Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

4. Walt Whitman, James Weldon Johnson, and the Violent Paradox of US Progress - Christopher Freeburg

{ 82 } 4 Walt Whitman, James Weldon Johnson, and the Violent Paradox of US Progress CHRISTOPHER FREEBURG C. L. R. James found himself possessed by Whitman’s “craving to mingle with all his fellow-­ men,” his rejection of standardized poetic forms, and his refusal merely to put the modern world in “individual terms.” In James’s eyes, Whitman bravely faces “the mass of things which dominate modern life.”1 Some of James’s important writing on Whitman was published in close proximity to the origination of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Phylon magazine. In one of the early issues, Phylon published an article on Whitman’s ideas about racial equality in the United States by Charles Glicksberg called “Whitman and the Negro.” While not refuting James’s praises about Whitman’s verse, Glicksberg focuses on how Whitman nearly neglects the topic of racial inequality. Glicksberg, unlike James, found it remarkable that Whitman missed the opportunity to depict the Negro as “the touchtone of democracy” or to muse on the American Dream deferred as blacks were “kept in bondage, chattel or economic, or discriminated against” without official political redress. Whitman, Glicksberg insists, nowhere explicitly denounced “the evil of racial discrimination and racial intolerance.”2 Despite Glicksberg’s insistence on Whitman’s failures to unequivocally denounce racism, Ed Folsom shows that Whitman thought seriously about slavery and racial difference. Additionally , Folsom asserts that Whitman was careful and even stra- Whitman, Johnson, & the Violent Paradox { 83 } tegic about what views he published on blacks and US racism. Whitman, in Folsom’s view, wanted to coerce slave masters into recognizing the humanity in slaves and “to voice the subjectivity of slave.”3 Yet neither Folsom’s reading of the slave nor James’s adoration of Whitman’s democratic idealism fully attend to the racial critique Glicksberg emphasizes. Though one can challenge Glicksberg’s inability to nuance Whitman’s thinking on race by examining published and unpublished works alike, as Folsom’s work certainly does, Glicksberg’s remarks remain relevant insofar as Whitman’s published writing is concerned. To this point, given Whitman’s interests in reconciling the most troubling American divisions after the Civil War, why did racialized social inequality fall off his radar entirely? Whether Whitman was an actual racist, ignored racial difference, or thought carefully about racial politics while revising his work, it is important to think broadly about how racial difference figures in Whitman’s notion of US postbellum progress. What is more, I submit, it is actually the centrality of race to Whitman’s strident commitment to US progress and national unity in postbellum America that encourages us to see connections between him and black writers such as James Weldon Johnson, whose work reflected the nation’s turbulent uncertainty, violence, and need for progressive social transformation .4 The ongoing crisis of racial violence in the United States after the Civil War, the most violent time in the United States outside of war, was one crisis that Whitman appeared to watch from a distance in his published work. Whitman’s absence is striking but also compelling for a comparison with Johnson. It is because of Whitman’s deep commitment to national unity and to sociopolitical and historical progress that he actually shares much with black writers such as Johnson, even though Whitman is mum on racial conflict and violence, while Johnson explicitly engages it. What I want to emphasize is Whitman’s and Johnson’s shared focus on the idealistic fulfillment of US democracy, social equality, and the centrality of race to it, even if their approaches appear to contradict one another. Racial violence between whites and blacks in the South replaced the regional violence of the Civil War. More importantly, the ever-­ growing racial conflict in the American themes that { 84 } Christopher Freeburg Whitman famously found interesting—life and death, sexuality, the nude body, mutilated bodies, US equality, and the future unification of the nation—were absent from his well-­ recognized revisions and expansions of Leaves of Grass. This absence makes the minute presence of black figures more interesting. In this vein, I want to demonstrate how Whitman’s “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” (1871–72), while bereft of physical violence, points to racial difference as a stagnating obstacle to the movement toward nationalist consensus, a fulfillment of absolute history. Johnson, while certainly driven by political conflict, was also interested in revealing how the historical promises of US democracy could...