https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-t...
https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-t...
From West's "Roald Dahl" at https://archive.org/details/roalddahl00mark_0/page/70/mode/2... :
> The controversy started when Lois Kalb Bouchard and some other critics charged that the book was racist. In 1970 Bouchard published an article entitled “A New Look at Old Favorites: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was reprinted a few years later in a book called The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism.
That 1972 reprint is available at https://archive.org/details/blackamericaninb0000macc/page/11... .
West continues:
> Bouchard did not accuse Dahl of “being deliberately racist,” but she argued that he perpetuated racist stereotypes through his portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas. She criticized these characters’ “childishness and dependency upon whites.”12 She also disliked the relationship between Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas. “As workers in the factory,” Bouchard wrote, “the Black characters are exploited. The owner clicks his fingers sharply when he wants a worker to appear. The Oompa-Loompas are made to test various kinds of candies, sometimes with unfortunate effects” (Bouchard, 113).
After the 1971 announcement about the movie, the NAACP threatened to boycott the movie. Dahl "found the NAACP to be unreasonable, telling Knopf editor Bob Bernstein he was unable to understand why the perceived his story as a ‘terrible dastardly anti-negro book,’ and described their attitude as ‘real Nazi stuff.’” - https://daily.jstor.org/roald-dahls-anti-black-racism/
The NAACP protest is why the Oompa-Loompas in the movie are orange - https://screenrant.com/gene-wilder-willy-wonka-and-the-choco... .
Only after Cameron's "wide-ranging attack" in 1973 did Dahl agree to change the book, in 1974, several years after the movie came out.