Art: Uncle Remus Memorial

Georgia last week began raising $100,000 to build a monument to one of its two great literary heroes, the late Joel Chandler Harris, author of the “Uncle Remus” stories.* Throughout the State’s public schools, where his birthday in December is annually celebrated, collection boxes were to be distributed so that moppets with dimes, nickels and pennies could share in honoring the man who gave them the tales of the foxiness of Brer Fox and the agility of Brer Rabbit. First substantial gift came from Col. Sam Tate, president of Georgia Marble Co., who lives in a huge pink marble mansion in Tate, 60 miles north of Atlanta, and from whose quarries was cut the stone that built the Federal Reserve Bank Building in Cleveland, the Bok Carillon Tower at Mountain Lake, Fla., the Harding Memorial at Marion. He promised $30,000 worth of Georgia Pink. A nationwide competition will decide how Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer B’ar, Tar-Baby, Uncle Remus and the Little Boy will appear in Sam Tate’s marble.

Joel Chandler Harris was primarily a workaday newspaper man who for 24 years wrote editorials and features for the Atlanta Constitution. It was the Constitution which first printed an “Uncle Remus” story and D. Appleton & Co. which first persuaded its author to put a group of them in book form. (First edition: 1880.) A serious student of folklore and Southern dialects, Joel Harris claimed no invention for his stories, contended that he merely compiled them from tales told to him by Negroes.

Painfully shy, Author Harris would completely lose his voice when he met strangers, was badly frightened when President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to spend a night at the White House. The last year of his life he spent editing an unsuccessful monthly called Uncle Remus’s Magazine. Two weeks before he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1908, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church.

Enthusiastic Georgians last week were predicting that the money would be raised, the Harris monument erected in time for his bedridden 81-year-old widow to see it. Sure to see it were Joel Harris’ children: Mrs. Edwin Camp, wife of the Atlanta Journal’s sports writer “Old Timer”; Joel Jr., president of Atlanta’s Rotary Club; Lucien, in the insurance business; Evelyn, public relations counsel for Southern Bell Telephone Co.; and Julian, advertising manager of the Atlanta Constitution.

*Georgia’s other literary hero: Poet Sidney Lanier (1842-81).