Sun, 17 Jul 2022
For some reason I sat this morning and thought about the song – “My Country Tis of Thee”.
People in my age group will remember being taught it in school (at least the first verse), sometimes sung before the “pledge of allegiance”.
I sat and pondered the first stanza. (The one I was taught in school and sang repeatedly.
“My country tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim's pride,
From every mountain side,
Let freedom ring.
Ok… number one, I haven’t thought about that song in DECADES and haven’t sung it in probably over 50 years … but I can still recite it from memory, which in itself is problematic.
I decided to do a little cursory research on the song and found that it is actually a very long song, based on the British melody of the song “God Save the Queen” (that part I already knew). The main thing I was looking for was dates.
My Country Tis of Thee was written in 1831.
What else happened in 1831?
THE TRAIL OF TEARS:
The Trail of Tears was a series of forced displacements of approximately 60,000 American Indians of the "Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas to the west of the Mississippi River that had been designated Indian Territory. The forced relocations were carried out by government authorities after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830.
The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after. According to Native American activist Suzan Shown Harjo of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the event constituted a genocide.
“Sweet land of liberty / from every mountain side, let freedom ring.”
Uh huh.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Meaning the song was written and they were singing it for over THREE DECADES – AT THE SAME TIME Black people were enslaved, terrorized, raped and lynched by THEM!
The “founding fathers”, wrote a strongly worded “Deceleration of Independence” and started formally celebrating “Independence Day”, the date: July 4th 1777. So they were celebrating “Independence and freedom” for almost a HUNDRED YEARS at the same time Black people had been and continued to be enslaved, terrorized, raped and lynched!
And CONTINUED to do so through the “Jim Crow” era and on through present day with no end in sight..
They taught me and other Black children to memorize the song as a mantra, KNOWING that we were singing and glorifying our subjugators, oppressors and the very country that was and is terrorizing our people, both at home and abroad – something that itself likely gives them some form of twisted glee as they listened to us sing it.
My belief is that singular individuals can sometimes change … but ENTIRE PEOPLES DO NOT CHANGE! The amount of cognitive dissonance displayed by those who sang and continue to sing these songs, and the rich white enslavers who wrote those hypocritical documents pertaining to FREEDOM, and the people who continue holding them up as paragons of virtue, is something I can not begin to relate to.