Cases Dismissed Thanks To Baltimore Police Department Misconduct” [Tim Cushing, TechDirt]
• Why Columbia has so many peculiar street names: it couldn’t re-use any that had been used in Baltimore City/County or Anne Arundel [Christina Tkacik, Baltimore Sun]