I appreciate what you and Q are saying here. However, I respectfully mention that it's not "Uncle Remus" per se, that I {and some other African Americans} have a problem with, it's what "Uncle Remus" has come to symbolize {at least in our view}. For many "educated, middle class African Americans" {to use your descriptors and include myself in that category}, the character "Uncle Remus" represents the submissive, faithful Black slave who is portrayed {we believe} as being inferior to a small White boy.
At some other time I would love to enter into a discussion of African American's past & present acceptance & non-acceptance of the Blues. However, I believe that discussion would be too far off-subject here.
With regard to the subject of this thread, IMO, it's not a matter of us {African Americans} "re-gaining" respect for Uncle Remus stories", because we never had respect for them in the first place. I have read that people of African descent believe art should not be just for art {aesthetic} sake. Given this philosophy, how the artistic is used {to support sociological and political memes is more important than how well the artistic product is created.
See this excerpt of an article on Uncle Remus: Of course, while Joel Chandler Harris and Mark Twain were both quite confident that they were working to improve race relations by doing this kind of writing, modern attitudes have changed. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn has been banned from many schools, and students are often shocked that the Uncle Remus stories are included in this course. Personally, I cannot imagine doing this course without using the Brer Rabbit stories: it is one of the most important collections of American folklore that we possess. We are incredibly lucky to have this collection of hundreds of African-American folktales, which also provide a record of African-American dialect as spoken in the 19th century. Harris had a folkloric interest in these stories, and he notes the connections between the Brer Rabbit stories and African traditions, as well as the diffusion of these stories throughout Native American traditions (you will see many connections if you did the Cherokee readings last week).
Admittedly, the way in which Joel Chandler Harris collected and published the stories is bound up with the racism that marked every aspect of life in the society in which he lived. There is a deep contradiction between Harris and the stories that he tells: Brer Rabbit is a vitally important and authentic creation of the African-American experience during slavery, while Uncle Remus is a fictional character spawned by the racist politics of the post-war white South. This Uncle Remus character is used by Harris as a kind of "black-face" in print, something like a literary minstrel show. Harris is white, but he writes as a black man, much like the white singers and comedians who appeared as "black" on the stage.
Minstrel shows with white entertainers performing in black-face date back to the 1820's. These shows were already a well-established tradition by the time Harris was born and he would have been exposed to minstrel shows all his life (in fact, minstrel shows continued to be popular well into the 20th century, mostly famously in Amos and Andy). Putting on the Uncle Remus character seems to have come quite naturally to Harris, yet he never agreed to "perform" as Uncle Remus in public. At no time, did Harris do any public reading of the Brer Rabbit stories.
Luckily for us, however, the way that Harris "dressed himself up" in writing did not involve the use of black face paint, but instead depended on the heavy use of dialect in his stories. Harris, in fact, prided himself on his use of dialect, and his ability to distinguish between the many different regional dialects of the American South. As a result, you are probably going to find the stories hard to read. In order to understand the stories, you basically have no choice to but to read them out loud, using Harris' odd and abbreviated spelling to recreate the sound of English that was spoken by his African-American sources.
Yet at the same time that Harris's motives were - by the standards of his time - extremely sympathetic, there is no denying the taint of the minstrel show in Harris's work.."