He points out he was on both knees, not one, and claims he was praying to God.
I think what happened is some Ravens players approached him & asked him to kneel with them, he didn't have the balls to tell them no, and the the two-knee thing was something he came up with to try & accommodate both parties for & against kneeling...
Ya do gotta admit: RayRay was in a bit of a "Tough Spot" there.
Why the Heck was Francis Scott Key on a British Boat?!? When He wrote the poem that would become The Song?
He had a "name", he was "known" well enough as An American lawyer and amateur poet to undertake a Mercy Mission for the release of Dr.
William Beanes, a prisoner of the British. Key showed the Brits letters from wounded British officers praising the care they received from Dr. Beanes. The British agreed to release Beanes, but
Key and Beanes were forced to stay with the British until the attack on Baltimore was over. Key watched the proceedings from a truce ship in the Patapsco River.
On the morning of the 14th, Key saw the American flag waving above Fort McHenry. Inspired, he began jotting down verses on the back of a letter he was carrying.
Key's poem was originally named "Defense on Fort McHenry" was printed on pamphlets by the
Baltimore American.
Key's poem was later set to the tune of a British song called "
To Anacreon in Heaven", the official song of the
Anacreontic Society, an 18th-century Gentlemen's club of amateur musicians in London (
Not a Strip Club not "that type" of Gentleman's Club or at least I don't think it was.....all the time anyways). The song eventually became known as "
The Star-Spangled Banner". Congress made it the United States national anthem in 1931.
Two hundred and Four Years & (about) 2 Months ago, a 13-year-old girl named Caroline Pickersgill helped her mother sew what would become the most famous flag in America: the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
In 1813, the young United States was still fighting the War of 1812 — often called
the Second War of Independence — against powerful Great Britain. British ships attacked and burned small towns along the Chesapeake Bay as people in Baltimore braced themselves for attack.
Soldiers spent months preparing Fort McHenry, at the mouth of the Baltimore Harbor, to defend the city. The fort’s commander, Major George Armistead, decided to fly an enormous American flag “so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance.”
So military officers went to see a local flagmaker named Mary Pickersgill, who lived with her daughter Caroline in a small house near the Baltimore Harbor. They asked her to
create a flag that measured 30 by 42 feet — wider and longer than the Pickersgills’ house.
The Pickersgills set to work immediately. Two nieces and a servant girl also helped. For six weeks in the summer of 1813, they all cut and sewed stars and stripes. Because this was before the invention of sewing machines, they did all of their sewing by hand. Experts today estimate that there were more than 1 million hand stitches in the flag.
Under her mother’s direction, Caroline and the other seamstresses made each stripe two feet wide and each star two feet from point to point. (At that time, the American flag had 15 stars and 15 stripes, representing the first 15 states in the nation.)
The Pickersgills did not have room in their house to spread out the flag for the final sewing. So Caroline helped her mother carry the stars and stripes down the street to a local brewery, where they spread out the flag on the floor and pieced it together. Years later, in a letter to Armistead’s daughter, Caroline recalled “seeing my mother down on the floor, placing the stars.” They often worked until midnight before they went home and fell in their beds, exhausted.
After six weeks of steady work, they finished the flag and presented it to the soldiers at Fort McHenry. For about a year, the huge flag flew proudly over the fort. Then British ships started firing, and private citizens rushed to help the fort’s soldiers fight back.
The battle went on all day and all night while a lawyer named Francis Scott Key watched, listened and worried from a distance. Finally, on the morning of September 14, 1814, the battle ended, and he saw the huge American flag flying high, once again, over Fort McHenry. The United States had Remained Free.
The original flag, now tattered and worn, was on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in 2013
It might not still be cuz maybe it takes up a lotta room and they like to switch up displays, I don't know but they probably still have the flag. Its 204 Years old now.
Maybe, if you want to see The Flag, stop by and ask: 1300 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, DC 20560 or call 'em at (202) 633-1000 or Email 'em at
info@si.edu
http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/online
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/61/b5/61b57bf2-d35c-46a6-baad-a560eaf92c8d/jun14_i12_starspangledbanner.jpg)
