Super Bowl Myths

I have been just watching the pre-game activities and waiting for the Super Bowl to begin. Out of nowhere, they announced that former and present NFL greats, would be reciting the Declaration of Independence, as is the tradition before each Super Bowl. I had no idea this was the tradition, but it gave me an opportunity to listen once again to these words of Independence by the Rebels from the British Crown, which was signed starting on July 4, 1776 through Aug. 2, 1776 by the 55 signatories.

Although this has nothing to do with the Super Bowl, I should note some little known facts about the slave-holding colonies in 1776, that are rarely spoken about.

Right after the signing in August, the biggest battle of the Revolutionary War happened, and the British trounced the Rebel Continental army in Long Island, nearly forcing an American surrender. Those loyal to King George III, surged into New York City and remained under British protection for the rest of the war. These Loyalists had no desire to sever their links with Great Britain, along with one-fifth of other Americans who felt the same way. Those who remained loyal to the King, were called Loyalists or Tories, and at the end of the war, 80,000 of them left the colonies to start new lives in other parts of the British Empire.

Among them were about 3,000 black Loyalists - former slaves who had been granted their freedom in exchange for fighting for the British, who fled north to Canada to escape America's oppressive, peculiar institution of slavery.

The scale and range of this exodus points to a myth and a gap in what is popularly believed about the American revolutionary period. We pride ourselves on the freedom and tolerance embedded in our founding principles, but have rarely acknowledged the discrepancies between the nation’s vaunted commitment to these principles, like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, and the gross abuse of these principles in practice — glaringly above all, during the subjugation of slavery, followed by 100 years of Jim Crow segregation. Compared with the United States, the British Empire was a good bet if you were an enslaved black or a Native American.

Those black slaves who remained in slavery and were unable to escape to enjoy the 'freedom' that these Rebel American patriots were denying them, had to wait another 90 years before their freedom finally was gained at the end of the civil war.

It should be noted that even today, many of the ideals of the Declaration as applied to blacks and other minorities, are still just that - ideals, rather than realities. So interjecting them inappropriately into a sports event like the Super Bowl, as if they were a reality for all citizens, is as hypocritical as the hypocrisy of the founding fathers, most of whom were slaveholders.