Kemble was a notoriously racist artist who used minstrel-inspired "comic grotesque" style when drawing African Americans; for more about his career, see Wikipedia. Kemble was hired to do illustrations for important books like Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn, but his artwork can be really repugnant. For an essay that puts this into context, see Uncle Remus in Pictures by D. B. Dowd.
So, I decided just to not include his illustration for the story "Simon and Susanna" on that story page. My whole goal for this project is to re-discover the African American storytelling traditions that Harris documented and then appropriated for his own purposes, and including an illustration like this just plunges the story back into the minstrel/blackface context that makes all of Harris's books so painful to read.
As examples of some of Kemble's appalling art, here are items that you can find at The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida. This is A Coon Alphabet:
And here is a book entitled, I kid you not, Kemble's Coons.
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