On Alabama voters’ ballots will be amendments to the State’s constitution to “require all public schools to broadcast or arrange for” performance of “the first stanza of the Star-Spangled Banner at least once per week.” [FN1] Kids in Alabama public schools won’t be taught history. 1/9

The Constitution took effect 3/4/1789. [FN2] “The Star Spangled Banner” was written about the British bombardment of Baltimore on 9/13-14/1814 [FN3] in four stanzas by Francis Scott Key. [FN4] The third stanza contains language that, today, many find objectionable: 2/9

“No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” [FN5] These lines are not out of the overtly racist context of pre-Civil War America. Key was a “slaveholder.” [FN6] Alabama was admitted to the Union in 1819. 3/9

After Lincoln won, States seceded and formed the Confederacy. Alabama’s Commissioner wrote to Kentucky’s gov: “new theory of Government destroys the property of the South. “[W]ives and daughters” faced “violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” [FN7] 4/9

Singing or seeing a video of the National Anthem being sung is wrong, but if they insist on that, all four stanzas must be included. 5/9

Footnotes:
FN1. Ballotpedia, “Alabama voters to decide two constitutional amendments related to the pledge of allegiance and school prayer,” 04/17/26.
FN2. 5 Wheat. 420, 5 L.Ed. 124. 6/9

FN3. Marc Ferris, “Star-Spangled Banner: The Unlikely Story of America’s National Anthem,” p. 18 (2014).
FN4. Id., pp. 255-56.
FN5. Id., p. 256. 7/9

FN6. Key was the brother-in-law Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and author of the Court opinion in Dred Scott v Sanford v Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). Fred
Kaplan, “Lincoln and the Abolitionists,” p. 7 (2017). 8/9

FN7. House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.
housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/35085. 9/9