Die Britse outeur Roald Dahl (1916-1990) se boek, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964),"became something of a cause célèbre. Soon after news leaked out that there were plans to turn the book into a film, the producer David Wolpe received a letter from the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) objecting to the project on the grounds that the book was racist. This thinking stemmed from the fact that Wonka's factory workers, the Oompa-Loompas, had been portrayed as African Pygmies 'from the very deepest and darkest part of the jungle where no white man had ever been before'.
For Roald, this conclusion came as a complete shock. Not only had he never intended this fanciful detail to cause offense, he had also quite failed to appreciate fully the ferocity of the social tide that eddied around almost every public project within the United States at that time. Civil rights were a burning issue, the Black Panther movement was at its height, and Martin Luther King, Jr, had recently been assassinated. For the NAACP, the Oompa-Loompas seemed clearly to reinforce a stereotype of slavery that American blacks were trying to overcome. Exaggerated rumours quickly spread that the organization would picket any cinema which screened the movie and that even the use of the word 'chocolate' in the title had implied racist overtones. The producers were put under pressure to change both the nature of the Oompa-Loompas and the title of the film.
Lillian Hellman waded in to support Roald, writing to the NAACP on his behalf, but the reply she received [in 1969] was unequivocal. 'The objection to the title "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is simply that the NAACP doesn't approve of the book, and therefore doesn't want the film to encourage sales of the book. The solution is to make the Oompa-Loompas white and to make the film under a different title.' Roald was only too willing to change the colour of the Oompa-Loompas and did so with alacrity, but the people at the NAACP were adamant that the title of the movie also had to change because they did not want it to promote the book.
Roald told Bob Bernstein he was 'shattered' by this unreasonable attitude, complaining that he could not understand why the NAACP viewed his story as a 'terrible dastardly anti-negro book'. Angrily, he described their attitude as 'real Nazi stuff'. To Alfred Knopf [his American publisher] he wrote more sadly: 'The book is banned by the NAACP. They thought I was writing a subtle anti-negro manual. But such a thing had never crossed my mind.' Curiously, he seems to have forgotten that he had initially wanted to make Charlie a black boy, because he failed to mention it in any of the correspondence that surrounded the furore. Eventually a compromise was reached. Roald agreed to 'de-negro' the Oompa-Loompas in both book and movie, transforming them in the latter into dwarves with green hair and orange skin. The movie's title was altered to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
... The racism rumpus gained him notoriety - something Rayner Unwin [a British publisher] thought was good for book sales, because it was clear to him that there was nothing intentionally racist in Dahl's writing and because he knew that books that 'irritated librarians' generally entertained children. However, it provoked a period of intense - and with hindsight, almost comic - anxiety at Knopf. There, editors went through all Dahl's new material, scrutinizing it for anything that might unintentionally cause offence. Fabio Coen became concerned about using the word 'spades' in Fantastic Mr Fox. When he told Roald, the latter responded unexpectedly with a zeal worthy of Dr Bowdler. 'I will try to think of another word for spade. Shovel will not do because that is used in the story for mechanical shovels. Black with rage will certainly change.'
But within two years his attitudes had relaxed somewhat and a more familiar ironic detachment had returned. In an early draft of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Dahl had depicted the President of China using a yellow telephone and speaking on it in a silly accent. Coen was concerned about the racist implications of this, too. Although the offending passage was indeed eventually excised, Roald's first reaction now was that his editor had overreacted ...
Strangely, perhaps, it was not until the NAACP controversy that librarians began to complain about racism in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It seems none of them had noticed it until then. The letter that Dahl received [in 1972] from four of them who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, was typical. They informed him 'with great dismay' that they had found the book to contain 'passages with racist implications'. This was especially unfortunate, they added, 'as there are too few really fine authors writing for children, and you are certainly one of the best'. However, the book had robbed the 'little black creatures ... of all humanity' and this was now forcing them 'to question its place' on their shelves.
Dahl replied that he was 'flabbergasted to learn how much unwitting offence I had given to some people,' and assured them that the situation was being put right as soon as possible. It was. Future editions of the book contained no references to African Pygmies, only to dwarves with 'golden-brown hair' and 'rosy white' skin ... confident that his reputation was now restored among the juvenile literature intelligentsia ..."
Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, London: HarperPress, 2011, p 492-495.
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