Uncle Tom's Cabin

The book that awakened the conscience of so many men and women to the iniquity of slavery and played such a significant role in the liberation of slaves in the United States would be considered, ironically, from the 1960s onwards (by leaders of the civil rights and African American emancipation movements), as a racist work perpetuating the submission of black people. The reason lies mainly in its protagonist, Uncle Tom. "Uncle Tom" is, in the USA, an insult one can hurl at a black person, since the character is not a rebellious leader, a Spartacus, as the African American movement would have wished, but a martyr, docile and pious, who accepts all punishments as penance and forgives all his enemies. However, Tom is a man of extreme nobility, without a trace of servitude, with physical courage and supreme self-sacrifice, who recognizes the ignominy of slavery and does not accept it in any way, but rejects violence as a form of resistance and is incapable of lying even to the vilest of men—not out of fear, but out of self-respect. Tom is a saint, whereas the African Americans of the twentieth century were looking for a hero. It is evident that this passivity would not receive political approval from activists, just as Harriet Beecher Stowe's depictions of black people, with all their benevolence and angelic qualities, could not avoid being denounced as paternalistic. But few books can boast of having had such a significant influence on the lives of so many millions of people and on the history of the United States itself.