What did Bill Maher say about the NFL's Black National Anthem?

Bill Maher, host of HBO's political talk show "Real Time with Bill Maher," blasted the NFL after the league played the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing" before Thursday's game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

What did Bill Maher say about the NFL's Black National Anthem?

In the recent episode, Maher spoke about his disdain for the new anthem.

"To me, when people say to me sometimes, like, 'Boy, you really go after the left these days. Why?' Because you're embarrassing me," Bill Maher exclaimed. "That's why I'm going after the left in a way you never did before. Because you're inverting things that I'm not going to give up on being liberal! This is what these teachers are talking about. You're taking children and making them hyper-aware of race in a way they wouldn't otherwise be!"

Bill Maher continued, "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. 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."

“When people say to me sometimes, ‘boy, you go after the Left a lot these days, why?’ I’m like ‘Because you’re embarrassing me!’” – @BillMaher #RealTime pic.twitter.com/u8kjGqExmr

— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) September 11, 2021

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" origin

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" was written as a poem in 1900 by civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson.

A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson wrote the song/poem when someone in the community wanted to organize a celebration to commemorate the birth date of Abraham Lincoln.

In 1919, the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) adopted it as its official song.