This insider-outsider status has driven a longstanding struggle among black Americans to find room in a civic and political system that was built to deny them full citizenship. Du Bois termed “double consciousness” - the feeling of being part of the American polity yet not fully of it. The most consistent and perplexing response came from veterans of World War II, who dominated public life at the time and saw nothing contradictory in the argument that the freedoms they had fought to preserve did not include the liberty to do anything when the anthem was played except stand at attention.Īfrican-American anthem dissidents are heirs to a venerable tradition of critical patriotism that dates to what W.E.B. It was an almost everyday occurrence to see groups of African-Americans (and whites as well) - occasionally even athletes and cheerleaders - remaining defiantly seated at sporting events as the audience rose dutifully to its feet for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And the Vietnam War was unmasked as a morally repugnant enterprise built on a foundation of racism and lies.īy the time I started college in 1969, dissent from the national anthem was endemic.

Muhammad Ali was stripped of the heavyweight boxing title for refusing induction into the Army. King was assassinated for preaching nonviolent resistance in the South. That metaphor hit home with considerable force during my high school years in a Pennsylvania factory town during the 1960s. meant when he said that the country had defaulted on the promises embodied in the Declaration of Independence - and had written people of color a bad check that came back stamped “insufficient funds.’’ Many of us who were born black in the 1950s abandoned reverence toward the national anthem once we were old enough to grasp what Martin Luther King Jr.

The star the star spangled banner song