PHILADELPHIA – Nike has canceled the release of a July 4th-inspired sneaker featuring the famous Betsy Ross-sewn, 13-star version of the American flag.
"Nike has chosen not to release the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July as it featured an old version of the American flag," a Nike spokeswoman said in a statement.
The shoes were shipped to retailers with images of its design already posted online before the company gave notification that the merchandise should be returned. The Wall Street Journal reports that activist, Nike endorsee, and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick raised concerns with company officials over the flag's imagery and its relationship to early American slavery before the decision came down to pull the shoe.
While historians have debated the designer of the 13-star flag, the flag itself is believed to have been sewn by Ross, who was part of the Philadelphia region's Quaker community. Quakers played a significant role in the abolition movement against slavery both in America and in the United Kingdom. Ross was a lifelong Quaker who did not own any slaves herself but did live in a city with slave owners, including a number of the men who led the American Revolution. Ross also employed Phillis, an educated black washerwoman who was once owned by a Quaker shoemaker.
The flag was created during a time when American slavery existed, but as Lisa Moulder, director of Old City's Betsy Ross House, said, it was in a city where black slaves and freedmen often coexisted. Like many of America's defining artifacts — from the Constitution to the Statue of Liberty — it has become mired in complex debates and mixed-up histories over whom their messages speak to and represent.
In 2016, questions around the "Betsy Ross flag" as a symbol of modern white supremacy and nationalism flared after students waved it alongside a Donald Trump/Make America Great Again campaign flag during a Michigan high school game, according to the Wall Street Journal. In response to the incident, the president of the NAACP's local chapter released a statement, declaring students had "unwittingly or intentionally" used a flag that has "been appropriated by the so-called 'Patriot Movement' and other militia groups who are responding to America's increasing diversity with opposition and racial supremacy," while chanting "go home" to their opponents.
"In Betsy Ross's time, flags were strictly utilitarian — they were military tools," Moulder says. "They were used to help troops on land and at sea identify each other. The American flag wasn't commercialized or had the same sort of symbolism that it has today until much later."
