OPINION: Walt Whitman, black Brooklyn, Wounded Knee and me
As we celebrate the bicentennial of Walt Whitman’s birth on May 31, Brooklynites should be proud of the attention his poetry drew to their home borough. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he paid poetic tribute to the working Brooklynites of his era and those to come “a hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,” traveling to their workplaces and then their homes, feeding families and dreaming American dreams.
Whitman seemed to possess a love for the humanistic determination that, for many, defined Brooklyn.
His attitudes toward another defining element of Brooklyn — the multitudes of people of color and immigrants — need more scrutiny if we’re to be honest about the poet’s legacy.
To assess what Whitman means to Brooklyn today, one has to be aware that Brooklyn, even from its post-native beginnings, has been defined by its blackness, its African roots — first via slaves, and then through the free men and women from around the nation and the Western Hemisphere.