Walt Whitman was a racist?
Yes, the great poet was a fierce white supremacist
Published in
5 min readOct 21, 2019
You can study English literature all your life and never hear a startling fact: Walt Whitman, America’s great poet, was a KKK-level white supremacist.
Recently, I noticed the subject mentioned, and I went to look up the details. I find there have been discussions, now and again. Scholars wring their hands about it — quietly. But mostly, it’s not mentioned.
