Years before Colin Kaepernick’s dissent, the national anthem had become wrapped up in US cultural politics, a phenomenon that 9/11 exacerbated. In the wake of September 11th, Americans rallied around the flag in ways that at first seemed natural and inspiring, but almost immediately became performative and enveloped in the roiling divisiveness that has come to characterize 21st-century America.
Author: Derek Charles Catsam
Derek Charles Catsam is Professor of History and the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas-Permian Basin and is Senior Research Associate at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he has been the Hugh Le May Fellow in the Humanities. His most recent book is an edited collection, Struggle for a Free South Africa: Campus Anti-Apartheid Movements in Africa and the United States, 1960-1994 (Routledge, 2024). He is also the author of Don't Stick to Sports: The American Athlete’s Fight Against Injustice, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement (2021), Freedom’s Main Line: the Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, (2009), Beyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture, and Politics of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup (2014) and Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan’s Diary of the 2004 Season (2005). He is currently working on a book on one pivotal day in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and another on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s.