View source for Little Black Sambo

==Racial stereotyping==

{{main|stereotyping}}

[[Langston Hughes]] wrote in 1932 that:

*Little Black Sambo exemplified the "pickaninny variety" of storybook, "amusing undoubtedly to the white child, but like an unkind word to one who has known too many hurts to enjoy the additional pain of being laughed at."<ref name="ferris" />

A 1941 book and record version of the story "epitomizes the worst of [[racial stereotyping]] -- Sambo's parents are now [[Mammy]] and [[Pappy]], for example, and they are caricatures of [[Aunt Jemima]] and [[Steppin' Fetchit]]." [http://www.tomfolio.com/bookdetailssu.asp?b=7986&m=81]

* Jerry Pinkney said in a recent lecture that LBS was one of his favorite books as a child because it showed a resourceful black kid. He suggested that the problems with the book stem primarily from the stereotypical illustrations and the connotation that later attached to the name Sambo.<ref name="fairrosa" />

[[Barbara Bader]] wrote:

{{quotebox|All American children did not see the same book, however. Though the authorized Stokes edition sold well and never went out of print, a host of other versions quickly began to appear from mass-market publishers, from reprint houses, from small, outlying firms unconstrained by the mutual courtesies of the major publishers. A few are straight knock-offs of the book that Bannerman made, without her name on the title page; the majority were reillustrated -- with gross, degrading caricatures that set Sambo down on the old plantation or, with equal distortiveness, deposited him in Darkest Africa. Libraries stocked the Stokes edition, and a few others selectively. But overall the bootleg Sambos were much cheaper, more widely distributed, and vastly more numerous.<ref name="ferris" />}}