Like you, I didn't know he was a slave owner, but there's more to it. I present an excerpt from his Wikipedia bio with the warning that Wikipedia is not censored and, in presenting verbatim quotations, does not use euphemisms like "the n-word":
Key purchased his first slave in 1800 or 1801 and owned six slaves in 1820.[15] Mostly in the 1830s, Key manumitted (set free) seven slaves, one of whom (Clem Johnson) continued to work for him for wages as his farm's foreman, supervising several slaves.[16]
Throughout his career Key also represented several slaves seeking their freedom in court (for free), as well as several masters seeking return of their runaway slaves.[17][18] Key, Judge William Leigh of Halifax, and bishop William Meade were administrators of the will of their friend John Randolph of Roanoke, who died without children and left a will directing his executors to free his more than four hundred slaves. Over the next decade, beginning in 1833, the administrators fought to enforce the will and provide the freed slaves land to support themselves.[19]
Key publicly criticized slavery's cruelties, so much that after his death a newspaper editorial stated "So actively hostile was he to the peculiar institution that he was called 'The Nigger Lawyer' .... because he often volunteered to defend the downtrodden sons and daughters of Africa. Mr. Key convinced me that slavery was wrong—radically wrong."[20] In June 1842, Key attended the funeral of William Costin, a free, mixed race resident who had challenged Washington's surety bond laws.
Key was a founding member and active leader of the American Colonization Society and its predecessor, the influential Maryland branch, the primary goal of which was to send free African-Americans back to Africa.[17] However, he was removed from the board in 1833 as its policies shifted toward abolitionist.
(emphasis added for one sentence that really highlights the ambiguity)
In the early 19th century, that idea of freeing the slaves and helping them return to Africa was popular among people who abhorred slavery but who thought that blacks and whites could never live together in peace as equals. IIRC, Lincoln favored that approach.
ETA: None of this changes the fact that "The Star-Spangled Banner" is a really bad song. I would love to see "This Land Is Your Land" become the national anthem but that's probably too much to hope for. I'd settle for "America the Beautiful" despite the repeated references to God (a popular figure from the bourgeois religion-myth).
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