A long OP but replies can be short or long as you wish. I could see this as more fitting for IMHO or even GD, but since it’s literature and movie related I’ll put it here and see if it gets any responses.
The school where I work is doing a presentation for Black History Month involvign faculty and students portraying historical characters in vignettes discussing their significance in black history. I’ve been asked to participate and (unlike the other two white faculty members asked) I agreed. I’d originally thought of John Brown since I think he’s a fascinating character, but I was specifically asked to choose a southerner. I ultimately chose Joel Chandler Harris.
I’ve been interested in him for years. For starters there’s a physical resemblance between us (me and him, or vice versa- hard to tell us apart really), but more importantly I’ve researched him since I used to live a few miles away from his birthplace and developed a strong interest in him.** I worked for some while on a show for three actors (one man [me] playing him, another playing alternately Uncle Remus [and his historical counterparts] and W.E.B. Dubois, and a third playing his foster father and Sam Clemens and other characters he was associated with) and the fables being enacted by puppets. For the presentation all I need to do is take the script down from 2.5 hours to 5 minutes.
Anyway, in reviewing research I was reacquainted with his ongoing controversy. In his own life he had almost universal critical success (at least initially) and unqualified commercial success***. He was the bestselling author in 19th century America after Twain (who was a good friend and admirer) and even some black intellectuals praised him for preserving the stories told by the slaves. Folklorists fell in love with him, fascinated at the similarity to fables not just from the tribes in western Africa and the Cherokees but also to tales told in India and China. The harsh criticism started in his own life as well, however (DuBois being one of his earliest and most prominent black critics, H.L. Mencken the same for white critics). He was accused of cultural theft, romanticizing slavery, and denigrating blacks with dialect, etc…
There is some misunderstanding of his life. Among other things he was not, as sometimes reported, the silver-spoon plantation boy of the stories but rather the illegitimate son of an Irish day laborer he never met and an impoverished seamstress, and he grew up in a shack on a plantation where his best friends were the slave children and where he heard the Br’er Rabbit (and other) stories firsthand. Ironically in some ways he was considered something of a radical liberal in his own day. His editorials (he was a journalist before and during his Uncle Remus career) basically called for the South to “get the hell over it” (my words, not his) in terms of the war and slavery, he gave thousands of dollars of his own money to Tuskegee and other black colleges and schools and praised Booker T. Washington (which of course didn’t endear him to DuBois). He not only had many black friends but his books sold well in the black community himself.
OTOH, he was every bit the paternalist and a bearer of the “white man’s burden”. His racial views, while moderate for his time and place, were nowhere near as progressive as, say, Mark Twain’s: he believed slavery had ultimately been for the best as it introduced the “savages” (his word, not mine) in Africa to “culture” and Christianity (Harris was a very devout convert to Catholicism), and he definitely had white supremacist views all around (as did most white men). Part of my presentation is to mention that Harris saw what he believed rather than believed what he saw (a valuable point since the school is currently reverberating with the “critical thinking” catchphrase that SACS has mandated and all must pay lip service to).
However, I also think some of his treatment is unfair. It is highly probable that had he not recorded the folklore of his plantations that it would have been lost forever save perhaps to a few obscure academic folklorists. While he was definitely racist and white supremacist by our standards he was moderate by his own timeplace and actually less so than, say, Lord Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts whose comments on Africans can be jaw-dropping) or even many northern intellectuals and politicians. His work has been accused of being propaganda but I think this is overanalyzing: his first point was to entertain and his second was to make a buck (he was sole support of his mother, wife, and nine kids and “wrote what he knew” to make ends meet- he was stunned when the book made him rich rather than a side income). I think it’s ridiculous that Disney does not rerelease Song of the South due to racial controversy as whatever else it is it was a masterpiece of animation/live action fusion and generally well done, and it even broke a barrier of sorts: James Baskett (Uncle Remus) was the first black actor to win an Academy Award.****
So anyway, what do you think of Harris/Uncle Remus? Is it cultural theft, cultural preservation, or a little of both in your opinion? Are the works too racist to have merit outside of an academic setting (I don’t think anyone would deny their historical importance to U.S. history/U.S. lit/American Studies etc.). Should Disney re-release Song of the South? If you have small kids, would you let them watch that movie or read Harris’s works? I’d love to read other people’s thoughts on any/all of these (or related matters).
*Needless to say, portraying a “white southern male significant in black history” can be a bit of a landmine for a white guy to do in Alabama during black history month (i.e. “y’all gone supply the whip or should I brang one of my own?”). I thought of doing Eston Hemings (son of Sally and [probably and certainly imo] Thomas Jefferson who though 1/8 or so black passed as white, but that was vetoed also as some feared a white guy playing a black guy (even one who crossed over the color line) may offend. So, not wanting to do anybody too controversial (Bull Conner or Jeff Davis or Robert E. Lee or whatever) or too liberal and non-representative of southern men (Hugo Black, various southern abolitionists, etc.) and wanting to have at least a little bit of controversy, I chose Harris.
**I wrote a thread three years ago on my encounter with Alice Walker and our talk of Mr. Harris.
***He would have had even more commercial success as he was offered fortunes (the equivalent of millions today) to go on reading tours, but he had absolutely crippling stagefright. Clemens described him as “bashful as a sick kitten” but “the sweetest man I ever met”.
**I’m using actor in its gender-specific case, since Hattie McDaniel won for best supporting actress.