The self-righteous hate-filled bigots in San Francisco toppled and defaced a statue honoring Francis Scott Key. They also tore down a statute of General Ulysses S. Grant and Father Juniper Serra.  Naturally, the liberal leaders in San Francisco were supportive.


Mayor London Breed said she understands:

“the very real pain in this country rooted in our history of slavery and oppression, especially against African-Americans and Indigenous people.” She did have one minor complaint:
“Every dollar we spend cleaning up this vandalism takes funding away from actually supporting our community, including our African American Community.”

Apparently, none of these people realized that General Grant was a major factor in freeing all those slaves. But they also ignored a few facts about Francis Scott Key. Yes, he did own slaves. But there is a lot more to the story.


Even though he came from a large slaving owning family, he was an early opponent of slave trafficking. By all accounts, he treated his slaves fairly and freed several of them during his lifetime. He also had a reputation for providing free legal advice to impoverished free blacks and slaves in Washington.

But in June 1842, Francis Scott Key did something remarkable. William Costin died. He was a respected leader of the free African American community in Washington, D.C.  There were more than 70 carriages filled with people who trailed his casket to the cemetery. Some of the people in those carriages were white. But following this was a long line of men on horseback, all of them black, with one exception. That exception was Francis Scott Key.

I doubt that many people in the angry mob that tore down his statue knew any of this. Francis Scott Key, like everyone else, was far from perfect. He lived during a time when racial prejudice was a reality in the United States. But it was people like Francis Scott Key that were an important factor in ending slavery and at least attempting to be part of the solution.

Sadly, facts do not matter to an angry mob. This represents a lot of things, but justice for anyone is not on the list. In addition, I couldn’t help but notice that all the anger is directed at everyone else but themselves. There is racial prejudice in this country, but it is a lot better than it used to be. Other people have experienced extreme prejudice with very different results. One could argue that few were treated worse than Chinese immigrants to the U.S. They were the men who built our railroads and often died in the process. They also were treated as subhuman. If anyone had a right to be bitter and angry, they were near the top of the list. But, instead of focusing on what was being done to them, they focused on lifting themselves up. Today, Asian Americans are at least equal in personal wealth to white Americans. They didn’t do this by blaming everything on white people, although they would certainly have been justified in doing exactly that. They were too busy working on what they could do themselves to build a better future for them and their children.

Francis Scott Key was originally opposed to the War of 1812. But while on a British ship, watching the bombardment of Ft. M’Henry he was inspired by the “Star Spangled Banner” and he saw clearly what it meant. He realized that preserving the land of the free and the home of the brave required courage and sacrifice.

O say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

It is too bad that those filled with media fueled rage can’t see this at all. They also don’t realize that in toppling statues of men like Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key, they are not building bridges to a better future, they are instead fueling the exact type of racial prejudice they pretend to oppose. I greatly fear that while screaming the need for racial tolerance, they will ultimately achieve the exact opposite. It is really this simple. If you keep telling white people that you blame all your problems on them because of the color of their skin, at some point they are going to agree with you. It is important to realize that this can have no other result than an increase in racial prejudice.

We are starting to see a lot of things clearly now. We are seeing that all the violence and racial discount is happening in major cities run by Democrats. If Democratic policies were so marvelous at helping minorities, how did this happen?  We are seeing criminals elevated to saint hood, because they were killed by police, with little or no regard for police killed by criminals. We are seeing a Democratic Party and its supporters in the MSM promoting ludicrous conspiracy theories about Donald Trump while refusing to consider the blatant abuse of power by Barrack Obama and the mind-boggling corruption of Joe Biden. They would have us seriously consider electing someone showing serious signs of dementia to be Commander in Chief of the greatest military in the history of mankind.

Oh, say can you see? I sure can see, and my hunch is that a lot of other people are seeing the same things.


Leave a Reply