Nike pulls ‘Betsy Ross flag’ sneakers after Colin Kaepernick intervenes. Here’s what that flag meant to Ross and other American revolutionaries.

Nike has canceled the release of a Fourth of July-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 spokesperson said in a statement.

The shoes were shipped to retailers with images of its design posted online before the company gave notification that the merchandise should be returned. The Wall Street Journal reported 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 banner 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 in America and the United Kingdom. Ross was a lifelong Quaker who did not own any slaves, but Philadelphia had slave owners, among them a number of the men who led the American Revolution. During her life, Ross also employed Phillis, an educated black washerwoman who was once owned by a Quaker shoemaker.

So the flag was created during the time of American slavery, 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.

“Even in Betsy’s prime, the 13-star flag with the stars in the circle, that wasn’t the only flag that you’d see during Betsy’s time,” says Moulder. “The early American flags had stars in all sorts of patterns. You had flags that had pine trees. There were many, many different types of flags in Betsy’s time. This one just became more synonymous with American freedom over the years.”

In 2016, questions around the “Betsy Ross flag” as a symbol of white supremacy and nationalism arose after students waved it alongside a Make America Great Again campaign flag during a Michigan high school game, according to the Journal and local outlet MLive. 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.

The American flag has become a symbol of American identity and values, as well as the heated debates around both, but the purpose of the Betsy Ross flag wasn’t to be symbolic of either. “In Betsy Ross’ 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.”

The “Betsy Ross flag” started on its path of commercialization and identity symbolism after the Civil War, Moulder says. That’s when Ross’ name and likeness, along with the 13-star flag, began appearing on everything from the appropriate — like sewing machines — to the less appropriate bourbon decanter, cigar box, and so on until it was set for Nike shoes.

“I would think that anybody in the 18th century, late 18th century, would be stunned to hear that people are wearing flags on shirts and on hats and that sort of thing,” Moulder says. “That was a completely foreign concept to Betsy and her contemporaries, especially since the flag wasn’t even really symbolic of America at the time.”