Black National Anthem

[BmorePat87]

(07-04-2020, 09:13 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Back in the time of slavery in the US, there was a large portion of the Nation who saw that practice as wrong.  That portion abolished that practice, as they viewed humans as people and not property.  Some folks didn't agree with that idea, as treating their labor as humans cut into their production and profits.  This dispute became bitter and heated, it eventually led to a great war that resulted in the side standing for freedom prevailing.

In the years prior to that dispute and ensuing war, a great many slaves fled their owners and plantations.  Where did those people flee to?  They didn't run to Mexico.  They didn't travel West and claim their own territory to form their own Nation.  They didn't take boats back to Africa, where their own people sold them down river into slavery in the first place.  No, they fled to America, land of the free, home of the brave.  A place where we live as "One Nation, indivisible".

The notion of a "second" National Anthem, one specifically aimed at one people in a great melting pot, is sort of contradictory to the ideals that the Nation is actually principled upon.  Perhaps the general messaging in society shouldn't be "hey, some of you were mean to us", but rather "thanks for seeing us as equals, and making things right"?

This is actually incorrect. Fugitive slaves absolutely went to Spanish territories and Canada (an estimated 30% of escaped slaves in the 19th century went to Canada) as slavery was outlawed there. We annexed Florida from the Spanish after a war partially because it was where many slaves ran to. Many also did go to Africa as well. Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, was one of those destinations. 

Congress passed versions of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793 and 1850, requiring all citizens and government officials to aid in the arrest of any escaped slave, and then in 1857 the Supreme Court said that the US Constitution did not grant citizenship to any black person, free or enslaved. 

They didn't "flee to America" because they were in America. Many did head to free states, but the law did not protect them. Very, very few slaves escaped slavery in the South.

After the Civil War, the US government gave up on enforcing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and abandoned Reconstruction, allowing for Jim Crow laws to control the lives of black people for the next 80 years. During this era of segregation, incarceration, bondage via sharecropping, and lynching, the NAACP commissioned a song to be a symbol of hope and resilience for the black community as they began a long legal battle to fight against the laws of the "land of the free" that made them 2nd class citizens without full rights. This was decades before the US adopted the Star Spangled Banner as the National Anthem. 

I am more than happy to go into more detail and chronicle a full 400 years of oppression against Black folks that spins a different light on this romanticized and half correct history you are attempting to use to justify your disapproval of a song. I don't think any of that will matter. You are determined to see a song as a symbol of division, despite it not being that. This is like when people said Obama divided the nation. He didn't, people did that in response to him being president. Likewise, this song does not divide people. People are just manufacturing outrage over it.