WATCH: Bill Maher Says Left Is “Embarrasing Me” Slams The “Black National Anthem” (VIDEO)
According to Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time,” the National Football League should not be playing the black national anthem shown before kickoff on Thursday.
“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. Now, maybe we should get rid of our national anthem, but I think we should have one national anthem,” Maher said emphatically.
“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,” he said.
It is from a poem by James Weldon Johnson that the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” are derived. Smithsonian Magazine reports that it was subsequently turned into a song, and that in the 1920s or thereabouts, it was “adopted by the NAACP as the official Negro National Anthem.”
Weldon Johnson wrote about the song in 1935, saying that it had become popular all across the South and in a few other areas of the nation within twenty years. “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.”
As part of their commitment to social justice, the NFL has just stated that they would play the song in combination with The Star-Spangled Banner as part of their national anthem ceremonies. As sports writer Joe Morgan of the Daily Wire briefly observed on Friday after the start of the NFL season:
It was a video of Alicia Keys singing “Lift Every Voice And Sing” that was played throughout the stadium to kick off the NFL season, and it was performed by members of the Florida A&M Concert Choir. The National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was performed soon after.
As NBC’s Mike Tirico said during the broadcast on Thursday, “Tonight, the NFL as it did last year will present ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ also known as the black national anthem.” “And it will happen at several league events during the year — the NFL continuing the attention around social justice causes.”
As reported by Front Office Sports, the NFL also intends to make the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the Black national anthem, “a significant component of all major league events in the future.”
As reported by Front Office Sports, the NFL also intends to make the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the Black national anthem, “a significant component of all major league events in the future.”
During his program on Friday, Maher said that he has been taking shots at the political Left recently, adding that he has done so because they have been “embarrassing me.” In his own words, “that’s why I’m going after the Left.”
