Connecticut author Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Life Among the Lowly, based on a book she read 20 years after slavery had been abolished in Britain.
The injustice of her story captured imaginations internationally. Abraham Lincoln suggested that it caused the US Civil War. By then, the British had been prosecuting British slave traders for fifty years.
The popularity of Uncle Tom’s cabin created and spread several racist stereotypes such as the dark-skinned mammy, the pickaninny stereotype of black children; and the namesake character type of “Uncle Tom,” describing a dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress.
While spending summers at Macalester College’s World Press Institute, Author Alex Haley researched and wrote what would become the book “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” released in 1976.
This eventually became an epic miniseries.
Over three nights in 1977, Roots solidified a new, unquestionable, racial history of the United States. This miniseries caught the imagination of a nation and also created and spread several racist stereotypes.
The historical accuracy of either of these stories is beyond debate in polite society and the majority of teachers and academics would never deviate from these. I won’t deviate from that either but I would like to address the racial stereotypes Roots has enforced.
Ask any Black man if he would slit your neck if you tied his child to a pole and whipped them with a bullwhip.
I’ve tested the stereotype portrayed in countless movies, and other than Black college professors and activists, every Black man I’ve met would kill you for this. In your sleep, if they had to, and would not give a shit about the consequences.
My polling has been non-scientific but extensive. It’s impossible to poll the attitudes of people dead for centuries, but until 1960 Black men were more likely to live in homes with their children than any other race.
The stereotype that Black men wouldn’t kill to protect their children holds little water.
Perhaps this is why so many activists, the women’s movement, and government agencies have fought so hard to create policies and systems to remove them. History has shown us when you remove Men from society, you can do anything you want to the women and children.
Another set of persistent, socially enforced, racist stereotypes is that of the illiterate, Black-agrarian, Southern, rural, sharecropper.
I’m always very interested in stereotypes and who benefits from perpetuating them. I’ve met many wealthy white activists and African students and executives who are deeply entrenched in this set of stereotypes. They become deeply dismissive of the contributions Blacks have made to American society and how well they’ve been rewarded.
The ingenuity, persistence, and determination of American Black entrepreneurs and inventors isn’t new. Patent writing requires possessing and/or coordinating a number of talents and resources.
As early as 1884, Judy Woodford Reed held a patent. Like most people in Charlottesville, VA at that time she was illiterate. Chicago resident Sarah E. Goode, was the first literate Black woman to receive a patent in 1885.
This is more than 60 years after Thomas L. Jennings received the patent for dry cleaning. This patent was so lucrative, his daughter, Elizabeth Jennings Graham, was able to bring a lawsuit against the Third Ave Railroad Company that refused her service.
In 1855, the court ruled in her favor. In his charge to the jury, Brooklyn Circuit Court Judge William Rockwell declared: “Colored persons, if sober, well behaved, and free from disease, had the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the company nor by force or violence.”
The jury awarded Jennings damages in the amount of $250 (equivalent to $6,900 in 2020) as well as $22.50 in court costs. The next day, the Third Avenue Railroad Company ordered its cars desegregated.
This case helped her attorney, Chester Arthur become the 20th President of the United States.
Hard work, ingenuity, a rigorous talent stack, and an ability to collaborate helped Thomas Jennings become wealthier than nearly every person living in the South before the Civil War.
Now, activists, executives, and professors might ask me, “What does Thomas Jennings have in common with Uncle Tom?”
I would probably ask them the same question.
