soon-to-be-stock characters of the plantation
darky, a slave who moved and thought slowly, and
the city dandy, a freed black who comically imi-
tated upper-class whites.
In 1843, the Virginia Minstrels, four white de-
lineators with experience in the circus, introduced
to New York City’s theatrical stages an act that
became the model for the minstrel show (rather
than a show with minstrels) when they performed,
for the first time ever, an entire evening of comedy
from the “Sable Genus of Humanity.” Their success
led to many large and small, traveling and resident
minstrel troupes that performed a variety of stock
routines. One sketch that became popular was
“Old Uncle Ned,” which showed the paternal kind-
ness of slave owners. Ned, a kind old black man,
was nursed by his owner through a long illness and
painful death. The tears of the master in the first
incarnations became the tears of the slave as this
minstrel act passed through the century. The slave
could no longer live without the master.
Sambo, Ned, and other black stereotypes were
turned into a positive force for abolition in Har-
riet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental novel, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly (1854), based
loosely on the story of Josiah Henson, a fugitive
slave. Capitalizing on the success of slave narra-
tives like FREDERICK DOUGLASS’s NARRATIVE OF THE
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SL AV E,
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF (1843), Stowe countered the
image of the black nonhuman other, popularized
by those who wished to justify slavery, with her
sensitive treatment and characterization of Tom,
a devoutly pious and obsequious slave. Ironically,
Stowe’s novel also codified other black stereotypes,
including the ghoulish Topsy, who “jes grew” rather
than was born; the assertive black MAMMY, To m ’s
wife, Aunt Chloe; and the wild, unruly woolly-
headed slave children, the picaninnies. The book’s
popularity led to its immediate and widespread
adaptation into minstrel shows, replete with the
brave frozen river escape of biracial Eliza with her
prized child and the egalitarian sentiments of her
noble octoroon husband, George Harris, comple-
menting the sacrificing Uncle Tom, whose bond
with his new master’s child, Evangeline, helped
create an American classic.
The minstrel images and sentimental stereo-
types survived the Civil War and boldly reappeared
in the latter part of the 19th century—for example,
in the historical collection of black folklore pub-
lished as the Uncle Remus stories in the plantation
literature of Joel Chandler Harris. African-Ameri-
can writer CHARLES CHESNUTT, in his CONJURE
WOMAN and The House behind the Cedars, sought
to challenge these images, directly or indirectly.
However, his resolute effort and those of FRANCES
ELLEN WATKINS HARPER, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON,
W. E. B. DUBOIS, and others were not enough to
overcome the popularity of minstrelsy in 19th-
century America. Sambo emerged in the 20th-cen-
tury motion picture industry, specifically its first
epic, The Birth of a Nation, and also in a toned-
down version with the arrival of talkies like The
Jazz Singer. During the depression of the 1930s,
the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) promoted the national
production of minstrel shows and distributed
minstrel scripts. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, rivaled
in popularity only by the King James Bible, is still
produced as serious drama or parody today.
Much in the way that HARLEM RENAISSANCE au-
thors challenged various forms of literary repre-
sentations steeped in racist perceptions of African
Americans, post–World War II black writers also
challenged them head on. RICHARD WRIGHT stands
in the vanguard, as the title of his collection of
short stories Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) suggests.
Similarly, in INVISIBLE MAN (1952), RALPH ELLISON
tackles both Owens’s presentation of Uncle Re-
mus’s Brer Rabbit and the image of the puppetlike
dancing Sambo.
However, the most direct criticism came from
JAMES BALDWIN in “EVERYBODY’S PROTEST NOVEL.”
While identifying Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the “corner-
stone of American social protest fiction,” Baldwin
indicts Stowe and her novel for ultimately giv-
ing more hindrance than benefit. Its stereotypes,
Baldwin argues, confined rather than liberated,
separated blacks from society, and sanitized them
for saintly existence with superior whites, as it for-
got the enduring bond and mutual bind she (and
white society) had with blacks. Baldwin derides
Stowe’s Uncle Tom for his willingness to endure,446 Sambo and Uncle Tom