Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. pertaining to African Americans.

1879

London Life 14 June 5/1: [T]hey looked black because nature had painted them that colour [...] [T]hese two members of the Uncle Tom fraternity will doubtless make their mark on the music-hall boards.

2. (orig. US black) outwardly subservient, in the context of black/white relations; sometimes extended to any relationship between unequals.

1905		C. Chesnutt Colonel’s Dream 67: I thought, suh, that you looked like a No’the’n man. That bein’ so, doubtless you’d like somethin’ on the Uncle Tom order.
1942		‘Marienne’ ‘Solid Meddlin’ in People’s Voice (NY) 7 Mar. 33/2: When will Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong get hep that those plugs in Scribeman Winchell’s colyum [...] ain’t nowhere with us oi done in Uncle Tom dialect???
1944		C. Himes ‘Let Me at the Enemy’ in Coll. Stories (1990) 38: Here come a big Uncle Tomish lookin’ cat in starched overalls.
1958		C. Himes Real Cool Killers (1969) 89: Can that Uncle Tom crap.
1968		N. Heard Howard Street 152: Did you know that a lotta of them rich bastards live right here in Jersey? – and the Uncle Tom niggers.
1969		N. Cohn Awopbop. (1970) 115: If soul really has become Uncle Tom [...] less harsh, less racial and more accessible to half-baked white taste. [Ibid.] 124: He was typical soul, a bit Tom. Still, he wasn’t bad.
1969		‘Iceberg Slim’ Pimp 54: I gave him the same ‘uncle’ smile going out that I gave him coming in.
1970		B. Seale Seize the Time 52: I tried to get them not to think in Uncle Tomish ways.
1970		Compton Yearbook 81: Negro comedians of past years were limited to playing Uncle Tom-ish, lazy, smiling, shuffling menials.
1983		S. King Christine 62: Kids are a downtrodden class; after a few years you learn to do your own version of an Uncle Tom routine on kid-haters like Will Darnell. Yessir, nosir, okay, you bet.
1998		(con. 1960s) G. Washington Blood Brothers 150: That’s something you wouldn’t understand, you Uncle Tom Yankee.
2003		Bug (Aus.) Aug. 🌐 But this blackfella doing his Unca Tom number standing up for these thuggy white supremacists concerned me just a tad.
2019		S.M. Jones Lives Laid Away [ebook] ‘You a two-bit Uncle Tom niggah just like yo dead old man’.