Fort McHenrys Flag - by Martha S. Jones
We who believe in freedom cannot rest. — Ella Baker
Getting beyond myths, we might just discover meaning.
When asked by Philadelphia Inquirer Contributing Editor Errin Haines to pen a reflection on the American flag, I knew I had to begin at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. There, in the aftermath of the 1814 Battle of Baltimore, Francis Scott Key penned a poem destined to become the national anthem.
Key’s America, and the waving flag that symbolized it, was the land of the “free.” He made no accommodation for enslaved men and women, be they those battling among British forces in Baltimore’s harbor or those compelled to labor in nearby Fells Point.
This bitter-tasting perspective was shared by many men of Maryland’s slaveholding class. And not too many years later, in 1816, they were among those who banded together, formed the American Colonization Society, and promoted a scheme to remove Black Americans from the country altogether. Colonizationists committed to preserving the U.S. as a white man’s country and Key was there.
In 1814, Key’s flag flew over a nation that was already warring within itself over slavery, a circumstance that has troubled the meaning of the Stars and Stripes ever since. In Philadelphia, I looked to discover if it had always been so. There, at the Betsy Ross House, I encountered still more myth and too little history.
You can read more about my journey to discovering what the flag means to me (and along the way ponder what it means to you) over at the Inquirer in “Scars & Stripes.” I’ll leave you with this image that opens this essay, one that for me is a powerful 21st century retort to Francis Scott Key: A mural by Parris Stancell, titled Freedom School, which depicts Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr., and Frederick Douglass, larger than life beneath an American flag and captioned by Baker’s words: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.”
— MSJ
Image credit: Library of Congress
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