After NFL Bans Kneeling in Protest, Columnist Wants Them to Play the ‘Negro National Anthem’ – By Sam Dorman (ijr.com) / May 28 2018
After the NFL said players had to stay in locker rooms if they didn’t want to stand for the national anthem, one columnist suggested the league try to make amends with the black players it allegedly “insulted.”
Leonard Greene, columnist for the New York Daily News, said on Sunday that the NFL could make it up to black players by removing the national anthem from games for a week.
He proposed, instead, that the league play “The Negro National Anthem,” a poem written on former President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1900:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya7Bn7kPkLo
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears have been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, Our God, where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our GOD,
True to our native land
“Its words inspire hope, and pay reverent respect to the battles fought to achieve our freedoms,” Greene said of the poem.
Greene presented the anthem as “every bit as patriotic” as the national anthem. He accused an unspecified “patriot police” of turning “what was a peaceful protest about police brutality and social injustice into a flag-waving, jingoistic shame fest.”
Greene’s proposal came amid news that the NFL was considering a 15-yard penalty for players who kneeled during the national anthem. President Donald Trump went so far as to suggest that if players didn’t stand for the anthem, they should maybe leave the country.
"You have to stand proudly for the National Anthem. You shouldn't be playing, you shouldn't be there. Maybe they shouldn't be in the country…the NFL owners did the right thing" -President @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/bt36t4EX5u
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) May 24, 2018
In response, disgruntled NFL players suggested the president pushed against American ideas like free speech. “He’s an idiot, plain and simple,” Seattle Seahawks player Doug Baldwin said:
Retweeted Gregg Bell (@gbellseattle):
Doug Baldwin on President Trump’s comments today about NFL players: “He’s an idiot, plain and simple.” #Seahawks @thenewstribune pic.twitter.com/A0jbmFAVnW
— Mistor Williams 🔭🔬💸🕵✍💭®™ (@Mistor_ME) May 24, 2018
