In the 1960s, when Muhammad Ali's black opponents in the ring insisted on calling him Cassius Clay and refused to address him by his new Muslim name, Ali fought back with words as well as punches. As he pummeled them, he would shout: "Uncle Tom, what's my name?"

Today, the term "Uncle Tom" is still considered a strong insult among African-Americans. Earlier this year, two black authors published "The American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms: Being a Review of the History, Antics, and Attitudes of Handkerchief Heads, Aunt Jemimas, Head Negroes in Charge, and House Negroes Against the Freedom Aims of the Black Race." In the book, Richard Laurence and James Lowe charge a number of prominent African-Americans, including Oprah Winfrey and Secretary of State Colin Powell, with being "Uncle Toms," or traitors to their race.

It wasn't always so. Uncle Tom, the leading character in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was once one of the best known and most sympathetic characters in American literature. And the novel, which is getting renewed attention as it marks its 150th year in print, is still widely read in US high schools and is among the most successful and influential books in American history.

In her 1852 novel, meant to publicize the evils of slavery, Stowe paints an Uncle Tom who is "spiritually and morally superior" to the three white men who successively own him, says Charles Johnson, an African-American scholar who has written an introduction to an anniversary editionof the book (Oxford University Press).

The Uncle Tom of the novel is a young and strong slave in the pre-Civil War South, a father of three young children who chooses, out of his Christian convictions, martyrdom over violence to deal with his oppressors.

"There's a very heroic moment in [the book] where he dives off of a ship and saves Little Eva's life, rescues her, when she's fallen," points out Patricia Turner, the author of "Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture." "But when you say 'Uncle Tom' [today], you don't usually imagine someone who's that strong and that robust."

At the end of the novel, Uncle Tom sacrifices his life to protect others. "He dies because he won't reveal to [his master] Simon Legree the presence of two female slaves who have been sexually exploited by Legree," Dr. Turner says. "[He] would rather be whipped to death than give up the location of two women who've been sexually abused."

Stowe, an ardent abolitionist, came from a deeply religious New England family that included several Protestant ministers. Her novel was meant to show that slaveholding was a deep moral wrong, inconsistent with Christian practice, a view that was by no means universal at the time. Her long, winding story (it appeared first as a magazine serial) depicts a large cast of characters, black and white, who wander through a number of locales.

In her story, even kind Southern whites who care about Uncle Tom and other slaves suffer the ill effects of being slave owners. "The presence of slavery corrupts their ability to work as a family," Ms. Turner says. "What [Stowe] wants her white readers to see is that there can't be harmoniously good, white slaveholding families.... There isn't a way of making slavery and Christianity compatible. It just doesn't work."

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