On this point, Kazin writes acutely:

How can this all-too-perfect servant of the Lord be confused with the type of sycophant wheedling before the white oppressor that we now dismiss as an "Uncle Tom"? In the more than hundred and thirty years since the book was published to such acclaim and uproar—it will always figure in history as the book that really awoke the middle-class conscience to the horrors of slavery—the issue has shifted from what the white middle class "feels" to what the descendants of slaves demand as their political and human rights in our professed democracy.