From an earlier answer of mine:
Song of the South (1946), the movie so racist it has basically been disavowed by Disney, was also so racist that it inspired controversy even before production.
I'm hoping none of us have specifically sought to see it recently, but for those of you who also have never read a plot synopsis: Song of the South consists of four animated, animal-populated "short stories" wrapped inside a live-action narration/plot. The stories are taken from the Uncle Remus books written by Joel Chandler Harris, who gathered them from African-Americans living around Atlanta after the Civil War. Often violent and scary, many of the folktales in the books are allegories for the horrors of slavery and white masters. The Disney adaptation, on the other hand, picks light-hearted stories, matches them with joyful and cute animation, and turns the frame story into a recreation of the antebellum Southern fantasy (mansion of the slave owners, black sharecroppers in shacks, the stock characters of Mammy, Pickaninny, and of course the "good slave" Uncle Remus)--complete with a Magical Negro twist to make the white boy's family all good again.
This alteration was readily apparent to critics of the time. Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP, rather diplomatically commented:
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.
White wrote this after the film's release, but he had been one of the voices in protest when news of an Uncle Remus adaptation leaked out in 1944. According to Thomas Cripps, these early efforts framed themselves as helpful--and it wasn't a stretch, since (as Cripps documents) World War II had served/was serving as a major turning point for black representation in movies (and complaints from the NAACP and other groups when Hollywood was seen to fail). So White, Alain Locke (a former Rhodes Scholar), and Hollywood writers Caleb Peterson and Leon Hardwick reminded Disney to be good about representation or risk massive protests, to avoid "lowering black morale" for the war and for America. Disney even initially hired a script doctor to redo the film, and he had plans of mixing the Remus tales with stories drawn from the WPA ex-slave narratives (no, really!). Ultimately, the company reverted to original plans.
The controversy was not quelled upon release. Matthew Bernstein compiled an impressive array of excerpts from contemporary reviewers and commenters. On one hand, you had (white newspaper) Atlanta Constitution reporter Doris Lockman's commentary on the film's Atlanta premiere:
[The crowd] ...saw the honest red dirt of Georgia, the weathered cabins that huddle on friendly mounds under tall pines, the dusty shabby old servitors of a kindlier day, focused richly amid the magic wrought from the homely philosophy of Joel Chandler Harris and moulded into reality in the facile fingers of Walt Disney and his crew...
It was everybody's picture. Grandmother, seeing it, could remem- ber the golden days of yesterday. Her daughter, beside her, reached for snatches of tales long sleeping and the modern ones realized restively that much has gone from life that could ill be spare.
In contrast, New York Times columnist Bosley Crowther insisted it was by no means "everybody's picture":
For no matter how much one argues that it's all childish fiction, anyhow, the master-and-slave relation is so lovingly regarded in your [Disney's] yarn, with the Negroes bowing and scraping and singing spirituals in the night, that one might almost imagine that you figure Abe Lincoln made a mistake. Put down that mint julep, Mr. Disney!
Ann Tanneyhill of the National Urban League emphastically denounced the movie's "black , fat, greasy, sweaty, laughing, grinning, eyes rolling, white teeth showing predominantly, bowing, scraping hat in hand" stereotype. NAACP leader Gloster Current rejected the joint stereotype-myths of the docile slave and that black people liked slavery.
And some people suggested further action was necessary. NAACP director White, in response to actually seeing the film, proposed that the organization create a screening or censoring branch to preview. Mary McLeod Bethune called for production companies to include a wider variety of non-white characters in movies with the prescient idea that this might affect overall attitudes towards people of color (she says "minority groups," so, not just black people).
And so even while the harshest critics felt obligated to praise the movie's artistic achievements (probably a mixture of heartfelt and diplomatic, depending on critic), Song of the South was in all likelihood a massive economic failure even at the time. Certainly it has failed to provide Disney with the same financial and popular legacy as other wildly problematic movies ("where they cut off your ears if they don't like your face," anyone?).
Cripps concludes, "Song of the South clarified movie politics as had no other movie since Gone with the Wind." Protests over racial representation and racist stereotypes in movies are hardly an invention of the Internet age.
Further Reading: