Charlie and the White Supremacy Factory

Banned Histories of Race in America

Some will say this is a story about censorship.

In 1970 Paramount Pictures was about to make now-classic Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, based on the 1964 book Charlie & the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. But there were some problems. The filmmakers didn’t think certain parts of the book belonged in their movie and so they hired a writer to change them. This made Dahl furious.

One particular change enraged Dahl the most: the Oompa-Loompas. You see, he hadn’t written the singing and dancing little helpers as the orange and green beings from the mysterious region of Loompaland with which you are probably most familiar. No, in the original version, the golden ticket holders cry out, “What are they doing? Where do they come from? Who are they? Aren’t they fantastic! No higher than my knee! Their skin is almost black!”

The Oompa-Loompas as African Pygmies, as depicted by Joseph Schindelman in the original version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). AP

That’s right. Wonka then explains, “They are real people! They are some of my workers!... Pygmies they are! Imported direct from Africa! They belong to a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies known as the Oompa-Loompas. I discovered them myself. I brought them over from Africa myself — the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all. I found them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.”

If the movie Oompa-Loompas were also Black, the visual would not show the audience an eccentric candyman giving away his legacy, but a cruel enslaver picking a successor for his plantation. Their dancing would appear like a Cakewalk, their singing like field hollers, “Oompa-Loompa” sounding like mocking an African language.

Changing the Oompa-Loompas was a good move by the studio, but it was not a moral act of anti-racism by progressive executives. The change was forced by the NAACP threatening to protest at every movie theatre across the country that showed the film. Dahl remained furious and claimed the NAACP’s threats of protest to be, “real Nazi stuff”.