Uncle Remus Museum Still Grapples With Race Issues

Curtis Richardson hops around the front parlor of the 140-year-old house, animatedly recounting the enchanting tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Wolf.

This photo taken Oct. 15, 2009 shows Lain Shakespeare, the great-great-great grandson of author Joel...

This photo taken Oct. 15, 2009 shows Lain Shakespeare, the great-great-great grandson of author Joel Chandler Harris at The Wren's Nest, the Atlanta home Harris who wrote "Uncle Remus". The Wren's Nest opened as a museum in 1913 after Harris' death. The museum nearly closed a few years ago but has been revived by Shakespeare. (AP Photo/Dorie Turner)

(AP)

The elementary school students in the room shriek with delight as he huffs and puffs, stomping around the Wren's Nest, the very house where newspaperman and author Joel Chandler Harris brought the mischievous characters to life based on stories he heard from slaves during the Civil War.

"I smell a rabbit!" Richardson booms in a deep bass voice for the wolf, making the children laugh.

Down the hall in an office sits Harris' great-great-great grandson, Lain Shakespeare, a spunky 26-year-old who took over the failing museum three years ago and revived it from near closure using social networking Web sites Twitter and Facebook and a blog.

It was quite a tall order for a kid who grew up in a family that mostly shunned the museum because of its long-standing practice of not allowing blacks to visit, a policy that ended in 1984 when Shakespeare was a baby. Piled on top of that painful history is the controversy surrounding Harris' work — a white man profiting off stories he took from slaves and spreading what many consider to be an unflattering caricature of Southern blacks.

"It's an uphill battle, to say the least," Shakespeare said sitting in his Wren's Nest office, which was once the bedroom of Harris' mother. "We're letting people know the full story, instead of the story that's been told by other people. We talk about it. We don't sweep it under the rug."

He even poses questions on his blog like "Is Uncle Remus racist?" and invites readers to respond honestly. In one post, he wrote of a Girl Scout leader who wanted to bring her racially diverse troop to visit Wren's Nest, but was "met with dead silence" when she suggested the field trip to parents.

That friction and controversy is exactly what Shakespeare hopes will bring visitors to the front door of the mustard-colored home with the stained glass windows in Atlanta's mostly black southwest neighborhood. That, and fond childhood memories of hearing stories about Uncle Remus and the Tar Baby in the briar patch.