The Aunt Jemima Backstory

With the ongoing protests about the insane level of police violence and racial injustice in the USA, suddenly Aunt Jemima is back in the news. A false meme instantly began pushing a complete BS story about Nancy Green all over social media. Then I received the same meme in an email.

You can imagine that I, your humble fact-checking and “backstories” writer, just had to make this post.

At a recent tRump event, republicans actually trotted out a white “student” to tell a whopper about the “original model Nancy Green” and how “cancel culture” was somehow denigrating her legacy, or something. (Actually the actual original Aunt Jemima model was a white male blackface character in a minstrel show, but we’ll get to that). The false social media meme claims that Nancy Green supposedly died a millionaire, as the school girl snarkily said, her story was”the American dream.”

Spoiler alert: False.

A simple Snopes search could have shown this girl that the story she was instructed to tell on national television was a lie. Did she not know about Snopes? It’s possible that she was unaware or was told not to “trust” it, (since the right-wing now hates Snopes – because evidently truth has a “liberal bias”). Or, from the tone of her delivery, she might be auditioning to be the next Aryan female Fox “news” host. Sigh.

So, here we go.

The Origins of Aunt Jemima

Minstrel Blackface Emmett Miller The origins of Aunt Jemima can be traced back to 1889 when Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood created a self-rising pancake mix. The product originally carried the rather boring name “self-rising pancake flour,” but Rutt happened to attend a minstrel show where he saw men dressed in blackface perform a song entitled “Old Aunt Jemima.” He was inspired to change the name of their product to “Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix”.

in the autumn of 1889 Rutt appropriated the Aunt Jemima name and auntjemimaPoster-m image from lithographed posters he’d seen at a vaudeville house in St. Joseph, Missouri. The term “Aunt”and “Uncle” in this context were terms used to address older enslaved peoples – since they were denied use of courtesy titles, such as Mrs. or Mr.

Eventually, Rutt and Underwood sold the company to the Davis Milling company.

Original model Nancy Green

greenm The Davis milling company brought its pancake mix to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. While there, they encountered a woman who worked as a cook for a judge named Nancy Green. A former slave, Ms. Green seemed the perfect representative to play the part of Aunt Jemima and sell the pancake flour.

“This began a really long tradition of women being Aunt Jemima in public performance,” said Maurice M. Manring, author of “Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima.” You can read about the other Aunt Jemima models here.

At the time, Aunt Jemima was seen as a “mammy” character, a racial stereotype of a slave happy to please her white masters.

The fame of the brand Aunt Jemima coincided with the explosion of advertising during deysurelovemuhpancakesw World War I. The brand created a whole backstory for Aunt Jemima giving her a fictional family and creating made up events about her life.

Ms. Green was paid for her work, however, there is no evidence that Nancy Green shared in any of the profits from the company that sold the pancake mix, said Patricia A. Turner, professor of African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author. And she was certainly paid far less than a white model would have been.

Green would continue her work as a housekeeper and died in 1923 after being hit by a car. (Some accounts say it was a car accident.)

Quaker Oats bought the company in 1926
buckwheatm Quaker Oats bought the company and needed a new “Aunt Jemima.” Anna Short Harrington was discovered by company executives at a cooking fair where she had won praise for her own homemade pancake mix. She was exactly what they were looking for in a spokeswoman. Anna was hired on the spot as the company’s new full time real-life Aunt Jemima and within months an ad featuring Anna appeared in the magazine Woman’s Home Companion. The company also started using her recipe for mass production of their mix.

In 1937, Quaker Oats filed for a trademark for the brand. In their trademark application, they included a photo of Anna Short Harrington in costume as Aunt Jemima.

She was paid a modest salary for her role which allowed her to purchase a small home in Syracuse, New York where she rented out rooms and lived until her death in 1955. She had played the part of Aunt Jemima from 1935 to 1949, but her image continued on long after she died.

oliviam Eventually, Quaker Oats hired Anna Harrington’s great granddaughter Olivia to be their model in 1989.. Thankfully, it looks like she’ll be the final model for this product line; and finally Quaker Oats is bowing to public pressure to change the name of their products.

The Lawsuit

Anna Short Harrington’s great-grandson filed a class action lawsuit in August 2014, alleging that Quaker Oates illegally used his great-grandmother’s image and recipes for decades without ever paying a dime in royalties that should have been standard. Furthermore, the suit claimed “theft in procuring 64 original formulas and 22 menus from Harrington.” And worst of all, the lawsuit claimed the company dissuaded their great-grandmother from seeking legal help to protect her rights in the trademark registration, taking advantage of her lack of education and age so they would not have to per her a percentage of sales from her recipes.

He lost the lawsuit but not because it was without merit. He actually lost because he could not prove definitively that he was a genetic descendant of Anna Harrington(!)

Uncle Ben, Uncle Remus, Aunt Jemima are not affectionate names

As mentioned above, older slaves were often addressed as “Aunt” or “Uncle” because whites would not grant them basic courtesy titles of Mr. or Mrs. Black Americans know what it means when white people call them “Aunt Jemima” or “Uncle Ben”; and it’s not to celebrate them as “the American dream.” it’s used as an insult… one of far too many that are hurled in their direction every single day. That’s why petitions were started several years ago to get Quaker Oats to change the name of Aunt Jemima products. They resisted making that change until this month, June 2020, when public pressure reached a crescendo, with millions of white allies joining together with black Americans to demand change. Finally,Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s and the Cream of Wheat guy are going away.

Better late than never, I suppose.

***

Slave In A Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima by M.M.Manring

Black Hunger: Soul food in America by Doris Witt

*Much of this information was taken from sites below, some verbatim, which is not my normal way of writing. But I wanted to get this posted quickly. The sites below were great for confirming the research and helping to get the dates correct.

crazyemailsandbackstories