Walt Disney’s Song of the South (1946) Artemus Ward Dept. of Political Science Northern Illinois University aeward@niu.edu

Introduction The Uncle Remus stories are an important part of African-American oral history. Disney’s Hollywood version of Uncle Remus portrays the fictional idyllic master-slave relationship of the old south. Walt Disney may have believed that he was doing the right thing when he produced the film, but he succeeded primarily in robbing the world of a folk hero and instead enslaving him in a cartoon image.

Origin Folk stories of animal tricksters derive from both the African and Native American cultures. They were passed down orally, and the Brer Rabbit stories specifically grew out of the experience of American slaves. Eventually whites heard these stories, retold them, and wrote them down.

Joel Chandler Harris Harris worked on a Georgia plantation, got to know the slaves, and listened to them tell folk stories. He wrote them down and published them in the Atlanta Constitution helping to popularize them with white readers. Harris was part of the “New South” movement of “progressive” yet paternalistic writers who stressed regional and racial reconciliation during and after the Reconstruction era. He said that he began the Uncle Remus stories as a serial to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future.“

Initial Impact The tales became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South. Few outside of the South had ever heard accents like those spoken in the tales, and no one had ever seen the dialect legitimately and faithfully recorded in print. To the North and those abroad, the stories were a "revelation of the unknown.” Mark Twain noted in 1883, "in the matter of writing [the African-American dialect], he is the only master the country has produced.” Twain went on to appropriate Harris’ dialect in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Countless subsequent writers borrowed heavily from Harris including A.A. Milne with his Winnie-the-Pooh stories.

Black Cartoon Characters Did Disney deliberately create black cartoon characters? Consider that for Fantasia (1940) the character “Sunflower” was a hoof shining centaurette who had “attitude” while polishing the hooves of white centaurettes. This sequence aired uncut in theaters and on television in 1966 before the scene was cut for the film's 1969 theatrical reissue. In Dumbo (1941) the jive-talking black crows—including Jim Crow—sing: “I'd be done see'n about everything/when I see an elephant fly!” In The Jungle Book (1967) , all the animals in the jungle speak in proper British accents. Except, of course, for the jive-talking, gibberish-spouting monkeys who desperately want to become "real people.“

The Disney Version Song of the South is a frame story based on three Brer Rabbit stories, "The Laughing Place", "The Tar Baby", and "The Briar Patch". Yet there is little in the film that resembles the original stories except for the setting and characters. African-American actor Clarence Muse, hired to help with the script, made suggestions for upgrading the image of the black characters in the film. When those suggestions were rejected, he resigned, saying that he believed the movie would be “detrimental to the cultural advancement of the Negro people.” Similarly, actor Rex Ingram turned down the role of Uncle Remus, reasoning that the film would “set back my people many years.”

Contemporary Controversy On its release, the film was immediately denounced by the NAACP who called for a total boycott of the movie and protested the perpetuation of “a dangerously glorified picture of slavery.” Ebony said that Disney’s Remus was an “Uncle Tom-Aunt Jemima caricature complete with all the fawning standard equipment thereof: the toothy smile, battered hat, grey beard, and a profusion of ‘dis and ‘dat talk.”

Conclusion Disney’s Song of the South changed the Uncle Remus-Brer Rabbit folktales forever. No longer part of the philosophical teachings of African-American culture, the stories were transformed by the film to be little more than entertainment for whites. Though there have been some recent attempts to rescue the stories as important records of African-American folktales, the Disney film and related materials have left an indelible image of Remus as a negative stereotype and the stories as little more than Disney entertainment. The film has never been released on home video or DVD in the United States. Should it be?