The New York Times, November 28, 1946:
"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People expressed regret yesterday over Walt Disney's new production, Song of the South, on the ground that it is helping to perpetuate the impression of "an idyllic master-slave relationship" in the South.
Walter White, executive secretary, in telegrams to newspapers, stated the association recognized the artistic merit of the picture, but added, "It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the North or South, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, Song of the South unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts."
In 1989, Disney took that problematic movie and—unwisely—adapted it into Splash Mountain, one of the most popular rides in its American parks. Even though the picture's low stature among civil rights thinkers was well established—Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., called it "an insult to minorities"—the company proceeded.
Even in 1989, guests could not legally access the movie the ride was based on—it's still not available in the United States on DVD or on Disney+.
At the time, Imagineers thought they could solve the problem with a crude amputation. They simply deleted the most problematic character: the kindly old African-American narrator Uncle Remus, the freed slave who stuck around to delight small white children with folktales. (In 1989, corporations apparently thought they could solve accusations of racism by simply omitting the Black characters.) Instead, the ride illustrates adaptations of the tales Remus told.
The entire 13-minute experience centered around Remus' animal characters. They had no race, but their boneheaded hijinks and stylized, dumbfounded patois was rooted in minstrel traditions. They way they acted and sounded was familiar to anyone who'd grown up with Stepin Fetchit, Buckwheat, or Amos and Andy.
Harris' version of the post-slavery South wasn't the real one, in which freed Black men were denied education, hunted by racists, or slaughtered for daring to be elected to government positions, as happened in Colfax, Louisiana. Instead, his freed slave Remus loved his white masters so much that he stuck around their plantation, where he lived in a shanty and told stories to little white children from the opulent mansion.
If it sounds like a white fantasy of post-slavery racial roles, that was Harris' intention. Spike Lee has witheringly called Remus "a super-duper magical Negro.”
You can almost understand how Walt Disney the man would be dense enough to think this was appropriate source material for a movie. Remus was a great storyteller, and Disney probably saw something of himself in him. Wrong as it was, the film's image of the South was accepted almost as documentary by mainstream white audiences at the time. Gone With the Wind's hugely successful movie adaptation had come just seven years before, so Disney even hired Hattie McDaniel, one of its stars for a small role in Song of the South. (She played the maid, again.)
It's much more of a wonder how Disney the company could be daft enough to take that material and turn it into a ride in the 1980s. From the start, the Song of the South log flume ride was a Frankenstein's monster of ideas.
Splash Mountain was devised by Imagineer Tony Baxter, who had found design success a decade earlier with Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and later, in Euro Disneyland (now Disneyland Paris). As the story goes, Baxter was handed the task of creating a ride that would excite teenagers, and around the same time, a robotic musical show named America Sings was slated to close, which would leave Disney with a warehouse full of Audio-Animatronic animal characters and nowhere to use them.
Disney is a big recycler: Some of the reanimated corpses at Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris lived previous lives in Future World at Epcot in Florida. In the case of Splash Mountain, being able to recycle the animals from America Sings was a principal driver of selecting Song of the South.
Disney execs, satisfied by the cost savings (the final attraction still cost $75 million) and by the "solution" of omitting the Black character, green-lit what would become Splash Mountain. The most racist tropes were deleted or transferred to animals, where they could simply be interpreted as the hijinks of country bumpkins.
Their cobbled-together ride was incoherent, but wildly fun, and on that basis it became one of the most popular attractions in Disneyland, an honor it still holds. Within a few years, an updated version opened at the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World and another at Tokyo Disneyland.
And that's where we've been for the past three decades. Disney has known full well that the property was tainted—it knew that on the night of its 1946 release, when picketers threw a line around Times Square's Palace Theatre, where it was premiering, carrying placards declaring "We fought for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Tom.” (The full story of the revulsion of its reception is documented in Jason Sperb's Disney's Most Notorious Film.)
Disney held a wolf by its ears. A headliner ride was based on one of its most objectionable properties. What had it gotten itself into?
Now it's getting itself out. Following recent headlines about a public campaign of petitions to force Disney to re-theme the ride to 2009's The Princess of the Frog, the company has finally announced it will do it.
Not coincidentally, The Princess and the Frog was the company's first animated feature starring an African-American princess. The movie was set in 1912 New Orleans and the Bayou—not a far cry from the swamps of Uncle Remus in terms of geography, but generations away in content and tone.
In 1946, when Song of the South premiered, Disney lost the public confidence of important Black voices like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Walter White. For this rollout, the company is trying to avoid that. This time, it created memes made out of endorsements from multiple Black performers and Disney executives:
In the very first line of the announcement, Disney said it's an idea "project Imagineers have been working on since last year"—is that a signal by the company that it won't be cowed by petitions, or is it yet another sign Disney chose not to acknowledge the ride's issues even though it saw them? Whatever the reason Disney felt it was important to share that, it took the popular uprisings of 2020 to finally goad it into action.
No date has been set yet for the change; Splash Mountain is a mammoth draw in the heat of summer but it usually closes in each winter for several weeks, so the company might give the attraction one final season in its current form.
The change has also only been announced for Disneyland and Walt Disney World. The third version, in Tokyo, is owned by the Oriental Land Company, which will make its own decision; Disney continued to release Song of the South in Asia long after it determined the movie was no longer appropriate for American audiences.
Ride along on Splash Mountain with this complete trip shot in Florida. Listen for that pidgin version of a "Southern" patois that Harris used for his Black characters in particular.
"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People expressed regret yesterday over Walt Disney's new production, Song of the South, on the ground that it is helping to perpetuate the impression of "an idyllic master-slave relationship" in the South.
Walter White, executive secretary, in telegrams to newspapers, stated the association recognized the artistic merit of the picture, but added, "It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the North or South, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, Song of the South unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts."
In 1989, Disney took that problematic movie and—unwisely—adapted it into Splash Mountain, one of the most popular rides in its American parks. Even though the picture's low stature among civil rights thinkers was well established—Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., called it "an insult to minorities"—the company proceeded.
Even in 1989, guests could not legally access the movie the ride was based on—it's still not available in the United States on DVD or on Disney+.
At the time, Imagineers thought they could solve the problem with a crude amputation. They simply deleted the most problematic character: the kindly old African-American narrator Uncle Remus, the freed slave who stuck around to delight small white children with folktales. (In 1989, corporations apparently thought they could solve accusations of racism by simply omitting the Black characters.) Instead, the ride illustrates adaptations of the tales Remus told.
The entire 13-minute experience centered around Remus' animal characters. They had no race, but their boneheaded hijinks and stylized, dumbfounded patois was rooted in minstrel traditions. They way they acted and sounded was familiar to anyone who'd grown up with Stepin Fetchit, Buckwheat, or Amos and Andy.
The source of the issues
The Uncle Remus tales were first written in the 1880s by a Georgia-born journalist, Joel Chandler Harris, who wanted to create a new literary mythology that could instruct the world about the ideals of the New South. At that time, the South had a terrible reputation. It was still hobbled by the aftermath of the Civil War, and during the 1870s it was plagued by the most violently racist years in American history. So Harris set out to write a more pleasant testament to his native land. Like the women who campaigned to install Confederate statues across the land, Harris wanted the world to believe his new version of what the South was. Harris used African-American folktales in his work; today we call that cultural appropriation, but at the time, many saw Harris as elevating those stories to a worldwide platform.Harris' version of the post-slavery South wasn't the real one, in which freed Black men were denied education, hunted by racists, or slaughtered for daring to be elected to government positions, as happened in Colfax, Louisiana. Instead, his freed slave Remus loved his white masters so much that he stuck around their plantation, where he lived in a shanty and told stories to little white children from the opulent mansion.
If it sounds like a white fantasy of post-slavery racial roles, that was Harris' intention. Spike Lee has witheringly called Remus "a super-duper magical Negro.”
You can almost understand how Walt Disney the man would be dense enough to think this was appropriate source material for a movie. Remus was a great storyteller, and Disney probably saw something of himself in him. Wrong as it was, the film's image of the South was accepted almost as documentary by mainstream white audiences at the time. Gone With the Wind's hugely successful movie adaptation had come just seven years before, so Disney even hired Hattie McDaniel, one of its stars for a small role in Song of the South. (She played the maid, again.)
It's much more of a wonder how Disney the company could be daft enough to take that material and turn it into a ride in the 1980s. From the start, the Song of the South log flume ride was a Frankenstein's monster of ideas.
Splash Mountain was devised by Imagineer Tony Baxter, who had found design success a decade earlier with Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and later, in Euro Disneyland (now Disneyland Paris). As the story goes, Baxter was handed the task of creating a ride that would excite teenagers, and around the same time, a robotic musical show named America Sings was slated to close, which would leave Disney with a warehouse full of Audio-Animatronic animal characters and nowhere to use them.
Disney is a big recycler: Some of the reanimated corpses at Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris lived previous lives in Future World at Epcot in Florida. In the case of Splash Mountain, being able to recycle the animals from America Sings was a principal driver of selecting Song of the South.
Disney execs, satisfied by the cost savings (the final attraction still cost $75 million) and by the "solution" of omitting the Black character, green-lit what would become Splash Mountain. The most racist tropes were deleted or transferred to animals, where they could simply be interpreted as the hijinks of country bumpkins.
Their cobbled-together ride was incoherent, but wildly fun, and on that basis it became one of the most popular attractions in Disneyland, an honor it still holds. Within a few years, an updated version opened at the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World and another at Tokyo Disneyland.
And that's where we've been for the past three decades. Disney has known full well that the property was tainted—it knew that on the night of its 1946 release, when picketers threw a line around Times Square's Palace Theatre, where it was premiering, carrying placards declaring "We fought for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Tom.” (The full story of the revulsion of its reception is documented in Jason Sperb's Disney's Most Notorious Film.)
Disney held a wolf by its ears. A headliner ride was based on one of its most objectionable properties. What had it gotten itself into?
Leaving Song of the South behind
Now it's getting itself out. Following recent headlines about a public campaign of petitions to force Disney to re-theme the ride to 2009's The Princess of the Frog, the company has finally announced it will do it.
Not coincidentally, The Princess and the Frog was the company's first animated feature starring an African-American princess. The movie was set in 1912 New Orleans and the Bayou—not a far cry from the swamps of Uncle Remus in terms of geography, but generations away in content and tone.
In 1946, when Song of the South premiered, Disney lost the public confidence of important Black voices like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Walter White. For this rollout, the company is trying to avoid that. This time, it created memes made out of endorsements from multiple Black performers and Disney executives:
In the very first line of the announcement, Disney said it's an idea "project Imagineers have been working on since last year"—is that a signal by the company that it won't be cowed by petitions, or is it yet another sign Disney chose not to acknowledge the ride's issues even though it saw them? Whatever the reason Disney felt it was important to share that, it took the popular uprisings of 2020 to finally goad it into action.
No date has been set yet for the change; Splash Mountain is a mammoth draw in the heat of summer but it usually closes in each winter for several weeks, so the company might give the attraction one final season in its current form.
The change has also only been announced for Disneyland and Walt Disney World. The third version, in Tokyo, is owned by the Oriental Land Company, which will make its own decision; Disney continued to release Song of the South in Asia long after it determined the movie was no longer appropriate for American audiences.
Ride along on Splash Mountain with this complete trip shot in Florida. Listen for that pidgin version of a "Southern" patois that Harris used for his Black characters in particular.
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