|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In June 2020, the Quaker Oats Company announced that it would be re-branding its Aunt Jemima line of products — syrup, pancake mix, and other breakfast foods — because the brand's origins were based on racial stereotypes. Kristin Kroepfl, vice president and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, told NBC News: This decision caused some online outrage as social media users accused Quaker Oats of erasing its history and diminishing the accomplishments of Nancy Green, the woman who portrayed Aunt Jemima in promotional materials in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many of these posts claimed that Green was one of the first African American millionaires because of the amount of money she earned playing Aunt Jemima: But Green did not die a millionaire. In fact, she could not live off the earnings she made from her portrayal of Aunt Jemima, and continued to work as a housekeeper until a few years before her death in 1923. 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 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. The Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture writes: While Rutt and Underwood developed this self-rising mix and contributed the Aunt Jemima name, they were unable to turn their product into a commercial success. The duo sold their milling company to R.T. Davis, who, with Green's help, would go on to create the persona of Aunt Jemima and turn the brand into a national product. Davis hired Green, who was born a slave in Kentucky in 1834, to portray Aunt Jemima at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. Green, as Aunt Jemima, served pancakes to the crowd and told romanticized stories of her time on the plantation. While these stories were presented as if they were the genuine memories of Aunt Jemima, Green was, of course, just playing a fictional character. In Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory, author Kimberly Wallace-Sanders writes: A pamphlet detailing the life of Aunt Jemima, which portrayed her as a happy slave with a secret recipe working at a plantation owned by Colonel Higbee of Louisiana, was also created for the 1893 World's Fair, and laid the foundation for future advertisements to build on the Aunt Jemima myth. One artifact from the early days of Aunt Jemima's fictional history was a set of paper dolls that supposedly showed Aunt Jemima and her family before and after they sold her secret pancake recipe. The before set included six paper dolls without shoes and dressed in shabby clothing, while the after set included a set of fancy clothes. But these dolls, like most of the fictional lore surrounding Aunt Jemima, did not accurately reflect reality. We have been unable to find any specific details about how much Green was paid for her portrayal of Aunt Jemima. The evidence, however, suggests that Green did not become rich from her work and was likely paid a paltry sum. In Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America, Micki McElya writes that in 1900, Green listed her occupation as a cook. While this may have referred to her job demonstrating pancake mix as Aunt Jemima, in 1910, she was working as a housekeeper. We reached out to McElya for more information about what monetary payments Green received for her portrayal of Aunt Jemima. McElya couldn't point to a specific dollar amount, but she did say that she found no evidence that Nancy Green died a millionaire in 1923, and that the available evidence suggests otherwise. M.M. Manring, the author of Slave in A Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima, also told us that all of the available evidence ... would suggest that [Nancy Green] was almost certainly not conspicuously wealthy. Manring also addressed the notion that Green was given a lifetime contract to portray Aunt Jemima. This lifetime contract, according to Manring, was part of the lore created for the character of Aunt Jemima - but there's no evidence that it actually applied to Green. Manring said: Obituaries for Green published in The Chicago Tribune and Daily Herald also made no mention of her being one of the first African American women to become a millionaire: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/53701027/ While no evidence exists to suggest that Green died a millionaire, she did make enough money (as both a housekeeper and for her promotional work as Aunt Jemina) to support the missionary work of the Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago. It should also be noted that Green's descendants (as well as the descendants of another Black woman who portrayed Aunt Jemima) filed a lawsuit against Quaker Oats, arguing that the company exploited Green, and that her family was owed billions in royalties, USA Today reported. The lawsuit was later dismissed after a judge ruled that the plaintiffs did not provide proof that they were related to the women who portrayed Aunt Jemima: The rumor that Green died a millionaire is, like much of the folklore surrounding Aunt Jemima, not supported by historical evidence. This claim is unfounded, and all of the material we examined suggests that Green was not conspicuously wealthy. Therefore, we've rated this rumor false. In February 2021, Quaker Oats announced that it was retiring the Aunt Jemima brand name and replacing it with the Pearl Milling Company.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}