Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from Hero to Traitor

Priscilla Pizzato

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a bombshell in American society. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel inflamed passions and made the abolition of slavery a national debate – it is even considered as a trigger of the Civil War according to Abraham Lincoln. “Uncle Tom” personified the struggle against slavery, yet it became over time an insult within the black community, a nickname for those who were seen as too docile toward whites.

This documentary tells the conflicting story of the best-selling book of the 19^th Century after the Bible – a novel as liberating as it was a vector of the worst racist prejudices, and which continues to irrigate racial issues up to Black Lives Matter.