Bill Maher Hits NFL Over Black National Anthem Performance: ‘We Should Have One National Anthem’

HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher slammed the National Football League during his show Friday night, saying in response to an Alicia Keys performance shown before kickoff Thursday that the league shouldn’t be playing the song known as the black national anthem before events.

“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,” emphasized Maher.

“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 added.

The words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” are from a poem by James Weldon Johnson. It was later crafted into a song, and in about the 1920s, it was “adopted by the NAACP as the official Negro National Anthem,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. – READ MORE