Uncle Remus books preserve African folktales and plantation Negro dialect

Harris was a white guy. I don't get "demeaning stereotypes", if that's how they talked on the plantation it's not a stereotype. The critics could say plantation life was demeaning.

It seems the books were respected in 1946, but civil rights activists wanted to erase history 20 years later. Pretty short Wikipedia entry for such important books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Remus

Uncle Remus is the fictional title character and narrator of a collection of black American folktales compiled and adapted by Joel Chandler Harris and published in book form in 1881. Harris was a journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, and he produced seven Uncle Remus books. He wrote these stories to represent the struggle in the Southern United States, and more specifically in the plantations. He did so by introducing tales that he had heard and framing them in the plantation context. He wrote his stories in a dialect which represented the voice of the narrators and their subculture. For this choice of framing, his collection has encountered controversy.

The stories are written in an eye dialect devised by Harris to represent a Deep South Negro dialect. Uncle Remus is a compilation of Br'er Rabbit storytellers whom Harris had encountered during his time at the Turnwold Plantation. Harris said that the use of the Negro dialect was an effort to add to the effect of the stories and to allow the stories to retain their authenticity.[2] The genre of stories is the trickster tale. At the time of Harris's publication, his work was praised for its ability to capture plantation Negro dialect.[3]

The animal stories were conveyed in such a manner that they were not seen as racist by many among the audience of the time. By the mid-20th century, however, the dialect and the narrator's "old uncle" were considered a demeaning stereotype by some black Americans, reflecting what they considered to be racist and patronizing attitudes. There is additional controversy in the stories' setting, a former slave-owning plantation that is portrayed in a passive manner. He said he had memorized the animal stories told by Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy at the plantation; he wrote them down some years later. He acknowledged his debt to these story-tellers in his fictionalized autobiography On the Plantation (1892).