Tipsheet

Of Course People Are Already Insisting the Francis Scott Key Bridge Name Be Changed

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  April 11, 2024 2:30 PM

Late last month, the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed in Baltimore, Maryland, with six people losing their lives. Given that Francis Scott Key wrote the text for our National Anthem, but also owned slaves, some rushed to highlight his faults. Not long after that, we're already hearing about demands for a name change. 

At the time, our sister site Twitchy covered how on March 26, the very same day of the collapse, the Associated Press' Deepti Hajela felt it necessary to focus on Key's biography, including how he owned slaves.

She wrote:

While the first verse of the anthem is the most well-known, there are a total of four stanzas; in the third, there’s a reference made to a slave. Key, whose family owned people and who owned enslaved people himself, supported the idea of sending free Black people to Africa but opposed the abolition of slavery in the U.S., according to the National Park Service’s Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine.

His personal history has made him a controversial figure in some quarters; in June 2020, a statue of him in San Francisco was taken down.

There's conveniently nothing else mentioned about what happened in the weeks leading up to June 2020, specifically the death of George Floyd in May of that year. Throughout the following weeks and months, countless other statues of other important American figures were taken down, too, in the Black Lives Matter protests and riots.

In the weeks that have followed, Key's biography is now getting even more scrutiny. The African American Caucus is calling for a name change, citing racism, according to the New York Sun. 

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As the report reveals, the critics' biggest beef comes from what the Star Spangled Music Foundation says is a quote that shouldn't even be attributed to Key:

The coalition of African American groups says that naming the rebuilt bridge after the national anthem’s author would be honoring a slaveholder. Key, though he wrote the “Star Spangled Banner” lyrics celebrating the “land of the free,” owned slaves. The group quotes him as saying that Africans are “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experiences prove to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.”

The quote in question, however, has been erroneously attributed to Key, according to the Star Spangled Music Foundation. 

The push to rename the bridge was expected by Republicans, who after the collapse began speculating about what Democrats in Maryland would rename it. 

Key had a “conflicted relationship with slavery,” the National Park Service notes, since as an attorney, he defended enslaved people seeking their freedom and believed that “all men are free” by the law of nature. Yet —  in addition to owning slaves himself — he defended slave owners as they sought to regain runaway slaves and he opposed abolition, the park service notes.

As for what Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) thinks, it looks like we'll have to wait to hear his thoughts on a name change. "I think any other conversations along those lines, there will be time for that but now’s not the time," he's quoted as saying. 

When he made his remarks on the same day that the bridge collapsed, President Joe Biden vowed that the federal government would be paying to rebuild and reopen the bridge. Sure enough, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) on Tuesday announced with the Maryland congressional delegation, as well as Moore and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, that he would be introducing a bill to have the federal government indeed pay for it, as The Hill reported.

The name change isn't the only controversy associated with liberal reactions to it. President Joe Biden spoke at the site last week. Even before he visited, his comments about the bridge were full of falsehoods. As Sarah covered over the weekend, USA Today ridiculously used the president's remarks there to claim the president had "clamped" down on illegal immigration, when his administration has given us open borders and record high border numbers, as well as an alarming amount of those showing up who were on the terror watch list. 

In speaking about the immigrant workers killed, Biden said "most were immigrants, all were Marylanders."