Uncle Remus and the Tar Baby
Joel Chandler Harris, once a household name in the United States, is relatively obscure today, though many readers will readily recognize his recurring character, Uncle Remus, as well as figures from African American folk traditions that he made widely known: Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the Tar Baby. Harris’s reputation precipitously declined after Disney released Song of the South, which was based on his books. The movie was produced 38 years after Harris’s death, and has been widely criticized for idealizing slavery through its depiction of the hyperbolically happy and loyal servant, Uncle Remus. Even the film’s premiere in Atlanta underscored its racial problems: James Baskett, the African American star of the film, was prohibited from attending the viewing at the segregated theater.
Harris’s books—some of the most influential and racially complicated children’s books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—reveal a complex picture of the sociopolitical landscape in the South and in the nation as a whole in the decades following the Civil War. Harris, a journalist in Georgia, was troubled by the rise of white mob rule in the Jim Crow South, and it appears from his journalism, fiction, and correspondence that he hoped to ameliorate racial tensions. From a contemporary perspective, Harris’s career, examined closely, seems laden with inconsistencies: while Harris was an advocate for the improvement of living conditions and rights for black people in the South, he was also a segregationist. While he (and later, his son) spoke out against lynching and racial violence in Atlanta at the height of Jim Crow, his fiction often appears nostalgic for the antebellum South. While he was widely admired in his day for his careful attention to the sounds of the spoken stories of middle Georgian African Americans, contemporary readers often find his stories choked by phonetic spellings that seem to derogate the dignity of the African American speaker.
Throughout his career, Harris was interested in fostering tolerance (though not equality) by making his white readers sympathetic to African American characters. He believed that regular exposure to pictures of interracial harmony would be more effective in convincing white Southerners of the rights of African Americans than would political rhetoric. Near the end of his life, when he founded Uncle Remus’s Magazine, he told Andrew Carnegie that his primary objective was “to fit the magazine to such gentle and sure persuasion with respect to the negro question, which is also the white man’s question, that honest people cannot resist them...” To Harris, the triptych of the Uncle Remus tales—Uncle Remus, the anonymous little boy, and Brer Rabbit—was the perfect tool for this "gentle persuasion," though the image came to be seen as less gentle and less persuasive over the course of the twentieth century.
We have collected here numerous texts related to Harris, and in coming months, we plan to add more content related to him, including selections from his journalism at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and excerpts from Uncle Remus Magazine).
Background Information
Biography of Joel Chandler Harris
Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant
Further Reading on Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris and Folklore
Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant
Further Reading on American Folklore
Interpretive Essays
Uncle Remus in Pictures
D. B. Dowd
Uncle Remus’s Cultural Afterlife
Amanda Gailey
Primary Materials
Books by Joel Chandler Harris
A collection of Harris’s books intended for children or families
Joel Chandler Harris’s Correspondence
A selection of Harris’s correspondence with authors, illustrators, and other notable figures
By the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.