Thread by @michaelharriot

People really just say shit without actually knowing WTF they’re talking about.

Bill “I’m-not-a-white-supremacist-but-you-gotta-admit-that-white-people-are-supreme” Maher even said singing it was like “segregation”

Is it, though?

A thread.

https://twitter.com/wrjahnjr/status/1438921756404764677

We won’t start by talking about how the National Anthem was written by Francis Scott Key—a slave owner who started the American Colonization Society to get FREE black Americans achieve a goal white people often email me about -

Go back to Africa

We don’t even have to talk about the fact that the Star Spangled Banner is racist itself…

I’m assuming you can read

theroot.com/star-spangled-…

Let’s talk about the “Lift Every Voice And Sing.”

Like the Star Spangled Banner, it was originally a poem (written by poet James Weldon Johnson).

While Francis Scott Key was considered a TERRIBLE poet Johnson was a child genius. He went to college at 16 & became a principal

On Feb 12, 1900, Johnson’s school held a celebration for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. His brother took the poem, set it to music & taught it to a choir of 500 kids

(Shameless plug: Here is my childhood friend singing all three verses)

Weldon & his brother eventually moved to NY to compose Broadway tunes. They were one of a group of artists who reverse gentrifed a part of Manhattan and started a little art movement called the Harlem Renaissance

On Feb 12, 1909, Lincoln’s 100th birthday, the NAACP was founded. One of their goals was to increase Black political power and stop the lynching epidemic

But the NAACP didn’t initially have any chapters in the south, where MOST Black ppl lived…

Until Ell Persons.

On April 30, 1917 a 15-year-old white gurl named Antionette Rappel ran away to “join the war” when her body was found 3 days later, they started rounding up Black men

After the cops agreed that the forensic science showed Ell Persons was guilty, a Lynch mob attacked him, but they didn’t lynch him

First they waited for a crowd of 5,000 to arrive

Then they sold refreshments

Then Rappel’s mother gave a speech

Then they burned him alive

Then they decapitated him and gave away his remains as souvenirs.

Yall… these motherfuckers had a MASTER OF CEREMONIES!

And the evidence?

They exhumed the victim and said they could see a “photograph” of Persons in her eyeballs.

Seriously. That’s it.

How do we know this?

Well, when this happened, the NAACP sent its new field Secretary to investigate and it mobilized Black America. By 1919, Memphis had the biggest chapter in the country.

Who was this new secretary?

Some dude named James Weldon Johnson

Now remember, this was during the time of the growth of Black “clubs.” Black fraternities & sororities were founded. HBCUs exploded. The Great Migration began. As Black people relocated across the country, they realized they had something in common:

They all knew this song!

Apparently the kids in Jacksonville had been singing it at other schools and teaching it everywhere!

Then, in 1919, white folks went on a lynching spree (I’ve done a thread on the Red Summer of 1919)

Why?

MUCH of the resentment was caused by Black soldiers returning from WW1

Black veterans came back from the war doing crazy stuff like looking white people in the eye.

white folks began paying attention to the epidemic of “race riots” when black people started fighting back. the “new negroes” weren’t taking that lynching shit anymore

Of course, the NAACP had been pushing this issue for YEARS!

So on May 5, 1919, in Carnegie Hall, the NAACP got some white people together to see if they’d push for the new anti-lynching bill. But they needed someone who could make the white people act with urgency, but who?

But the Dyer anti-lynching bill never passed. To this day, the United States has NEVER passed a lynching bill.

One month after the First National Conference on Lynching, the NAACP voted to make “Lift Every Voice And Sing” the Negro National Anthem.

And you might e asking:

Why would we need a separate anthem?

Well, here’s the thing:

During all that enslaving, and lynching and rioting…

America DID NOT HAVE A NATIONAL ANTHEM!

Believe it or not, sometimes they played “God Bless America” and sometimes “Hail to the Chief”

It wouldn’t be until 1931 that the Star Spangled Banner was officially named the National Anthem…

A whole twelve years AFTER the Black National Anthem became our official song.

Maybe we should be asking WHITE PEOPLE why they. We’d their own national anthem. We had one ALREADY

AND here’s the thing white people and ops like Jason Whitlock never seem to want to talk about:

Let’s say Black people DID want their own anthem. Let’s say they wanted to be separate from whites and hated wypipo and made everything about race…

WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WE GOT THAT IDEA FROM?

Do you think Black people just manifested this hypothetical animosity out of thin air? Do you think we shouldn’t have ANY residual white hesitancy after people who looked like us endured years of LEGALIZED slavery and rape and

And murder and theft?

Do you know how privileged you have to be to hopscotch over all of that shit and think a SONG is the thing that divides us?

GTFOH.

Well, it might interest you to know what those black people wanted back then:

Let us march on, til victory is won.

Shameless plug #2:

theroot.com/the-twenty-thi…

Finally, I’ve met a lot of Black people.

Tall ones, short ones, liberal, progressive, radical and conservative.I have NEVER met a Black person who wanted the national anthem sing in white spaces

We didn’t ask for this

We asked cops to stop killing us

This was white folks idea