Who Was Uncle Remus?

Uncle Remus is the fictional character created by Joel Chandler Harris to narrate the Brer Rabbit stories. He is one of the most beloved and controversial figures in American literature.

George Terrell

Harris called the character a “human syndicate” of people he had known, mentioning two of them by name, both enslaved men he met on the plantation where he worked during the 1860s: “Old Harbert” (as he knew him) and George Terrell (pictured left). They were among the people who told the teenaged Harris many of the tales that he used years later to fashion the Uncle Remus stories. The Remus name, Harris said, came from an African American gardener he knew during one of his first newspaper jobs in Forsyth, Georgia.

In 1946, Walt Disney produced a movie based on the Uncle Remus stories, Song of the South. James Baskett, who starred as Uncle Remus, was awarded an honorary Oscar, the first won by an African American male. But the role drew protests from the NAACP and others, who thought Uncle Remus represented a harmful stereotype of contented enslaved people.

The character has had a mixed reputation ever since. For example, in her famous 2012 essay “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine,” author Alice Walker writes, “In creating Uncle Remus, [Harris] placed an effective barrier between me and the stories that meant so much to me, the stories that could have meant so much to all of our children, the stories that they would have heard from us and not from Walt Disney.”