“To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said in an interview with NFL Media. On Friday night, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand while “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played before a preseason game. From the merciless lash, while our banner in sight / With its stars, mocking freedom, is fitfully gleaming.” The four verses, which are matched carefully to the contours and rhythm of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” describe slave ships waving “our star-spangled banner,” excoriate “our blood-guilty nation,” and conclude with the line “O’er the death-bed of Freedom-the home of the slave.” “The shrieks of those bondsmen, whose blood is now streaming. “Oh, say do you hear, at the dawn’s early light,” the new version opened. Although no music was printed, every reader would have known to sing Atlee’s text to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a thirty-year-old song that-alongside “Hail, Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle”-was at the forefront of a list of unofficial American national anthems. In 1844, the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator published “A New Version of the National Song,” with lyrics by a man named E.
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