What’s the truth about Aunt Jemima?

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. At a recent event, republicans actually trotted out a white high school girl to tell a whopper about the “original model Nancy Green”, (actually the 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 high 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”. Sigh.

So, here we go.

The Origins of Aunt Jemima

Minstrel Blackface Emmett MillerThe 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 name “self-rising pancake flour,” but Rutt was inspired to change the name of the mix after he attended a minstrel show and saw men dressed in blackface perform a song entitled “Old Aunt Jemima.”

in the autumn of 1889 Rutt appropriated the Aunt Jemima name and auntjemimaPoster-mimage from lithographed posters seen at a vaudeville house in St. Joseph, Missouri.  The term “Aunt” in this context was a southern form of address used to address older enslaved peoples – since hey were denied use of courtesy titles, such as Mrs. or Mr.

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

Original model Nancy Green

greenmThe Davis milling company brought its mix to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and hired Nancy Green, a former slave who was working as a cook for a judge, to act as 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.”

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 deysurelovemuhpancakeswWorld 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.

Green would continue her work as a housekeeper and died in 1923 after being hit by a car.

Quaker Oats bought the company in 1926.
Anna Short Harrington was discovered by Quaker Oats 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. She was paid a modest salary for her role which allowed her to purchase a small home in Syracuse, New York where she lived until her death in 1955.

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

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 actually a descendant of Anna Harrington.

Quaker Oats hired Anna Harrington’s great granddaughter Olivia to be their model in 1987.  Thankfully, it looks like she’ll be the final model for this product.

Here are some source links: