Was Uncle Tom an Uncle Tom?

I refute that. Hearsay are a hardworking if somewhat talent shy pack of chancers.

I'm really really sorry. I realise that wasn't funny.

yeah i was thinking about this too: sadly i never read the book, but it was done in pictures in LOOK & LEARN when i was wee. IIRC he was a gentle put-upon old man in bonded slavery who the evil Legree whipped to death. So when did it get to be an insult? Possibly when eg the Panthers were arguing that armed uprising would be more effective than MLK's Gandhian passive resistance...

Yeah, I think that's part of it. Ali calling Joe Frazier an Uncle Tom stuck pretty hard in the national consciousness too. I was doing some light research on this lately and came across the transcript of a US public radio 'book club' with Uncle Tom's Cabin as the book of the month. Many of the black contributors said that on reading the book for the first time, they were surprised to find how noble they found the character of Uncle Tom to be.

But it wasn't just a 60s black militancy thing though. An excerpt from a piece in the Hartford Courant:

The negative stereotype surrounding "Uncle Tom" is derived not from the book but from minstrel plays about it that Stowe had no control over, said Joan Hedrick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the biography "Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life."

"What she did was used by others for purposes of making fun, for entertaining, for humiliation," DeVaughn said.

Stowe had trouble following the plot of a theatrical version of the book performed in Hartford, Hedrick said, and left when a character came on stage talking in language she found disgusting.

It was the minstrel shows that started even before the Civil War that created the worst stereotypes, playing to audiences of largely white immigrants showing Uncle Tom as a shuffling goof to be laughed at.

Through the year, stereotypes were perpetuated by the spoons, toys, games and other kitsch sold along with the minstrel shows -- which Stowe had no control over and made no money on.

Hey, stop dissing my Uncle Tom. He's a little nutty but he's all right.

Mark: Ahhh, Look and Learn! The Trigan Empire! What kind of fascist shit was that? Thank god I graduated to Asterix.

These Momus fans are crazy!

Lovely painted Don Lawrence artwork on TE, tho' (lots of angst-ridden faces rendered in green - far out!!)

Nonsense, Janno's best friend was black. Well, green. Also L&L was actually published in Holland, and was full of pro-Netherlands propaganda on the sly. (This is TRUE!)

I am to this day culturally programmed to like the Netherlands! And most of my friends are green... Hmm...

now i think about it, the Trigan Empire was a bit suspect wasn't it? the sneering, wheezing green-skinned villain with the triangular hat and fu manchu moustache. the stupid but monstrously strong -zolts? dolts? were they called?- an underclass with pronouncedly slavic features. The oriental curves of the sea and land craft of the enemy compared to the hellenic proportions of trigo's war machines... still, ahem, the art was great...

By all the stars!

I'm an Uncle Tim. I'd love it if my nephews and nieces called me Uncle Arthur, but they don't, nobody in my family calls me Arthur. They all call me Tim.

No offense to the Tim horde.

My niece and nephew just call me Tia. I like it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe never visited the South once.