The film is still unavailable & a bigot is President. Happy now, haters?

When Disney took this film away, they thought the exact opposite of what's happening now would be happening today. A white racist endorsed by Klansmen is about to become president of the United States. After this, you cannot convincingly argue that taking this film away made racism go away. If anything, it just made things worse.

In the first 50 years of the film's life before the studio turned on it, we saw Brown v. Board of Education, a rise in black upward mobility, a resurgent African-American civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and more and more popular music with multi-racial influences (rock, R&B, soul, disco, and even the early years of rap before it turned violent, misogynistic and homophobic).

But after Eisner's heart attack and Disney turned on the film, things started to change, and not in a good way. Racial rhetoric started to become more divisive, the culture started to become more fragmented (and in a way, segregated), and the quality of both white and black music declined precipitously (keep in mind the film is called SONG of the South, and it's the sharecroppers' singing that attracts Johnny to their camp). And the same Disney corporate regime that took it away also foisted Justin Timberlake on us during his Mouseketeer days.

Corporate censorship is censorship and that's just what this is, plain and simple. A cover-your-ass move that they thought would make them look progressive, but it proves they're even more reactionary than they ever were. They still sell Touchstone movies on Blu-ray with anti-gay hate speech in it like My Science Project and the original Adventures in Babysitting, so they've got no moral leg to stand on.