The Story of Little Black Sambo, a children's book by Helen Bannerman, a Scot living in India, was first published in 1899. In the tale, the little boy has to sacrifice his new red coat and his new blue trousers and his new purple shoes to four tigers, including one that wears his shoes on his ears, but Sambo outwits these predators and returns safely home, where he eats 169 pancakes for his supper. The story was a children's favorite for half a century before it became recently controversial in certain countries due to the word sambo. The story takes place in a fairy tale India with Caribbean elements, with the tigers racing around the tree are turned into ghee, rendered as "butter" and the humans eating inhuman quantities of pancakes.

The book has a controversial history. The setting of Bannerman's story was clearly in India - as can be seen by the presence of tigers and the reference to ghee - and thus it is likely that Sambo is an Indian boy. The original illustrations portray Sambo in the European version darky iconography (see golliwog), with black skin, wild hair and bright red lips. As the book made its way across the Atlantic to the US, the illustrations were re-interpreted in terms of the possibly more demeaning American version of darky iconography known as blackface. As a result the word "sambo" has a long history as a racial slur against African-Americans.

However, regardless of the degree of racism in the original story, many pirated versions were knocked off at a cheaper price, gaining Little Black Sambo greater availability in its day. These imitations often were more degrading, as pointed out in an on-line essay by David Pilgrim.

In 1996, noted illustrator Fred Marcellino observed that the story itself contained no racist overtones and produced a re-illustrated version, The Story of Little Babaji, which changes the characters' names but otherwise leaves the text unmodified. This version was a best-seller.

Julius Lester, in his Sam and the Tigers, also published in 1996, recast "Sam" as a hero of the mythical Sam-sam-sa-mara, where all the characters were named "Sam."

A modern printing with the original title, in 2003, substituted more racially sensitive illustrations by Christopher Bing, in which, for example, Sambo is no longer so inky black. It was chosen for the Kirkus 2003 Editor's Choice list. Some critics were still unsatisfied. Dr Alvin F. Poussaint said of the 2003 publication:

"I don’t see how I can get past the title and what it means. It would be like . . . trying to do 'Little Black Darky' and saying, 'As long as I fix up the character so he doesn't look like a darky on the plantation, it's OK.'"

The book has been controversial in Japan as well, both for racism and piracy. Little Black Sambo (the Japanese title is Chibikuro Sambo) was first published in Japan by Iwanami Shoten Publishing in 1953. The book was a pirated version of the original, and it contained drawings by Frank Dobias that had appeared in a US edition published by Macmillan Publishers in 1927. Sambo was illustrated as an African boy rather than as an Indian boy. Although it did not contain Bannerman's original illustrations, the pirated book was long mistaken for the original version in Japan. It sold over 1,000,000 copies before it was pulled off the shelves in 1988 after being accused of depicting racist characterizations. Just after Iwanami's success, most of the Japanese publishers, including Kodansha and Shogakukan, the two largest publishers in Japan, published their versions of pirated Little Black Sambo. In 1988, all these publishers followed Iwanami and withdrew their books from the market altogether.