I just wanted to post a bit more about the history of Little Black Sambo. I think the most important aspect of this history is the way the character/story has made people feel about themselves. White privilege protects a majority of people from the hurts that can be evoked by “harmless” depictions in story books and advertisements. The price for that protection can come in the form indifferent ignorance.
- “The cultural understanding of ‘Little Black Sambo’ is a negative,” says Professor Frank Gilliam of UCLA. “It’s meant to suggest that people of African descent are childlike, that they’re irresponsible, that they’re not fully developed human beings.”
- Langston Hughes pointed out that Little Black Sambo was “amusing undoubtedly to the white child, but like an unkind word to one who has known too many hurts to enjoy the additional pain of being laughed at.”
The following is excerpted from an essay found at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia:
Arguably, the most controversial picaninny image is the one created by Helen Bannerman…The book appeared in England in 1899 and was an immediate success. The next year it was published in the United States by Frederick A. Stokes, a mainstream publisher. It was even more successful than it had been in England. The book’s success led to many imitators — and controversies.
Was Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo racist? The major characters: Little Black Sambo, his mother (Black Mumbo) and his father (Black Jumbo) used standard English, not the bastardized English then associated with Blacks. Stereotypical anti-Black traits — for example, laziness, stupidity, and immorality — were absent from the book. Little Black Sambo, the character, was bright and resourceful unlike most portrayals of Black children. Nevertheless, the book does have anti-Black overtones, most notably the illustrations. Sambo is crudely drawn, an obvious caricature… The names Mumbo and Jumbo also make the characters seem nonsensical at a time when Blacks were routinely thought to be inherently dumb.
The illustrations were racially offensive, and so was the name Sambo. At the time that the book was originally published Sambo was an established anti-Black epithet, a generic degrading reference. It symbolized the lazy, grinning, docile, childlike, good-for-little servant. Maybe Bannerman was unfamiliar with Sambo’s American meaning. For many African Americans Little Black Sambo was an entertaining story ruined by racist pictures and racist names. Julius Lester, who has recently co-authored Sam and the Tigers, an updated Afrocentric version of Little Black Sambo, wrote:
When I read Little Black Sambo as a child, I had no choice but to identify with him because I am black and so was he. Even as I sit here and write the feelings of shame, embarrassment and hurt come back. And there was a bit of confusion because I liked the story and I especially liked all those pancakes, but the illustrations exaggerated the racial features society had made it clear to me represented my racial inferiority — the black, black skin, the eyes shining white, the red protruding lips. I did not feel good about myself as a black child looking at those pictures.
Little Black Sambo served as the boiler plate for a spate of other versions, many of which used mean-spirited racist drawings and dialogue. The vulgar reprint versions were symbolic of Black-White relations. Little Black Sambo’s popularity coincided with the crystallization of Jim Crow laws and etiquette. Blacks were denied basic human and civil rights, discriminated against in the labor market, barred from many public schools and libraries, harassed at voting booths, subjected to physical violence, and generally treated as second class citizens. The year that Little Black Sambo came to America a Whites-initiated race riot occurred in New Orleans. It was effectively a pogrom — Blacks were beaten, their schools and homes destroyed. Little Black Sambo did not, of course, cause riots, but it entered America during a period of strained and harsh race relations. It was, simply, another insult in the daily lives of African Americans.
The anti-Little Black Sambo movement started in the 1930s and continued into the 1970s. Black educators and civil rights leaders organized numerous campaigns to get the book banned from public libraries, especially in elementary schools. In the 1940s and 1950s the book was dropped from many lists of “Recommended Books.” By the 1960s the book was seen as a remnant of a racist past.
Little Black Sambo was again popular by the mid-1990s. Its recent popularity is a result of many factors, including a white backlash against perceived political correctness. This is evident in internet discussions. Americans, Black and White, are rereading the original book (and some of the unauthorized reprints). There is agreement that Bannerman’s book is entertaining. However, there is little agreement regarding whether it is racist. White readers tend to focus on Bannerman’s non-racist intentions and the unfairness of judging yesterday’s “classics” by today’s standards of racial equality. Blacks find the book’s title and the illustrations offensive. Most of the debate centers on Bannerman’s version; there is no debating the racism explicit in later editions of the book produced by other writers and publishers.
© Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology
Ferris State University
Oct., 2000
mulatto diaries 
Racist. Without a doubt. What’s the argument? I find every bit of it offensive!
there never was anything racist about the author.
she wrote stories about her daughter and her daughter’s best friend when they lived in africa.
whites don’t have to be racist anymore, the blacks call themselves niggers.
now i gots ta go and git me som dat watamelon! uh huh!
we need to ban the three stooges.
because it depicts whites as being dumberer than dumbest.
especially when there were six stooges.
The story itself, I don’t see as being racist. Some illustrations are clearly so as is the animation posted here.
I agree with dippy dee do da. The Stooges, if black, would have caused the same negative reaction as Black Sambo.
I don’t know if you’ve touched on this in your earlier posts, but I remember reading somewhere that the story was originally written about a South Indian child. I don’t know so much about the etymology of the word “Sambo”.
Obviously, the different versions of this book over the years have racist type caricatures, as does the very name Sambo and how it was used in advertisements,etc… But, I thought this story takes place in India and is about a dark skinned Indian boy (the south indians in general are darker than the Indians of the North, hence black sambo?). She mentions tigers, ghee( Indian butter). So, I’m not sure the author meant this story as a slight to African Americans. I wonder if she was ever discussed it while she was alive. I’m curious to other peoples comments regarding this. My guess, after reading her background, was that she meant no harm and didn’t live long enough to see the ramifications of her title. Though, from what I read the name Sambo as a slave name preceeded the book. So…who knows.
It is a South Indian folktale and takes place in a jungle – not the plains and savannas of Africa. There are no indigenous tigers in Africa. Helen Bannerman and her family were part of the British Raj and lived in India for most of her life – 32 years in Madras alone. She wrote a whole series of “Little Black” books, each and every one of which were retellings of South Indian folk tales. Little Black Sambo involved not only tigers (indigenous to India and NOT to Africa), but also ghee – melted butter. Other books revolved around crocodiles, mangoes, elephants, and included many specifically South Indian terms such as chat and dhobi.
In fact if you had ever actually READ the text of “Little Black Sambo”, it says right in there SPECIFICALLY:
“And they still ran faster and faster and faster, till they all just melted away, and then there was nothing left but a great big pool of melted butter (or “ghi” as it is called in India) round the foot of the tree.”
I don’t know how much clearer it would have to be – it is an INDIAN folk tale and has nothing to do with people of African descent except for the misinterpretation of the title and earliest illustrations by Americans (of any racial background) at the very beginning of the 20th century. And, apparently, said misapprehension continuing to this day.
I guess ignorance isn’t the sole province of early 20th century Americans.
That said – it was still somewhat racist – just not originally aimed toward the group of people in this country have assumed it was aimed at. In GB, they call East Asian Indians “blacks”. So the illustrations and the names she used in her books certainly did reflect the existing racism of the times, but the story itself was not racist. Far from it. It was a fairly accurate retelling of a very old folk tale wherein the protagonist showed courage, tenacity, and creativity, first in escaping death by tiger, and secondly in retrieving his goods (and the tiger-ghee, for that matter).
I was born in 1964 in the UK and had the books as a child. It never occurred to me that they were racist. I loved them and identified with the main characters. Dark or light skin made no difference to me. I see the heart.
I read little black sambo in kindergarten in the late 60s..and even at 5-6 years old I found the illustrations extremely offensive. They were the old bug-eyed caricatures w/ huge red lips and coal black skin..and even I knew at that age that tigers were not endemic to africa..and wondered why the book used the illustration of an terrible caricature of an african when the tiger meant that the story had to be either in india or asia. Hell of a book to disperse to a kintergarten class w/ only one black kid in it..when no one I knew looked like that.
that should have read “in the late 50s”..but I see no way of editing the comment.