If you get a few moments during the day, do yourself a favor and read Jefferson Morley’s cover story in the Post Magazine if you didn’t catch it this past weekend. Any longtime DCist reader knows about our love for local history and Morley’s well-written and well-researched article, “The Snow Riot” — which looks at Washington’s forgotten first race riot — is a great read.

The piece details the capital’s 1835 race riot and gives us a new perspective on one of the nation’s most established historical icons, Francis Scott Key (at right), the author of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

On a historical marker in Francis Scott Key Park in Georgetown, he is described as “active in anti-slavery causes.” That is technically accurate but hardly the whole story. Key was an active leader of the American Colonization Society, a group popular among right-thinking members of the capital elite, which, while repudiating slavery in principle, also sought to encourage Negroes to move to Africa. The city’s legally sanctioned slave trade did not stir Key to action. He was far more offended by the outside agitators from the North who sought to abolish it.

Of course, not everyone is looking at Morely’s piece as a fine piece of journalism. One writer from Herndon, (apparently a Key decendant) says in an online chat with Morley that the Post “should be ashamed of the article” for “trying to make a ‘black history moment’ by using a superficial reading of history to besmirch the name of Francis Scott Key.”

Obviously, we can’t summarize the entire piece here, so be sure to take a look.

Morley, by the way, pens the Post’s World Opinion Roundup.