This exhibit primarily draws from the extensive collections housed at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Our project seeks to inform educators, scholars, and interested members of the public about the complicated history of Helen Bannerman’s once beloved—and now highly controversial—picture book The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), as well as the larger impact that it had on popular American culture. Incorporating over 70 texts from the Baldwin, along with other examples, this exhibit contextualizes both Bannerman’s original book and its hundreds of adaptations alongside the larger shifts in the children’s literature field to erase, sanitize, or suppress Little Black Sambo’s troubled genealogy.
In the last thirty years, a myriad of authors and illustrators have created new adaptations of Little Black Sambo that aim to “restore” the troubled text for a contemporary audience. Many of these versions—such as Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney’s Sam and the Tigers (1997) and Anne Isaacs and Mark Teague’s Pancakes for Supper (2006)—work against the racism inherent in both Bannerman’s original textual narrative and in the many problematic visual portrayals of the characters–particularly those that initially follow Bannerman’s original for the first 40 years. While we recognize these texts as well-intentioned attempts at restoring Little Black Sambo, it is important to note that these contemporary adaptations also largely fail to address the long, complex, and darkened history of Sambo. As a result, they unintentionally continue to perpetuate the racial issues inherent in Bannerman’s original. A true “restorative” adaptation of Little Black Sambo, we argue, must: 1) clarify the ethnicity of the characters without resorting to harmful visual stereotypes, inauthentic, exoticized names, and racist tropes; 2) establish the geographic setting in a way that avoids the conflation of nonwhite peoples inherent in Bannerman’s original text; and 3) acknowledge the long and troubled genealogy of children’s literature, particularly in America.
By analyzing the evolution of Little Black Sambo, it is our goal to correct the erasure of both Sambo’s past and, by extension, the larger history of racism in children’s literature. Thus, this website seeks to serve as a comprehensive reference of The Story of Little Black Sambo’s historical context in order to allow visitors to better understand the Sambo phenomenon that captured the hearts and minds of America’s children for nearly all of the 20th century.
In order to avoid unintentionally perpetuating racism and racist imagery, we have chosen to only provide 2 or 3 illustrations per text. Additionally, we have provided contextualizing write ups for each featured item that explain the often troubling implications of the illustrations and text. While some may argue that Sambo and other racist books should simply be erased and forgotten, we believe that this disturbing children’s literature serves as a valuable learning opportunity and an important, though shameful, part of American culture that should not be forgotten. By illuminating how children’s culture can perpetuate harmful ideology, our website asks viewers to consider the impact of seemingly insignificant items of popular culture, as well as the potential for children’s literature to facilitate positive representation.
About the Little Black Sambo Project
Born out of Professor Kenneth Kidd’s and Baldwin Curator Suzan Alteri’s jointly-taught seminar in Fall 2019, “Into the Archive: Reading and Writing in the Baldwin Library”, this project’s first life was a mini-documentary that explored the plethora of versions of Helen Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo housed in the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. The then-project argued that despite the defenses made by scholars in the field of children’s literature, Helen Bannerman’s original text was inherently racist based on the heavy use of caricature in her illustrations, the etymology of the character’s names, and the collapsing of characteristics of different ethnic and racial groups into a reductive and singular non-White Othering of Sambo, Mumbo, and Jumbo.
This project meant to shed light on the curious-happenstance of scholars and authors of adaptations who would defend the original version of Little Black Sambo as not racist despite the climate in which the text and Bannerman were formed. While we cannot claim to say these scholars and authors are “right” or “wrong” in their feelings about Sambo, overwhelming bibliographical and historical evidence opens insight into the weight of nostalgia which may be clouding the critical approaches and lens in which our predecessors might be seeing with. In this way, the project meant to bring the conversation back to the issue of race and racism that the field of children’s literature has always been more-than-ready to forget, whitewash, or omit.
While we continue to work on the mini-documentary, with the goal of turning it into a full-documentary, the project’s next turn was to fully examine all versions of Little Black Sambo and adjacent titles in the Baldwin. Hence, the birth of this online resource: the Little Black Sambo Exhibit. Here you will find resources that contextualizes the once-phenomenally popular but also heavily-problematic children’s story that simultaneously inspired awe for an ethnically ambiguous black boy, braving tigers in the jungle, as well as revulsion for its original and hundreds of adaptations’ visual and textual representations of racism for decades in American culture. We also point to the legacy of this socio-cultural moment into the present day and gesture to why Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo became such a popular story and a vehicle of gross racial politics that would eventually become part of the legacy of American children’s literature and contemporary American history.
About the Exhibit Creators
Brandon Murakami is an PhD student in the department of English at the University of Florida. His interests are at the intersection of cultural studies, children’s literature/culture, visual rhetoric, and new media studies. He also researches in food studies, decolonial studies, and biodiversity.
Brianna Anderson is an English PhD candidate at the University of Florida. Her research interests include ecocriticism, comics studies and visual rhetoric, children’s and young adult literature, digital humanities, speculative fiction, and narrative theory.
To learn more about Helen Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo, click here.
To learn more about the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, click here.