[NYPO] National anthem should be changed to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine,’ activists say

"National anthem should be changed to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine,’ activists say":

https://nypost.com/2020/06/26/activists-change-national-anthem-to-john-lennons-imagine/

excerpt:

Amid a national reckoning over racial tropes in culture, historian Daniel E. Walker, author Kevin Powell and others are calling to “rethink [‘The Star-Spangled Banner’] as the national anthem, because this is about the deep-seated legacy of slavery and white supremacy in America,” Walker told Yahoo Entertainment.

The song would join a long line of cultural mainstays that are rebranding after the Black Lives Matter protests — foods such as Eskimo Pies and Aunt Jemima syrup among them.

The song was originally a poem written in September 1814, during the Battle of Baltimore, by Francis Scott Key, who owned slaves. The poem was eventually set to music and became the country’s official anthem in 1931. President Herbert Hoover authorized the song, sung often at baseball games and graduation ceremonies — notably missing the third verse, which references “the hireling and slave.”

Powell argues the song is still problematic — beyond being at the heart of the NFL protests kicked off in 2016 by Colin Kaepernick.

“Scott Key … was literally born into a wealthy, slave-holding family in Maryland,” Powell says. He also brings up Key’s unsavory ties to President Andrew Jackson and Roger Taney, a Supreme Court justice who opposed abolition. Why not, argues Powell, replace the tune with John Lennon’s “Imagine”?

“[It’s] the most beautiful, unifying, all-people, all-backgrounds-together kind of song you could have,” Powell says.
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