Kansas Bleeds into Cuba

Albery Whitman, the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race,” dedicates the 1890 edition of his epic poem Twasinta’s Seminole to “Honorable Charles Robinson,” an abolitionist hero of the Bleeding Kansas era and the first governor of Kansas.¹ Given that Twasinta’s Seminole is an epic poem that celebrates Indigenous and Black freedom beyond the white U.S. state, it seems curious that Whitman would choose to dedicate the book to Robinson— a politician and state actor— and not a more radical Kansas symbol of white abolitionist militancy like John Brown. To invoke Robinson is to not quite let go of the belief