Progressive television host Bill Maher continues to criticize his fellow liberals. Now he’s turned his attention to the National Football League, saying they should not be playing the song known as the black national anthem before events.
“I saw last night on the football game, Alicia Keys sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ which now I hear is called the black national anthem,” he said. “Now maybe we should get rid of our national anthem, but I think we should have one national anthem.
“I think when you go down a road where you’re having two different national anthems, colleges sometimes now have — many of them have different graduation ceremonies for black and white, separate dorms — this is what I mean! Segregation! You’ve inverted the idea. We’re going back to that under a different name.”
The words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” are from a poem by James Weldon Johnson. It Iater was crafted into a song, and in about the 1920s, it was “adopted by the NAACP as the official negro national anthem.
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“Within twenty years, it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country, “Johnson of the song in 1935. “Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used. The lines of this song repay me in elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.”
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More recently, the NFL announced that it will perform the song in conjunction with “The Star-Spangled Banner” as part of its social justice commitment. To kick off the NFL season, a video of Keys singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was played in the stadium with the help of the Florida A&M concert choir. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played shortly after.
During his show on Friday, Maher acknowledged that he has been hitting the political left lately and that he’s been doing so because they’ve been “embarrassing me.” He added, “that’s why I’m going after the left.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice