It’s Time To Rehabilitate Uncle Tom

Never before in history has a literary character been so misrepresented.

Cavendish Morton’s depiction of Uncle Tom. Image via Wikimedia Commons

I fully blame Malcolm X for this.

Perhaps out of an urgent need to depict the leading players of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as being out of touch with the vast majority of Black folk, our hero dug deep into history to find a literary character to whom he could compare Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer et al.

And in digging into history, he found Uncle Tom.

Malcolm X (rightly) saw white America as irredeemably and incontrovertibly racist and completely unprepared to entertain the notion that Black folk should ever enjoy the benefits of citizenship of the world’s wealthiest nation.

And that world view fed his pugnacious and some might say extreme rhetoric:

Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent. That’s Tom making you nonviolent. It’s like when you go to the dentist, and the man’s going to take your tooth. You’re going to fight him when he starts…