Half a century after Baldwin denounced it as “a very bad novel” in its “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” and promotion of feminine tears and anguish as a form of political protest, both the novel and Baldwin’s now canonical critique are ripe for reassessment.īaldwin wrote that Tom “has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.” Tom’s political impotence, for Baldwin, is symbolized by his sexual impotence. When I returned to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not long ago, it struck me as far more culturally capacious - and sexually charged - than either Baldwin or the 60’s militants had acknowledged. “Uncle Tom” had become such a potent brand of political impotence that nobody really cared how far its public usages had traveled from the reality of its literary prototype. In a scathing 1949 critique, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin boldly linked the sentimentality of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to the melodrama of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son,” a work far more appealing to black power types. I doubt that many of those who tossed around the insult had actually read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael called the N.A.A.C.P.’s executive director, Roy Wilkins, an “Uncle Tom,” while the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked, in its position paper on black power: “Who is the real villain - Uncle Tom or Simon Legree?” Muhammad Ali pinned the epithet on Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell and Joe Frazier as he pummeled them. He was the embodiment of “race betrayal,” an object of scorn, a scapegoat for all of our political self-doubts. not a black man with a white heart, but a black man with a black heart.” Intense cultural clashes emerged within the race, as Southern, rural migrants - the proverbial children of Uncle Tom - flooded north, and as black people, spurred on by a variety of warring political organizations, became ever more vocal about ending Jim Crow segregation.īlack nationalists in subsequent decades turned Uncle Tom into a swear word, but it was with the rise of popular black militancy in the 60’s that poor old Uncle Tom became the quintessential symbol that separated the good black guys from the servile sellouts. George Alexander McGuire declared at Garvey’s first convention in 1920, “and his place must be taken by the new leader of the Negro race. “The Uncle Tom nigger has got to go,” the Rev. The scholar Stephen Railton traces the first printed uses of the term to the black nationalist Marcus Garvey and his followers, in about 1919, a year of bloody race riots as black World War I veterans demanded their civil rights. I first read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an eighth-grade class in 1964, when it was probably just going out of fashion as required reading for American school children - and the phrase “Uncle Tom” was about to come into widespread use as the ultimate instrument of black-on-black derogation.
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