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Pancake flipping. Broadly grinning. Greasy, smiling, shining face. Teeth broadly flashing a huge show of white. Head rag, bandanna wearing, servile, anything for the white folks. Icon of the world of segregation and meek utter unconditional unending servitude.
The racist, sexist image of Aunt Jemima has become entrenched into the subconscious memory and culture of all Americans, and like a health-destroying bad habit, has sneaked into our existence and psyches as to have become a normal image that no longer holds feelings of disgust, shame and revulsion. That the manufacturers of Aunt Jemima have for over 100 years been able to so skillfully integrate this disparaging symbol into American culture, as to lend it as imparting endearing qualities across all racial, gender and ethnic groups, has had a profound impact on the image black Americans have had of themselves and of the image whites, and other races, have had of black people, and especially the image that black women have had to contend with.
That black women were relegated to being wet-nurses for the children of white people, that this asexual image of the all-giving mammy was created by white men to cover up their massive rapes of black women during slavery, regardless of the fact that black women in slavery on average were very thin/skinny because of a sub-standard slave diet, and that the majority of black women slaves did not live past the age of fifty years, this image was created to present the propaganda that black women were so matronly, so obese, so un-womanly, that there was no way any white man would have sex with such a black woman, let alone rape her.
Hence the creation of the Mammy/Aunt Jemima icon to justify rape of black women not only during slavery, but the continued perpetuation of legally and publically sanctioned rape of black women during Jim Crow segregation. Contrary to what many people think, the many black women who were forced into white homes to care for the white family because of the role of domestic servant was the only employment they could obtain, the image of the well-endowed, obese black Mammy is a lie. The majority of the black women who worked in white homes during segregation were young, slender black women. The creation of Aunt Jemima by white men was to soothe the conscious and fears of white women who felt that these “Jezebels” (ironic that the white men who raped black women would have the balls to call black women whores after they, the white men, raped black women for generations, and would slander black women with the epithet “Whore/Jezebel), but, white men created the Mammy image so white women would not have to fear that the Jezebel black woman would lure their weak-willed white men away, so that white women would not have to fear that these “temptresses” would wreck their already in turmoil white home life, therefore, Aunt Jemima was created to give the South an image of tranquil, docile, happy ex-slave black people who only lived to serve the white people’s bottomless needs. On the contrary, the many black women who were forced into working in white people’s homes resented this type of work and the horrors that came with it, since the job of domestic was all that was allowed to black women then.
And the all-pervasive degrading image of Aunt Jemima has relegated black women into a low economic status of life, forever slaves to a hateful stereotypical image of the all-serving, selfless, all-giving, give-out, work to the death, slave like a mule hitched to a plow, deny any and all essence of her being a human being—–MAMMY.
And despite all their efforts, despite all their work and accomplishments that so many black women have done, the mammy image always forces them back into the slave plantation kitchen of many American’s minds. As the author, Deborah Gray White, author of “Ar’nt I a Woman?” put it so well:
“In the pictures painted by Americans, Mammy towered behind every orange blossom, mint julep, erring white child, and gracious Southern lady. . . .In the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s Hollywood film producers and New York advertising agencies built their own monuments to Mammy. With their films, their pancake boxes, and their syrup bottles, they imprinted the image of Mammy on the American psyche more indelibly perhaps than ever before.We probably can not measure the effect of the mass packaging of Mammy with precision, but the fact is that Mammy became a national symbol of perfect domesticity at the very time that millions of black women were leaving the cotton fields of the South in search of employment in Northern urban areas. Surely there is some connection between the idea of Mammy, the service and domestic jobs readily offered to black women, and their near-exclusion from other kinds of work.”
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A CHRONOLOGY OF THE HISTORY OF THE RACIST STEREOTYPE AUNT JEMIMA
1889
Pearl Milling Company founded by Charles Rutt and Chris Underwood.
Creation of the first ready-mixed pancake flour.
Aunt Jemima chosen by Charles Rutt as advertising’s first living trademark.
Aunt Jemima Manufacturing Company replaces Pearl Milling Company.
1890
Aunt Jemima trademark registered by Bert Underwood, brother of Chris.
Aunt Jemima Manufacturing Company sold to R. T. Davis Milling Company.
1893
Nancy Green debuts as Aunt Jemima at World’s Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893.
1895
Aunt Jemima paper dolls introduced.
1900
Master of promotional strategies for Aunt Jemima trademark, R. T. Davis, dies.
1903
Reorganization of R. T. Davis Milling Company.
1905
Aunt Jemima rag dolls introduced.
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1914
R. T.Davis Milling Company reincorporated as Aunt Jemima Mills Company.
1926
Aunt Jemima Mills Company sold to Quaker Oats Company for $4,202,077.28
1940S
Painted package illustration of Aunt Jemima becomes a realistic photograph.
1955
Aunt Jemima Restaurant opens at Disneyland.
1960s
Aunt Jemima image featured on packages and in advertising campaigns becomes a composite.
1989
Aunt Jemima trademark is 100 years old.
1989
Trademark modified and reintroduced on May 27.
1991
Quaker Oats/Aunt Jemima forms an alliance with the National Council of Negro Women.
Women Who Have Portrayed Aunt Jemima
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- Nancy Green (1834 – 1923)
- The first Aunt Jemima, Nancy Green, was born a slave in 1834. She signed an exclusive contract which gave her the right to portray the character for the rest of her life. Green was featured at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Green, as Aunt Jemima, cooked pancakes, sang songs, and told stories of the Old South.
- Anna Robinson ( ? – 1951)
- In 1933, Anna Robinson became the second Aunt Jemima, and was featured at the Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition. Robinson’s likeness was captured on a painted portrait, an image that changed the product’s packaging.
- Edith Wilson ( ? – 1981)
- Prior to becoming the character, Edith Wilson was a classic blues singer and actress in Chicago. She appeared in “Amos ‘n’ Andy” and the movie, To Have and Have Not. Quaker Oats had Wilson portray Aunt Jemima on radio, television, and in personal appearances from 1948 to 1966. Wilson was the first Aunt Jemima to appear in television commercials.
- Ethel Ernestine Harper ( ? – 1981)
- Ethel Ernestine Harper was Aunt Jemima during the 1950s. Prior to assuming the role, Harper graduated from college at the age of 17 and became a teacher. As an actress, Harper performed in the Hot Mikado and the Negro Follies.
- Rosie Hall (1900 – 1967)
- Rosie Hall worked for Quaker Oats in the company’s advertising department until she discovered their need for a new Aunt Jemima. In 1988 they declared her grave an historical landmark.
- Aylene Lewis ( ? – 1964)
- Aylene Lewis first portrayed Aunt Jemima in 1955 at a restaurant of the same name at Disneyland. As Aunt Jemima, Lewis posed for pictures with visitors.
- Ann Short Harrington (1900 – 1955)
- Little is known about the career of Ann Harrington. Clippings from New York papers indicate the Harrington was “discovered” working as a cook in Syracuse, New York for the Kappa Sigma fraternity house. Before the fraternity, Harrington had worked for the former New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. It is unknown how long Ann Harrington portrayed Aunt Jemima, but she apparently appeared on television shows as the character in the New York area.
THE ANATOMY OF A STEREOTYPE THAT HAS MOCKED, DENIGRATED AND VILIFIED BLACK WOMEN FOR OVER 100 YEARS
The term stereotype was coined by a Frenchman named Firmin Didot in 1798. Stereotyping was associated with a printing mechanism that consisted of a plate upon which letters had been cast to create a permanent and unchangeable record or image. Around 1824 the term was being applied in a metaphorical sense due to its association with consistent monotony of perceived expectations and ideas that arise from prejudicial notions of fantasy, versus reality based in fact.
The phrase was introduced to the general public by Walter Lippmann in 1926. He described it as:
“An ordered more or less consistent picture of the world to which our habits, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. . ., it is a form of perception which implies a certain character on the data of our sense before the data reach intelligence.”
Stereotypes are the set of traits used to explain and predict the behavior of members of socially defined groups, therefore, based on this definition, stereotypes can and will result in perceptions of an extreme consistent nature, allowing for little, if any, variation within the target it seeks to define. Cut to the chase, a stereotype can be defined as a consistent representation of black people in advertising with images, words/text, and situations that in the end suggest that ALL members of the race (ergo, black people) are the SAME.
The stereotypes most associated with Aunt Jemima are considered as very negative by many black people. Traditional stereotypes are negative and always portray the intended group of people given the stereotypes in an unfavorable and disgusting light, and the main intent of stereotypes serves to stand for a whole diverse group of human beings. And nowhere is this more seen than in the case of Aunt Jemima, who is known to blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, etc. as the motherly-think-of-everyone-else-before-herself-even-if-it-means-her-demise-both-physical-and-mental Mammy image, due to 100 years of mass marketing.
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And it is the negative stereotypes of Aunt Jemima that seriously hinder and degrade the image of all black American women.
And it is through the mass media that the images of Aunt Jemima are proliferated and bombard the mental cognizance of persistent memory. And make no mistake about it, mass media plays a very vital role in the perpetuation of racist/sexist stereotypes against black people. The stereotyping of black people by media provides negative role models for both the minority/subjugated group (black people) and the majority/dominant group (white people). This causes a rift of cultural isolation, racial and residential segregation, increasing the distance between the two, making communication extremely difficult, and fuels the lingering legacy and detrimental effects of the pervasive stereotypes.
And the stereotypes of Aunt Jemima/Mammy are the most insidious that black women continue to have to challenge, fight and suffer from:
-The happy slave
-The devoted servant
-The happy non-white
-The natural-born cook
-The mental inferior
-The woman who is so ugly in appearance that she is no one a man would want to romance, love, or bring into his life or show off around his male buddies/friends
Aunt Jemima would also be the happy-go-lucky, clowning, grinning, childlike, soulful, hostile [but wary] perpetual servile slave.
Other attributes of Aunt Jemima/Mammy are the following:
-Strong, kind, loyal
-Obese, almost cow-like in image
-Slatternly, lazy and filthy in her appearance
-Her dark skin was mocked with a greasy eye-blinding shine
-Asexual, unattractive, matronly in appearance
-Always the “motherly type”—-but, not the type for a man to marry
-Good-humored to a fault, never had reason to cry or experience sorrow
-The ubiquitous head rag (which incidentally, was originally a West African gele headwrap worn by black Africans, but made into a pernicious stereotype by white people during slavery and by media ads of the 20TH Century). This image gave way to the phrase “handkerchief head”.
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(Ironically, the name “Jemima” is biblical in nature and is an anglicized version of the feminine Hebrew name Yamimah, the second of Job’s daughters born to him at the end of his self-entitled book of the Bible. Jemima, the offshoot of irascible mammy, was sweet, jolly, even-tempered, and polite. Yamimah/Jemima, Hebrew for “dove,” was Job’s youngest daughter, symbolizing innocence, gentleness, and peace. But the name belies its meaning. The caricature connotes not naïvéte but stupidity, not peace but docility. Jemima was an obese, darkly pigmented, broad-bosomed, handkerchief-headed, gingham-dressed, elderly servant content in her subjugation.)
When black women slaves stepped off the plantation, they envisioned a life free from perpetual toil of slavery, but, white America would not let them shed the shackles of the racist image of Aunt Jemima. With the packaging of Aunt Jemima securely embedded into the minds of all Americans, the icon of Aunt Jemima was here to stay.
In the 1923s, the Daughters of the Confederacy asked the Congress to set aside a site in the Capitol area where a monument in recognition of the “Black Mammy” could be built. Black people were so angered and offended at the thought of such an outrage even being suggested that they protested vociferously against this monument of insulting degradation against the image of black womanhood, and as a contemptuous sign of black servitude. Black women across the nation were enraged at the proposal for a Mammy statue. Civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell wrote that if it were built, ‘there are thousands of colored men and women who will fervently pray that on some stormy night the lightning will strike it and the heavenly elements will send it crashing to the ground.’ They instead suggested that “a better memorial would be to extend the full rights of American citizenship to the descendants of these Mammies”. Ending the lynching, public humiliation of black people on trolley cars and other forms of transportation, giving black people the right to vote, were what black people needed, not more racist/sexist slaps in the face. So great was the pressure brought by black people, black leaders and black groups, that the monument was rightfully killed in the House of Representatives.
I have admiration and reverence for Nancy Green and the many black women who portrayed Aunt Jemima.
They made do as they could with the world that was handed to them, and showed themselves, as so many, many black women have, that they were of better, sterner stuff than those white people who insulted, belittled, degraded, and mocked them.
The many Nancy Greens who had to go into white homes and face rape from the white husbands and sons, faced abuse from the white wives, faced disrespect, faced being cheated out of wages that amounted to nothing more than $2-3 dollars a day for hard labor under conditions that were no better than slavery—–those black women were the real humans, the real women, the real Southerners.
On days when I think I have it so bad, when I think I can’t go on, I remember all those brave black women who came before me, and I say to myself: “If they can go on after enduring hells that I can only conceive of in nightmares, then who am I to complain?”
It is white-run America that created these images; created these images to destroy the integrity, the value, the humanity of black women. That white men used black women as sexual toilets, and that white men tried to justify their sexual hatred of black women with the creation of “Mammy” was white Southern society’s way of sweeping under the rug white male sexual aggression against black women. By creating “Mammy”, white men , and white women, were seeking to assuage their guilt over all the hundreds of thousands of rapes done to black women during slavery and segregation. The creation of Mammy was to deflect from the reality of what many black women and girls suffered at the hands of white male rapists in the South. And this subservient image was created as a controlling image against black women. Black women who had more honor and humanity than all the white people who sought to destroy them.
Would that white America and all of America could learn from these fine women’s humility and love of life that they were willing to take the brunt of abuse so that their children, and their children’s children would have a better, less hellish life.
That is what a real woman does.
