Civil rights groups are calling for the collapsed Baltimore bridge to be renamed when it is eventually rebuilt — claiming the late national anthem author whose name it carries was a racist slave owner.
The Caucus of African American Leaders of Anne Arundel County voted unanimously on Monday to pass resolutions calling on Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and the state government to rededicate the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the Capital Gazette reports.
It argues that the collapse of the bridge into the Patapsco River on March 26 “allows Marylanders and taxpayers to remove names from bridges that do not honor all Marylanders.”
The groups say Key was a slave owner who wrote lyrics that “demeaned black people,” according to the Baltimore Banner.
The caucus, which includes civil rights groups such as local NAACP chapters and United Black Clergy of Maryland, is urging that the bridge should be named after late Congressman Parren J. Mitchell — the first black man from Maryland elected to the US House of Representatives.
“Of course the naysayers will not be happy and we anticipate opposition,” caucus convener Carl Snowden told the Gazette.
“However, we know we are on the right side of history and will eventually prevail.”
Key, who wrote the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner” while being held prisoner on a British ship in the Port of Baltimore during the War of 1812, grew up on a Maryland plantation and owned at least six slaves, according to WTOP.
He eventually freed several of his slaves and helped many black Marylanders obtain their freedom in the years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
But he also represented slaveholders hoping to regain their “property,” and once claimed he could not “remember more than two instances, out of this large number, in which it did not appear that the freedom I so earnestly sought for them was their ruin,” the Banner reports.
Key even became one of the founding members of the American Colonization Society, which promoted the emigration of black Americans to Africa.
Critics further maintain that Key once said black Americans are a “distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.”
However, the Star Spangled Music Foundation says the quote is “incorrectly credited to Key as a first-person expression of his attitudes about race in the United States.
“The quote is taken from page 40 of Jefferson Morley’s generally insightful 2012 book ‘Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835,’” the foundation explained in a blog post.
“Morley, in turn, cites as his sole source a quote in the 1937 biography ‘Francis Scott Key: Life and Times’ by Edward S. Delaplaine. This biography is the source of confusion as to the quote’s speaker.”
The caucus has submitted its resolution to rename the bridge to the governor’s office, Snowden told the Gazette.
It is also planning to discuss the matter with the governor at a future meeting, the Banner reports.
But when asked about the proposal, Moore said he is instead focusing on recovering the bodies of the remaining construction crew employees who were killed when the Singapore-flagged ship Dali crashed into the bridge last month, and on reopening the channel.
“I think any conversations along those lines, there will be time for that, but now’s not the time,” Moore said.
