COLUMN ONE : Gains From the Pain of Images Past : Many blacks have learned to face down the old stereotypes. They say the reward is an unvarnished view of history.

Inside the tiny log building--a museum made from three slave cabins--dusty pieces of history testify mutely but powerfully.

On the hearth sit iron pots and skillets that were used to cook white folks’ meals, to make their tea. Hanging on the wall are a wooden rake and a “brush broom” that neated up their dirt yards. Look to the left, and a huge stone fireplace recalls long nights of bitter talk about hard times. Walk on, look to the right, and there hangs a faded, handmade flag of the Confederacy.

Here also are the books of Joel Chandler Harris, the Uncle Remus tales in which negative stereotypes of blacks are portrayed in dialect and drawings along with the adventures of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox.

For years, almost all of the 1,000 visitors drawn to the Uncle Remus Museum each month were whites. Increasingly, however, blacks are coming, too, said Norma Watterson, the curator.

The change is startling because for years, blacks viewed the Uncle Remus tales as demeaning stories told by a shuffling “darkie” for the amusement of a little white boy, and these artifacts were a harsh reminder of an era when their ancestors were bought and sold as horses.

The museum, opened in 1963, is pulling in more black people than ever because what they see here is “a part of their history,” said Watterson, who is white.

The Uncle Remus character used to be painful to her, said Alice Hurt, a bank teller who is black. “But now I see it as something that happened--the way they made him out to be.”

Hurt’s former and present attitudes exemplify a dilemma that all black Americans face in deciding how to view history, literally: Looking at literature and artifacts dealing with slavery, the Civil War and segregation, at advertisements featuring bug-eyed, saucer-lipped black people causes more hurt than they want to bear, yet, at the same time, they increasingly want to know more about the times and the attitudes such artifacts represent.

A broad range of experts, including museum officials, historians, college professors, politicians and others, say that the need to know is gaining on the need to avoid painful memories. More and more, black people are seeking out history and collecting examples of racist pop art--such as the old Aunt Jemima pancake mix ads and “Jolly Nigger” coin banks--that they once disparaged.

Vanessa Simmons of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History said that blacks’ “awareness has been aroused.” More and more blacks realize that racist images “don’t tell you much about the people they depict. They tell you more about attitudes (of the creators) toward people that are depicted.”

“Maybe we had to go through a process of healing during which we rejected many of those things,” said Gail Davis Culp, a professor of English at Santa Monica College, “but we lost sight of how far we have come.”

Now, she said: “A lot of us (black people) are looking into these things. I want to know more so I can share more with my students.”

Many experts agreed that the trend is healthful, but some also warned that it carries with it a danger that bigoted whites may think that black people have become comfortable with the stereotypes--a terrible possibility at a time when some contend that racism is on the rise.

The South is filled with historical dilemmas and ambiguities that confront black people. White Southerners are incredibly infatuated with Civil War history, even as many of them embrace new roles as representatives of a desegregated New South. Here and in other small county seats throughout the region, monuments to the Confederate soldier stand as reminders of the lost war--and guard against a loss of Southern (white) dignity. Civic battles are still fought over whether the Confederate flag may be flown.

Black people generally have shown distaste for Confederate memorabilia. Thus when Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first black mayor, vowed in the early 1970s to help refurbish Cyclorama, The Confederate Museum’s diorama of the Battle of Atlanta fought in July, 1864, he was taking a political risk in his black-majority city.

Jackson, who just began a new term as mayor, said in a recent interview that he worried about black perceptions then, but pushed ahead with the restoration effort after a City Council member reminded him that “this depicts a battle that we (blacks) won.”

Said Jackson: “History was, period. History may not have been what we wanted it to be, but it was. We were a part of those days and this was a war that affected the liberty of African-Americans in a direct way.”

Tanya Touchstone, an aide at a mental health institute in Atlanta, knows that. Yet Cyclorama--a lighted and narrated three-dimensional exhibit backed by the 42-foot-high “Battle of Atlanta,” painted by German and Polish artists in 1885--is on her list of places not to go, along with Stone Mountain, the site of numerous Ku Klux Klan rallies.

“I’ve never been and I don’t plan to go,” she said. “Places that are going to show me how we built America and how they (white people) take credit for it--that doesn’t appeal to me.”

Nevertheless, black attendance at Cyclorama has been rising, tour guide Inell Duncan said. She estimated that about 5% of the 365,000 people who come to see the painting each year are black.

And seeing “Glory,” the first serious film about black soldiers in the Civil War, is likely to increase blacks’ interest in Cyclorama, Duncan said.

Indeed, the 1989 movie about the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, like Alex Haley’s blockbuster book, “Roots,” is a source of inspiration to those who advocate a more thorough investigation of black American history. Historians say they hope that “Glory” will offset earlier film images of the Civil War--the romanticized Old South and the complacent and compliant black people of “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind.”

Around the South, blacks until now have felt that dressing up in Confederate Army uniforms and re-enacting battles was a white man’s hobby akin to dressing up in sheets and burning crosses. “Glory” may change that feeling.

Ray Herbeck, associate producer of “Glory,” said that a heightened black interest in the Civil War predated the movie. He said that efforts around the nation to recruit blacks to reenact Civil War battles for the movie were successful.

In Washington, D.C., for example, an old-fashioned Civil War recruiting rally was staged at the home of Frederick Douglass, now a museum. An actor portrayed the powerful black 19th Century orator and delivered one of his speeches, accompanied by band music and banners. “It worked wonderfully,” Herbeck said, noting that 40 men eventually signed up.

Said Herbeck: “Our goal was to keep the black re-enactors in the hobby after the movie, keep it going, so there would always be a living presence in the hobby across the country.” Since the film opened, black re-enactors have been spotted at theaters making recruiting pitches to movie-goers.

Mayor Robert Major Walker, the first black elected to that office in Vicksburg, Miss., occasionally meets visitors on a Mississippi River paddle-wheeler and takes them to see some of Vicksburg’s rich Civil War history. Walker said that he particularly relishes playing the tour guide for black people.

Vicksburg was a bastion of the old South. For 100 years it refused to have a celebration on the Fourth of July because Gen. Ulysses S. Grant captured the city on that date in 1863. Walker said that after taking his tour, many blacks have a different impression--a “keen awareness” that the Civil War, like the old “mammy” dolls and “colored” signs, serves as “a reminder of what we don’t want to happen again.”

James Eaton, director of the Black Archives Research Center and Museum at Florida A & M University, wraps a similar message into a different kind of package. Eaton, who is black, calls his collection of racist postcards, toys, ceramic objects, advertisements and other items “the Coon Collection.”

“It’s our Holocaust,” Eaton said.

The Tallahassee museum also displays non-racist materials such as the papers of black college presidents, rare African maps and equipment issued to black Civil War soldiers. But the “Coon Collection” is its most popular attraction, Eaton said.

“If you don’t keep the records, you can forget where you came from, what you’ve been through,” he said.

Black people, who account for about 40% of the more than 100,000 annual visitors, sometimes “get sick” when they first see the leg irons from a 17th Century slave ship, the records of the Ku Klux Klan, the Little Black Sambo pictures, Eaton said.

“Some just can’t stand it,” he said, “but they still want to see it so they can get angry. Now, what they do when they leave here, I don’t know.”

The racist depictions have caused black people “great psychological damage” over the years, Eaton said. “Always seeing ourselves in a negative light, we thought we were inferior. So we started to straighten our hair, pinch our noses with clothespins.”

Eaton believes that black people now are more likely to view “black collectibles” in a museum run by black people than in one run by whites. Others apparently believe that, too, as white-run museums have sent him pieces they could not display for fear of offending blacks.

The collectibles have become hot items, and are often sold at flea markets. For example, an “Aunt Jemima” cookie jar--depicting a fat, grinning and excessively bosomy black woman in a kerchief, cost a quarter 22 years ago but now might bring almost $200. And black people often are the buyers.

Jacque Browne, a white woman who runs a booth at an Atlanta flea market, said she has sold “scads and scores of little blackies eating watermelon and that sort of stuff,” and that such items have become “very difficult to come by.”

Here in Eatonton, a quiet farming community of 6,600 that is about 55% black, the collectibles are far less visible than Uncle Remus and the critters. A Br’er Rabbit statue stands on the county courthouse lawn. There are Uncle Remus Realty and a Briarpatch Office Products, just across from the Confederate Memorial.

The Farmers & Merchants Bank calls its automatic teller “Tar Baby” after the character in one of the Harris tales. The receipts the machine spits out bear this slogan: “Tar Baby don’t say nothin’. He jus’ gives you money,” evoking the old slave speech patterns that Harris used in his works.

Roddie Anne Blackwell, executive vice president of the local Chamber of Commerce, said that a few black people criticized the “Tar Baby,” but they “weren’t from around here.” Several local blacks did voice disapproval to a visitor, however, showing that they will accept history even if they view it as racist, but that contemporary use of such offensive images is unacceptable.

In Atlanta, about 75 miles northwest of here, there is more Joel Chandler Harris history. Harris introduced his folk tales in the pages of the Atlanta Constitution, which hired him in 1876. His writings became known worldwide and were translated into 27 languages. In 1946, the movie “Song of the South” immortalized Uncle Remus and the critters.

Five years after Harris died in 1908, the family home in Atlanta, known as Wren’s Nest and kept mostly as it was when he lived, was opened to the public as a museum.

To some of the public, that is. Black people were not allowed in until a 1968 court order forced the association operating Wren’s Nest to abandon its whites-only policy.

The association is gone and Carole Mumford, executive director, and Karen Kelly, assistant director, say that more and more black people are coming in. In fact, they said, last year a group of women from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group once headed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., gave a tea at Wren’s Nest.

“People who came to that tea said, ‘I’m coming back and I’m going to bring my kids,’ ” Mumford recalled.

And Kelly said that other black people who live in Atlanta “have come through and mentioned the fact that they were not allowed in before, and that they are glad to be able to come to visit.”

Not Bill Merrett, however. As president of Gray Line of Atlanta, the charter bus service, he has helped many black people visit Wren’s Nest but he has never set foot inside.

His reason is a measure of just how hard society must work to overcome segregation’s toll.

As a child, Merrett used to go to Wren’s Nest with his grandfather, who cut the grass there. Neither was allowed inside, even to use the bathroom. “I used to sit on a rock at lunchtime with my grandfather, and they would bring us a sandwich and a cup of water--a little bitty cup, the kind you get at a fountain--and that had to last you,” he recalled recently.

That experience put “a bad memory in my mind,” Merrett said. Then he added: “I shouldn’t be that way.”

He said that a museum official has “begged me to come, and I tell her I’ll get there one day.”

Do it, Mayor Walker of Vicksburg would say, even if you have to hold your nose.

“I come across a whole lot of things that are personally offensive to me,” Walker said, “but I have to deal with them within the framework of what I’m doing to arrive at the ultimate truth, to get an appreciation of that broad picture of history. And history includes things that are pleasant to you as well as those that are not pleasant to you.”

Edith Stanley, staff researcher, contributed to this story.