Raquel Belden
“Mr. Bear Catches Old Mr. Bullfrog,” one of five murals for Techwood Homes, painted by TRAP artist Earl J. Neff (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 26, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Under the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States federal government established several public art projects to enhance public buildings, provide jobs to artists, and boost morale amongst American citizens.[1] Programs funded by the U.S. Treasury culminated in the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), which ran from 1935 to 1939.[2] It was through the TRAP that Atlanta’s first completed public housing project, Techwood Homes, acquired a granite sculpture of a fawn, a painting of Don Quixote, and five murals of Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” characters for the project’s on-site kindergarten.
The Uncle Remus stories, written in the Reconstruction-era South, are told from the perspective of a formerly enslaved person entertaining (and, through allegory, teaching lessons to) his former enslaver’s son.[3] The stories feature several recurrent animal characters—a trickster rabbit, an equally mischievous terrapin, a vicious wolf, a proud yet gullible fox, a mighty but easily-duped bear [Figures 1, 2]. Each is given the appellation “Brer,” or “brother” phonetically spelled to indicate a Southern Black dialect.
Figure 1: “Mr. Bear Catches Old Mr. Bullfrog,” one of five murals for Techwood Homes, painted by TRAP artist Earl J. Neff (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 26, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 2: “Brother Rabbit and the Little Girl,” one of five murals for Techwood Homes, painted by TRAP artist Earl J. Neff (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 26, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
This artistic subject matter was likely chosen for its relevancy to Atlanta, the city where Harris lived and where he wrote the famous tales.[4] While painted by Cleveland artist Earl J. Neff, many local sources informed this imagery, including documents from the former Atlanta home of Harris, known as the Wren’s Nest; Emory University’s Joel Chandler Harris papers; and the advice of an Emory English professor, Dr. Thomas H. English. [5] When we consider English’s advice and understanding of the Remus stories, it seems clear that the Techwood murals may have been intended to “properly” socialize the housing project’s young white residents into Jim Crow America and, more specifically, into the city of Atlanta and its complex racial dynamics.
English’s involvement in this public art project is explained by his close friendship with Charles F. Palmer—the real estate developer who organized the building of Techwood Homes—and is evidenced by archived correspondence between the two men.[6] One archival document, typed on Palmer’s personal letterhead, suggests that the businessman acted as a go-between, sending Neff’s preliminary drawings to Professor English and eliciting the professor’s assessment of them [Figure 3].[7] According to Palmer’s retelling, English praised the artist’s “re-imagining” of the tales that, though fresh, retained “enough of [the original illustrator’s] spirit … to make them easy of recognition by children.”[8] Recognizability is clearly of foremost importance to English: he expresses reservations about and editorial suggestions for two details, both of which he claims detract from the overall legibility of the work by being too “symbolically presented” for children to interpret.[9] The second (and more jarring) of these recommendations concerns the color of the tar baby in the mural of “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story.” According to English, in the drawing the baby is “a washed-out tan. It seems very clear that he should be jet black for after all he is a tar-baby.”[10] English’s recommendation to darken the baby’s skin tone was implemented in the final version of the painting, suggesting that the professor’s concerns were considered valid [Figures 4, 5]. To understand this detail’s importance, it is necessary to examine the original tale and potential interpretations of its allegory.
Figure 3: Correspondence between Thomas English and Charles Palmer, undated (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 27, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 4: Preliminary drawing of “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” one of five murals for Techwood Homes, drawn by TRAP artist Earl J. Neff (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 26, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 5: Final version of the “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” one of five murals for Techwood Homes, painted by TRAP artist Earl J. Neff, reproduced in The Atlanta Constitution, October 31, 1937 (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 27, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
“SHE AIN’T SAYIN’ NOTHIN’”: READING THE TAR BABY TALE AS RACIAL ALLEGORY
The story of the tar baby is as follows.[11] Brer Fox, the recurrent victim of Brer Rabbit’s tricks, decides to trap the rabbit by constructing a fake baby from a mixture of calamus root, tar, and turpentine. When the rabbit encounters the baby, and the baby fails to respond to his greetings, Brer Rabbit, increasingly frustrated, punches the tar and becomes entrapped in the sticky substance. The tale ends ambiguously—perhaps the fox finally had his chance to eat the rabbit, perhaps not. Uncle Remus does not reveal the rabbit’s fate to the little boy listening to his tale.
The baby’s construction from tar is essential to the narrative, which may suffice to explain English’s insistence that the figure’s skin color be altered. There are nevertheless undeniable racial politics at play in the baby’s appearance. Firstly, Brer Rabbit attempts, to no avail, to converse with a black body that, when struck, feels no pain. We could read this as a racist denial of Black sentience and humanity.[12] Moreover, though the baby is inert intellectually and sensorially, it has the power to impinge upon Brer Rabbit’s own body and—assuming the fox had his way (and had his dinner)—bring about the rabbit’s demise.
And the tar baby doesn’t just trap; it encroaches. The tar expands and spreads the more the rabbit fights, enveloping first his arms, then his feet, and finally his head. This detail is especially noteworthy when we consider slum clearance proponents’ rhetoric of encroachment and “contamination,” in which comparisons of the spreading of slums to cancer and disease were prominent. Such rhetoric focused on the impoverished built environment, its unsanitary conditions, and the social or moral decay those conditions were thought to engender.[13] In its reports advocating for prewar slum clearance, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) described the “shacks and shanties” of these neighborhoods as “creeping close” to Georgia’s Capitol building and Atlanta’s City Hall.[14] The proximity of the so-called slum was considered a threat to the “safety, health, and morals” of Atlanta’s business and political core.[15] Similarly, in his memoir, Adventures of a Slum Fighter, Charles Palmer refers to the neighborhood that would be replaced by Techwood Homes as an “untended abscess” festering uncomfortably close to “the heart of [the] city.”[16] So, if slums encroached like tar, then the unsuspecting rabbit caught in the tar baby trap was the city’s bustling downtown: in 1944 the AHA asserted that “to reach Atlanta’s business and office building section, from any direction, you must pass through slums which surround the city.”[17] In the eyes of the AHA, if the encroaching slums continued to choke the central business district and cut it off from the rest of the city and state, the very economic viability of Atlanta would be at risk.[18]
Slum contamination rhetoric often failed to address the racial makeup of the areas in question.[19] But clearance and subsequent rebuilding was used to segregate cities, targeting and eliminating pockets of Black residency to be replaced by all-white housing projects like Techwood.[20] The AHA acknowledged these effects of redevelopment in its first annual report, even if it did not frame segregation explicitly as its goal, writing, “If we begin with the worst housing, we generally displace colored people. Some of these areas, formerly entirely white, should return to white occupancy, if white low-income families are also to enjoy the benefits of easy access to work, schools, and churches in downtown Atlanta.”[21] The language used here suggests that the AHA marked out certain areas as inherently entitled to white individuals. It is telling that the “white-entitled” future site of Techwood Homes was adjacent to the downtown commercial business district. Palmer himself, as the owner of several downtown office buildings, directly benefitted from the housing project being exclusively white-occupied, as white occupancy would have improved the property values of the surrounding downtown blocks. So, though contamination rhetoric did not explicitly deal with race, it certainly helped advance racist agendas of urban segregation.
I argue that the tar baby allegory, installed on the walls of Techwood’s kindergarten, was appropriated to reinforce these ideas about race and space in the minds of the project’s white children. The story implicitly taught the children that maintaining personal space was a matter of safety, and that they should think twice before interacting with people unfamiliar or different in appearance, for fear of encroachment and entrapment. Of course, one might argue, we understand the tar baby to be inhuman; it is tar that is encroaching, not a Black body. In Neff’s illustration, however, nothing indicates that we are looking at a fake child: the tar baby’s body is accurately proportioned, its face turned away and unable to be examined for any evidence of counterfeit. Brer Rabbit, moreover, has not yet struck the child, which too would clue us into artifice by revealing the tar’s sticky residue. For all of English’s insistence on literalness and recognizability, he seems to have deemed this point of confusion—is the baby human or not?—acceptable. Perhaps it is meant to be a kind of warning: even those who know the tale’s outcome run the risk of repeating Brer Rabbit’s mistake and, therefore, ought to be apprehensive around the unfamiliar and keep their distance.
The “threat” of the tar baby was not the only device that worked to instill the logics of Jim Crow America in the murals’ child viewers. This was also accomplished by the narrative figure of Remus himself and the established tropes upon which this character relies.[22]
‘UNCLE REMUS’ IN THE PUBLIC EYE: CONSIDERING DISNEY’S SONG OF THE SOUTH
A character trope is a predictable, recurring, and/or stereotypical representation of a certain personality or kind of person.[23] A trope typically relies on the preconceptions of readers or viewers to advance a story’s plot. Think of a damsel in distress, a mad scientist, or the girl next door. When we recognize one of these types, we can guess that the damsel needs a savior, that the scientist cannot be trusted to do good, and that the girl next door is innocent and wholesome. Tropes work because they are culturally conditioned; the author can rely on his or her readers' expectations without making explicit statements.
The tropes informing the Uncle Remus figure are thrown into particularly sharp relief when we examine the production, reception, and criticism of the Walt Disney film, Song of the South (1946), which features both animated and live-action depictions of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and Brer Frog. Disney’s negotiations with the Harris family for rights to these characters began only two years after Neff painted the Techwood murals. As a roughly contemporaneous creation, this notorious film can be used to situate the Techwood paintings through prevailing public attitudes toward these characters and the stereotypes informing them.
Delayed by the Second World War, the time between the planning stage of production for Song of the South and its release into theaters spanned nearly a decade. The film was meant to replicate the box office success of David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind (1939), then the biggest and highest grossing Hollywood film of all time.[24] Like Gone with the Wind, Disney’s Song of the South presented an idealized picture of the Old South and even cast Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in Selznick’s picture, in a similar role. “Mammies” in the antebellum South were usually the primary caretakers of an enslaver’s family, and as such, characters reliant on the mammy trope are typically nurturing, self-sacrificing, and loyal.[25] Other character tropes featured in Disney’s film include the “pickaninny”—a comical Black child figure, called Toby—and, of course, the Uncle Remus character, who is a comic variant of the traditionally tragic Uncle Tom type.[26] The “Uncle Tom” trope, named for the titular character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, denotes an enslaved Black man who is content with his servile role and overly loyal to his enslavers.[27]
From these descriptors alone, it is obvious that these characters are defined not independently but by their relationship to other (white) characters. They exist primarily as narrative devices to advance the plot of white protagonists—offering advice, friendship, comfort, comic relief, and, of course, their labor. In Song of the South, it is young Johnny, grandson of Remus’s former enslaver, who primarily reaps the benefits. Remus’s stories, Toby’s companionship, and Mammy’s care see him through the trials of boyhood.
The race relations presented here minimize the horrors and brutality of slavery and, in so doing, work to ameliorate white guilt. To return briefly to our primary source material regarding the Techwood murals, Harris allegedly based the Uncle Remus character on his own experience living on a plantation in his younger years (from 1862 to 1866) and living in Reconstruction-era Atlanta (from 1876 to 1908, the year of his death).[28] It is unclear to what extent Harris witnessed the brutality of slavery, if at all. In an essay he wrote for The Georgia Review, Thomas English suggests that the transplanted Black freedman was a ubiquitous figure in postbellum Atlanta and thus one that would have been familiar to Harris, though there he provides no evidence that the author interacted directly with such individuals.[29] Regardless of Harris’s actual experiences, his Remus character assumed a certain legitimacy precisely because he could allege to have encountered such individuals firsthand. To understand why this claim to legitimacy is harmful, consider English’s description of Remus: the storyteller is an “essential Negro” with “the characteristics of a primitive culture” who despises members of his own race, finds the notion of social equality with white folks ludicrous, and derives strength from “an inward freedom” that could not be taken from him, even as an enslaved person.[30] He, in fact, longs for the “ol’ farmin’ days” of enslavement.[31] By claiming this character was an accurate representation of slaves and freedmen, Harris promoted the idea that the racial hierarchy and economy of slavery in the Old South was not only beneficial to white slaveowners but favored by Black individuals as well. The large number of testimonials provided by white readers following the publication of Harris’s first Uncle Remus story—in which many attested to the “authenticity” of Remus’s depiction—proves how this character catered to the nostalgic and highly questionable yearnings of white individuals.[32] This is one result of the usage of character tropes: because tropes rely on the culturally-conditioned expectations of their intended audience, the worldview and biases of that audience are bolstered when encountering stereotypical characters like Remus.
This biased picture of plantation life becomes even more insidious when one considers the “origins” of Uncle Remus’s stories. Harris, in the preface to Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, asserts that these tales were brought to the Americas from Africa by Black individuals.[33] The true heritage of these stories remains unclear, but Brer Rabbit—who, being a relatively weak creature, must rely on his wit to outsmart bigger and fiercer animals—shares many qualities with the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, Esu Elegbara.[34] As such, the stories Harris wrote may indeed have been similar to some tales told by real Black plantation storytellers. However, his claim should be understood as yet another attempt to legitimize the Remus character and, by extension, the attitudes Remus held about the Old South, slavery, and race relations.
Because Harris framed these stories as authentically African and his narrator as inspired by real-life individuals, white southerners reading the Harris stories (or watching Song of the South or looking at the Techwood murals) could feel the same nostalgia Remus felt for the “ol’ farmin’ days” with a clean conscience and without critical reflection. After all, they might (incorrectly) retort, how could these stories or characters possibly be racist or harmful to Black individuals, when they originated from Black communities? How could Remus possibly be a problematic construction, when Harris claimed to have known Black individuals just like Remus?
During World War II, considerable efforts were made on the part of both the NAACP and the Office of War Information to diversify Black representation in Hollywood beyond servile roles.[35] By the time Song of the South was released into theaters in 1946, critics and audiences found the film to be disappointing and quite culturally regressive, its decidedly outmoded stereotypes particularly jarring.[36] Such diversification had not yet taken place at the moment of the Techwood murals’ creation in 1937, however, and so the racial undercurrents in their content remained largely unexamined and continued to operate insidiously. Archetypes and tropes are, in a way, ideal for teaching, as they rely on simplification, repetition, and—to use English’s term—ease of recognition. The rabbit is almost always clever, the fox almost always one step behind, the narrator always happy to counsel the young white listener. And while these murals do not literally depict Uncle Remus, a closer look at the public life and media coverage of these works attests to the persistence of the Remus character trope as fodder for white nostalgia and as a vehicle for perpetuating regressive racial attitudes.
THE TECHWOOD MURALS IN ATLANTA
Like nearly all aspects of the Techwood housing project’s development and early years, the Neff murals received considerable publicity once procured, and the public life of these works is marked by several reassertions of the Remus figure in name and likeness. Both the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal published articles on the panels, their headlines identifying the characters not as Harris’s but as Remus’s [Figures 6, 7, 8].[37] Additionally, prior to their installation at the Techwood site, the Neff murals were shown at the High Museum of Art alongside a painting of Uncle Remus.[38] While these promotional decisions may have been guided by the recognizability of Remus’s name, they have the added effect of reaffirming and legitimating the fictitious narrator of these stories and, by extension, the image of a subservient, content, self-hating, and white-loving "Uncle Tom" figure. As one headline proclaims, “Uncle Remus will Live Again on Techwood Kindergarten Canvases.”[39] And in this character, Harris’s whitewashed fantasy of the Old South could live on, too.
Figure 6: “Techwood to Have Uncle Remus Art: Five Murals Depicting Joel Chandler Harris Characters Painted for Project,” The Atlanta Constitution, October 31, 1937 (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 27, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 7: “Uncle Remus Characters to Live at Techwood Homes: Beloved Characters of Uncle Remus Stories to Adorn Walls of Techwood Kindergarten,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 15, 1937 (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 27, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 8: “Uncle Remus Will Live Again on Techwood Kindergarten Campus,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 15, 1937 (Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 27, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
These murals were intended for an interior space within the Techwood housing project, centrally located within the complex next to other communal facilities such as the auditorium and a laundry room [Figures 9, 10, 11]. Once installed, physical access to these artworks would have been limited mostly to residents of Techwood Homes. But because of their exhibition at the High Museum and their coverage in the Atlanta newspapers, the audience of these murals came to include Atlantans other than the project’s residents. So, not only did these murals and stories function, on one level, to socialize young white Techwood residents into contemporary racial dynamics, but they also sent a message to the city about the racial politics implicit in the building of Techwood. Specifically, they communicated that through the segregation of Atlanta and the expulsion of Black individuals to free up potentially lucrative real estate, Black agency could be limited. Not only were Black folks denied the freedom to choose where to live but also the ability to live near an especially prosperous commercial district, which in turn made commuting to work in this district even more difficult. And all this was done, as mentioned above, in the name of some permanent entitlement of this area to white people.
Figure 9: Site plan of Techwood Homes. The kindergarten would have been located on the basement floor of Building no. 1, Group no. 108 and is here indicated with a red asterisk (microfilm drawer 2.7, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center).
Figure 10: Plan of Building no. 1, Group no. 108, basement level with kindergarten outlined in red. Other communal spaces on this floor include an auditorium and a laundry room (microfilm drawer 2.7, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center).
Figure 11: East elevation of Building no. 1, Group no. 108. Kindergarten would have been accessed going down the stairs indicated with red arrows (microfilm drawer 2.7, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center).
Three factors emerge as especially crucial to the successful communication of the racial and spatial politics implicit in the Techwood project. For one, the message was conveyed through recognizable visual and textual tropes, which functioned not only to encode racist sentiments (in the Uncle Remus character) but also to feign Black approval of them (through the supposedly “African” stories Remus tells). Second, this political messaging was further validated by the authority of the cultural and media institutions implicated in the creation and reception of the murals—the Atlanta newspapers, the High Museum, Emory University, the TRAP. Indeed, through the involvement of these institutions, this public art project not only reached a broader audience but was also elevated to the status of high art and could even lay claim to a level of academic validity. Finally, by appealing to nostalgic impulses, the Remus stories, appropriated from Black culture and told by a character who echoed the sentiments of the white man who created him, acknowledged an underlying desire for white control—once incontrovertible in the Old South, now potentially at risk from the threat of “slum encroachment.” To protect the “heart” of the city, as Palmer put it, this message was hung, in the guise of an instructional artwork for children, in the heart of Techwood Homes. And through housing projects like Techwood, white control, like Uncle Remus, could also “live again.”
***
Raquel Belden is pursuing her Ph.D. in Art History at Emory University with a focus on Modern Art.
Keywords: Techwood Homes, Treasury Relief Art Project, Uncle Remus, murals, public art
NOTES
[1] For a more detailed history of the New Deal arts programs, see Sheila D. Collins and Naomi Rosenblum, “The Democratization of Culture: The Legacy of the New Deal Arts Programs,” in When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal, ed. Sheila D. Collins and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 205–32.
[2] Collins and Rosenblum, “The Democratization of Culture,” 210.
[3] R. Bruce Bickley, “Uncle Remus Tales,” in New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified July 23, 2018, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/uncle-remus-tales/.
[4] Bickley, “Uncle Remus Tales.”
[5] “Techwood to Have Uncle Remus Art: Five Murals Depicting Joel Chandler Harris Characters Painted for Project,” The Atlanta Constitution, October 31, 1937, Charles F. Palmer papers, OBV 3, scrapbook 1933-1937, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Neff would go on to become “Cleveland’s acknowledged authority on ‘ufology’—the study of UFOs.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, “Neff, Earl J.,” accessed April 1, 2022, https://case.edu/ech/articles/n/neff-earl-j.
[6] For evidence of Palmer and English’s close friendship, see the contents of Charles F. Palmer papers, box 14, folder 4, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University; and Thomas H. English papers, box 8, folder 15, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
[7] Thomas H. English to Charles F. Palmer, undated, Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 27, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
[8] English to Palmer, undated.
[9] English to Palmer, undated.
[10] English to Palmer, undated.
[11] My summary of this tale is informed by Joel Chandler Harris, The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, ed. Richard Chase (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1955), 6–8.
[12] This possible conclusion borrows from questions raised in Christopher Peterson, “Slavery’s Bestiary: Joel Chandler Harris’s ‘Uncle Remus Tales,’” Paragraph 34, no. 1 (March 2011): 30–47, https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/para.2011.0004.
[13] For more on the rhetorical framing of Techwood Homes, see Katie Marages Schank, “Producing the Projects: Atlanta and the Cultural Creation of Public Housing, 1933-2011” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2016), https://www.proquest.com/docview/1779975993?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true.
[14] Atlanta Housing Authority report, quoted in Lawrence J. Vale, “Public Housing and Private Initiative: Developing Atlanta’s Techwood and Clark Howell Homes,” in Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 40.
[15] Atlanta Housing Authority report, quoted in Vale, “Public Housing and Private Initiative,” 40.
[16] Charles F. Palmer, Adventures of a Slum Fighter (Atlanta: Tupper and Love, Inc., 1955), 7.
[17] Atlanta Housing Authority report, quoted in Vale, “Public Housing and Private Initiative,” 40.
[18] Vale, “Public Housing and Private Initiative,” 40–41.
[19] See Schank, “Producing the Projects.”
[20] For additional reading on slum clearance and segregation, see Vale, “Public Housing and Private Initiative,” 39–89.
[21] Atlanta Housing Authority first annual report, quoted in Vale, “Public Housing and Private Initiative,” 51.
[22] For a more detailed explanation of these tropes, see Jason Sperb, “Conditions of Possibility: The Disney Studios, Postwar ‘Thermidor,’ and the Ambivalent Origins of Song of the South,” in Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 37–61.
[23] My description of character tropes in this section borrows from the explanation and examples provided by the Nashville Film Institute. “Movie Tropes: Everything You Need to Know,” Nashville Film Institute, accessed April 24, 2022. See also Merriam-Webster, “trope (n.),” accessed April 24, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trope.
[24] Gone with the Wind remained the highest grossing film of all time until the release of The Godfather (1972). Sperb, “Conditions of Possibility,” 51.
[25] Sperb, “Conditions of Possibility,” 46. For an account of how the mammy and other Black stereotypes have persisted in American culture, see Wendy Reynolds-Dobbs, Kecia M. Thomas, and Matthew S. Harrison, “From Mammy to Superwoman: Images that Hinder Black Women’s Career Development,” Journal of Career Development 35, no. 2 (2008): 129–50, https://doi.org/10.1177/0894845308325645.
[26] Sperb, “Conditions of Possibility,” 46.
[27] David Pilgrim, “The Tom Caricature,” Ferris State University, accessed July 7, 2022.
[28] Thomas H. English, “The Other Uncle Remus,” The Georgia Review 21, no. 2 (Summer 1967): 210–17, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41396353. Charles Palmer owned a signed copy of this essay. This document can be found in the Charles F. Palmer papers, box 14, folder 4, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. For a useful summary of the life of Harris, see Bickley, “Uncle Remus Tales.”
[29] English, “The Other Uncle Remus,” 211.
[30] Ibid., 212–13.
[31] Ibid., 211.
[32] Jennifer Ritterhouse, “Reading, Intimacy, and the Role of Uncle Remus in White Southern Social Memory,” The Journal of Southern History 69, no. 3 (August 2003): 585–91, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30040011.
[33] Natalie Marie Khoury, “The Duality of Joel Chandler Harris: The Preservation of Folklore and the Presentation of Violence in the Jim Crow South,” (MA diss., University of Georgia, 2009), 17, https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/khoury_natalie_m_200905_ma.pdf. Alice Walker provides an account of watching these familiar Black oral traditions onscreen and feeling alienated from them as spoken through the mouthpiece of Disney’s Uncle Remus. See Alice Walker, “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine,” The Georgia Review 66, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 635–37, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23268234.
[34] For more on these trickster figures and their function in African and African American cultures, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning,” in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 49–96.
[35] The OWI hoped, in so doing, to boost wartime morale amongst Black Americans. Sperb, “Conditions of Possibility,” 47.
[36] Jason Sperb, “Introduction,” in Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 1–36.
[37] “Techwood to Have Uncle Remus Art”; “Uncle Remus Characters to Live at Techwood Homes: Beloved Characters of Uncle Remus Stories to Adorn Walls of Techwood Kindergarten,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 15, 1937, Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 27, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University; “Uncle Remus Will Live Again on Techwood Kindergarten Campus,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 15, 1937, Joel Chandler Harris papers, box 32, folder 27, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
[38] “Lectures Planned by High Museum: Series of Nine to be Presented this Season, Skidmore Says,” The Atlanta Constitution, October 10, 1937, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, https://login.proxy.library.emory.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/lectures-planned-high-museum/docview/502907253/se-2?accountid=10747.
[39] “Uncle Remus Will Live Again on Techwood Kindergarten Campus,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 15, 1937.
CITATION
If you are citing this story, we recommend the following format using the Chicago Manual of Style:
Raquel Belden, “Uncle Sam Meets Uncle Remus: Federally Funded Art for Atlanta’s Techwood Homes,” Atlanta Housing Interplay, ed. Christina E. Crawford, accessed [the date accessed], https://www.atlhousing.org/uncle-sam-meets.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archival material
Charles F. Palmer papers, 1903-1973, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library, Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia)
Joel Chandler Harris papers, 1848-1908, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library, Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia)
Primary published sources
English, Thomas H. “The Other Uncle Remus.” The Georgia Review 21, no. 2 (Summer 1967): 210–17. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41396353.
Harris, Joel Chandler. The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus. Edited by Richard Chase. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1955.
Palmer, Charles F. Adventures of a Slum Fighter. Atlanta: Tupper and Love, Inc., 1955.
Secondary sources
Bickley, R. Bruce. “Uncle Remus Tales.” In New Georgia Encyclopedia. Last modified July 23, 2018. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/uncle-remus-tales/.
Collins, Sheila D., and Naomi Rosenblum. “The Democratization of Culture: The Legacy of the New Deal Arts Programs.” In When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal, edited by Sheila D. Collins and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, 205–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning.” In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, 49–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Jackson, Wilfred, dir. Song of the South. 1946; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Pictures, 1946. 95 min.
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