Why did John Ford call James Stewart a racist?

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-ford-called-james-stewart-racist/

Starring alongside John Wayne, this 1962 masterpiece is usually considered to be one of Ford’s greatest works. However, its legacy is complicated by the significant disagreement between the director and Stewart. According to Michael Munn, who penned the biography Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend, their feud was sparked by Stewart’s alleged racism.

Munn claimed that he had conducted an interview with Woody Strode, who also appeared in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. As per the details of their interview, Strode allegedly told Munn: “Stewart was never rude to me – he was never rude to anyone. But I could tell he preferred to be around Lee Marvin or John [Wayne] than me.”

Many scholars have pointed out that Munn was notoriously unreliable. In another interview, Stewart himself opened up about the infamous showdown between him and Ford. When the director asked him what he thought of Strode’s costume, the actor disapproved of the outfit and said that he looked “a bit too much like Uncle Remus”.

Ford gathered the entire crew and called out Stewart, saying: “One of the actors here doesn’t like Uncle Remus. In fact, I don’t think he even likes Negroes”. According to Munn, Strode later admitted that Ford had manipulated him into hating Stewart and that the incident made the actor even more uncomfortable around him.

While Ford didn’t hesitate to call Stewart a racist, many prominent filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee have pointed out that Ford’s films are inherently racist. In an interview with Henry Louis Gates, Tarantino declared: “To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that who kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity.”