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Notes -
There was some stereotyping, but the primary complaint was that it depicted a black sharecropper in the post-reconstruction era who seemed basically content with his lot in life. In my mind that's not that bad. There are plenty of people who live in unjust and meager circumstances who still manage to find happiness, and it doesn't imply an endorsement of the whole social system. That said I haven't actually seen it, I'm mostly going off the many many critical articles from the early 2010s.
In my experience, this is the complaint in the motte, and the complaint in the bailey is that it depicts a black slave in the antebellum era who seemed basically content with his lot in life. (The people complaining are historically illiterate and do not understand what the film is about.)
To be fair, Song of the South is really vague about its time; the Hays Code reviewers supposedly asked for explicit statement in-film that it was set post-Civil War, but in the released work you end up having to read tea leaves and styles of clothing to nail it down. Yes, Remus's family are clearly sharecroppers rather than slaves, but Georgia did have a (tiny, heavily exploited) number of free African-Americans pre-Civil War (though almost all closer to cities); Johnny's family's behavior toward the African-Americans is way too familiar to have been acceptable in antebellum Georgia, but sanitizing treatment of 'the help' in media was absolutely common to antebellum writing and post-Reconstruction writing about pre-war behaviors.
Supposedly one of the scriptwriters wanted to make it more explicit, and there's probably something interesting to say about what a film closer to his version would have looked like, but given that one of the other guys wrote stuff such that the Hayes Code thought it was too racist for the time, and he's the one with more obvious fingerprints on the final work, I don't think it's an unreasonable complaint.
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