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.
