SOURCE: "The Oral Tradition," in Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1975, pp. 19-41.

An American educator and critic, Bone is the author of The Negro Novel in America (1958) and Richard Wright (1969). In the following excerpt, he asserts that African American tales exemplified by Harris's Uncle Remus stories embody "the black slave's resistance to white power."

Joel Chandler Harris is in bad odor among the younger generation of literary men. The blacks, who tend to equate Uncle Remus with Uncle Tom—sometimes, one suspects, without having read either Harris or Stowe—reject the Uncle Remus books out of hand. And sympathetic whites, who hope thereby to ingratiate themselves with the black militants, are fond of giving Harris a gratuitous kick in the shins. Both responses are regrettable, for they blind their victims to...