Last summer on June 17, 2020, the Quaker Oats Company announced its decision to rename its Aunt Jemima pancake brand after 131 years. Public opinion since the announcement has been mixed. One camp believes that the change is long overdue. While another group believes there’s nothing wrong with the brand’s namesake. For this special mini episode, we’re going to DIG in deeper and look at the history of Aunt Jemima. This case study will examine how something as innocuous as a box of pancake mix, represents America’s problematic history of racism.

Transcript for “Aunt Jemima: American Racism on Your Grocery Shelf”

Marissa: Last summer on June 17, 2020, the Quaker Oats Company announced its decision to rename its Aunt Jemima pancake brand after 131 years. Public opinion since the announcement has been mixed. One camp believes that the change is long overdue. While another group believes there’s nothing wrong with the brand’s namesake.[1]

Carly: For this special mini episode, we’re going to DIG in deeper and look at the history of Aunt Jemima. This case study will examine how something as innocuous as a box of pancake mix, represents America’s problematic history of racism.

Carly: I’m Carly

Marissa: And I’m Marissa

Carly: And we’re your historians for this episode of Dig.

Marissa: So before we really get into the history of Aunt Jemima, there’ll be some historical overlap with our “Slavery & Soul Food” episode and our more recent Birth of a Nation” episode. If you’re an educator, we’ve created a learning assignment/lesson plan that integrates these three episodes so be sure to check that out. Just go to our “For Educators” tab on our website, digpodcast.org. Also, Carly is joining me. She helped to write and produce this episode.

Carly: In 1888, entrepreneurs Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood acquired a bankrupt flour mill in St. Joseph, Missouri. Afterwards, they created a product that had never been done before—a pre-made, self-rising flour pancake mix. Before this, pre-made mixes weren’t really a thing. People would make or buy local flour, sugar, corn flour, whatever. So this new pancake mix was hot stuff. It also worked out really well for them because around this time, there were new methods of paper-packaging foods. (Remember we’re in peak American Industrialization here!) This is important for two reasons. First, this allowed Rutt and Underwood to make their pancake mix and then ship it off to sell in other places in the United States. Second, this made it so they were able to put a brand, an image, on their packaging because it was paper.[2]

Marissa: Because paper packaging allowed consumers to recognize their favorite products on the store shelves, Rutt and Underwood were trying to find something eye-catching for their product packaging. They wanted something that conveyed the comfort and warmth of buttery pancakes, right? One day in Autumn 1889, Rutt was walking through St. Joseph, and he stumbled upon a minstrel show.[3]

Carly: If you’re not familiar with minstrel shows, they were pretty popular in the 19th and early 20th century. Minstrel shows included skits, songs, and dances. And they usually focused on a, sort of, romantic and pastoral view of the “Old South.” Problem is, with most of these minstrel shows, they glamorized the plantation system and made it look like it was a better time to live in, especially for white people.

Marissa: Simultaneously, minstrel shows also cemented some really negative stereotypes about African Americans. Performers, who were men in painted blackface, would usually do a “plantation skit” where they’d reenact scenes from the Antebellum South. They would sing and dance, and basically make fun of enslaved black people.[4] So when Rutt dropped in on this St. Joseph minstrel show, this is where he found the image for his brand: “Aunt Jemima”, which was this well-known mammy-type character.[5]

Scene of Gone With The Wind, with Hattie McDaniel as "Mammy," Olivia de Havilland as "Melanie Hamilton," and Vivien Leigh as "Scarlett O'Hara"
Gone With The Wind actresses, Hattie McDonald, Olivia de Havilland, and Vivien Leigh | Wikimedia Commons

Carly: There’s some overlap between reality and fiction with the mammy. For example, the mammy is based off the very real enslaved Black woman who usually lived inside the plantation home. She cooked, cleaned, and took care of white children. (Also, the character is kind of based off of the Black woman servants to White employers after Emancipation.) But beyond that, white authors took this real person and created this false and problematic archetype with it.

Marissa: The mammy was usually depicted as fat, motherly, older, sexless, and bossy. Some saw her as this beloved figure, like a second mother to White children. And I’m sure there were some enslaved women who did care for the White children they looked after… but also they were being oppressed at the same time, ya know? So she was used as this symbol of harmony between Black enslaved people and White enslavers. This is pretty obvious in the famous 1939 film, Gone with the Wind. The mammy character, played by Hattie McDonald, really supports and dotes over the White southern belle protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara.[6] In the original book by Margaret Mitchell, it says that the mammy “devoted to her last drop of blood to the O’Haras…”[7] For many Southerners, mammy was the “perfect slave.”

Carly: So, why were people so invested in the mammy? She was everywhere in the late 19th and early 20th century. In a way, the mammy redeemed Southerners in the institution of slavery. According to Jo-Ann Morgan, “Seeing the former slave woman visually transformed into a contented servant absolved everyone of past transgressions and future responsibility toward the freed people.”[8] Marissa, you and Sarah mentioned in the “Slavery and Soul Food” episode that in 1923, the Daughters of the Confederacy wanted to erect a statue in remembrance of the mammy.[9] Their request was denied but I makes sense why they would want to preserve this character. The “mammy” character is nostalgic, it made slavery look not so bad, and her job was to comfort and take care of white people.[10] However, the mammy’s perceived loyalty and closeness totally ignores the traumas enslaved people endured within the system of slavery.[11]

Marissa: Also, the mammy character is problematic too because it’s dehumanizing. According to Riché Richardson, a professor of African-American literature, this stereotype “is premised on notions of Black otherness and inferiority, that harkens back to a time when Black people were thought of and idealized mainly in relation to servant positions.”[12] If you look at the original Aunt Jemima copyright image, it’s a very degrading and cartoonish representation of Black people.

original sketch of the Aunt Jemima logo on pink paper surrounded by faint pencil mark notes.
1890 original trademark image of Aunt Jemima | Library of Congress

Carly: So back to Aunt Jemima. Rutt finds this idea, this character, at a minstrel show for his pancake mix and he’s like, “Great! People love this character is. We’re going to play up this whole thing about Southern comfort. And it’ll be perfect.” They copyrighted an image (as Marissa just mentioned) and Aunt Jemima first appeared on a sack of flour in 1889. Shortly thereafter, Rutt and Underwood sold their company to R. T. Davis. And this guy, went even further with the brand.[13]

Marissa: So, when R. T. Davis got the company, he wanted to create a backstory for the brand character. He sent out calls to find the personification of Aunt Jemima. Not a man in blackface, but a “real” slave woman. Why? Well, according to historian M. M. Manring, he wanted someone who could “reinforce the product’s authenticity and origin as the creation of a real ex-slave.”[14]

Carly: Why were they interested in an “authentic” enslaved woman to represent their brand? Well, because the “Lost Cause Myth” and the idea of the “Old South” was culturally very popular. The “Lost Cause” is shorthand for “The Lost Cause of the Confederacy.” It’s this shared mythology that the South’s involvement in the Civil War was heroic and noble. Southern white writers would create stories and imagery where the White, Christian, Southerners defended the South from the immoral North, especially to protect vulnerable women. Most importantly, the “Lost Cause” myth created this belief that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.

Marissa: People who believed in the “Lost Cause” usually also believed in a romantic vision of the “Old South,” one that was lush, leisurely, and comfortable for white people. Some of this is based off of the South’s agricultural economy when compared to the North’s more industrial economy. And so, R. T. Davis championed the idea of finding a black woman who could play the role of an enslaved person who made this “utopia” possible, because it was so attractive to white people.

Carly: Eventually they found their Aunt Jemima in Nancy Green. At the time of her “discovery,” she was fifty-nine-years-old and she was employed as a domestic servant in Chicago. And she had been born into slavery on a Kentucky plantation.[15] Green made her Aunt Jemima debut at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago by serving pancakes, singing songs, and telling slave stories. Some of those stories were made up, but some of them actually were based off of Green’s own life. Her debut was really successful for the business because merchants who attended the fair placed like fifty thousand orders for the pancake mix. It also solidified the Aunt Jemima brand.[16]

Marissa: R. T. Davis’s brand manager, Purd Wright, expanded the brand’s lore by writing the earliest version of Aunt Jemima’s history, The Life of Aunt Jemima, the Most Famous Colored Woman in the World. This pamphlet took stories from Green’s actual life and blended them with Lost-Cause-type fiction we mentioned earlier. According to this pamphlet, Aunt Jemima’s enslaver is this fictional “Colonel Higbee” from Louisiana. And in one of these early stories about her, during the Civil War, she apprehends Northern troops by offering her famous pancakes. And this gave “Colonel Higbee” a chance to escape.[17] This type of advertising, we can see, paints the Confederacy as the chivalrous heroes of the Civil War. Although false, it was a pretty effective way of advertising in the early 1900s.

Carly: Why did advertising have such a hold on this era? Well, first off, marketing really vamped up due to WWI. Propaganda created new advertisement opportunities, and this primed consumers and marketers to see ads on “any surface and every surface, and all approaches through the senses.”[18] Additionally, this is when we start to see the beginnings of market research. The J. Walter Thompson company did a 1912 demographic study entitled, Population and Its Distribution, that almost two thousand companies used to understand their consumers.[19]

Marissa: Advertiser, James Webb Young, was exceptional at understanding consumers. This man was able to create an entire campaign to sell Odorono women’s deodorant by playing off of women’s insecurities.[20] When he began teaching later in his life, he urged advertisers to focus less on the statistics of consumers, but instead “the types of factors which govern human behavior… the mores, the folkways, the customs, and the fashions.”[21]

Carly: After Odorono, Young went on to work for Aunt Jemima because of his understanding of the Southern “folkways,” like a desire for a “simpler time” and Southern luxury. Many of his advertisements focused more on reconciliation between the North and South rather than on restitution towards Black people and their enslavement. According to M. M. Manring, “[Young’s] South was a place where white people celebrated over good food, where North and South came together over coffee and pancakes, and where white labor was erased by the picture of black men and women bringing plates to tables.”[22]

Marissa: Young depicted the “Old South” agriculture system as a lush “garden of eatin.”[23] With Young’s expertise, products like Baker’s Coconut and Maxwell House Coffee capitalized on the perceived abundance and luxury of living in the American South. Baker’s Coconut had this whole campaign about the “coconut man” where in the “old days” you could go into town and get the fresh, delicious coconut. And they found that when they marketed their coconut as “Southern Style” (as opposed to something like “premium shred” or “fresh-grated”) they sold more, especially in Northern States. Their big slogan was “Until Today the South Alone Could Have It.”[24]

Carly: So why were early 20th century consumers in love with the Southern nostalgia? Well, it’s important to remember that this was peak Jim Crow where segregation and certain laws created a greater “us versus them” mentality between White and Black southerners. In Elizabeth and Averill’s “Birth of a Nation” episode, they talked about how the Daughters of the Confederacy succeeded in retelling the story of the Civil War and antebellum South in textbooks from a “Lost Cause” point of view. So, not only was the “Lost Cause” myth embedded in American culture, it was also prevalent in law-making and public education.[25]

Marissa: In 1903, the R.T. Davis Company was renamed Aunt Jemima Mills. So, they’re really committing to this bit now, I guess you could say. Haha. They also began a 1906 coupon promotion that also fleshed out more of the “lore” of Aunt Jemima. If you sent in “three boxtops and sixteen cents or four boxtops and a dime,” you could receive an Aunt Jemima rag doll. They also made ragdolls for her fictional husband, “Uncle Mose,” and for her two children, “Diana” and “Wade.” We should note that the original add campaign used racial slurs to describe Aunt Jemima’s children. We’re not going to say it here. But… it’s there. And it’s not great.[26]

Advertisement of Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour. The ad shows Aunt Jemima serving pancakes and in the bottom left corner it shows the Aunt Jemima family ragdolls.
1909 New York Tribune advertisement of Aunt Jemima. In the bottom left-hand corner you can see a coupon promotion for Aunt Jemima’s family ragdolls, including: “Uncle Mose,” “Diana,” and “Wade.” | Library of Congress

Carly: Let’s talk more about historical criticisms of Aunt Jemima. In 1918, Black journalist, Cyril V. Briggs, was the editor of the New York Crusader and he said that the depiction of Aunt Jemima represented “ugliness, depravity, and subservience.” Very similar to what we talked about in those minstrel shows. And he called upon his readership, especially fellow black people, to boycott the brand.[27] Keeping along with timeline here, in 1925, Quaker Oats bought the company. So it was still called Aunt Jemima Mills but it was like a sub-company under Quaker Oats. Obviously, Briggs remarks weren’t enough to stop the brand from growing. Although, it should be noted, people didn’t like it back then either.[28]

Marissa: Here’s another example. In Paul K. Edward’s 1932-study about African-American consumers, he found that Black consumers liked it when advertisements featured Black people because they were inclusive. There was one huge exception though, when it came to advertisements like Aunt Jemima’s, Black consumersoverall didn’t like how Aunt Jemima represented black people! And this was a fairly broad study. It included Black men and women. And the study included black people from different levels of wealth and education. Someone said that the image “play[ed] upon idea of [Black people] in slavery too much.” Another comment, and this is my favorite, “I positively hate this illustration.”[29] So we can see early on, that many Black people didn’t like the Aunt Jemima brand.

Carly: Aunt Jemima’s persona remained steady from the mid-to-late-twentieth century. From 1955 to 1970, Disneyland (of all places, haha) even operated an “Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House.” It also had an Aunt Jemima character there, very similar to what was done at the 1893 Exposition. She had a costume, of course, and she also sang, danced, and served food.[30]

Marissa: During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, the NAACP called upon consumers to boycott the brand. In one instance in 1956, the Springfield, Illinois NAACP Chapter was able to get the Florence Gas Range to cancel a live Aunt Jemima performance. But, when looking at the press coverage of this event, a lot of local newspapers criticized the NAACP because Aunt Jemima seemed like a really trivial matter. And it was kind of this attitude where “Oh, if this is what you’re protesting. If you have a problem with something dumb like Aunt Jemima, then really Black people don’t have it that hard. Really.” I think we see that same attitude today.[31]

Carly: In 1968, Quaker Oats responded to criticisms about Aunt Jemima by slimming down her figure and making her look younger. They also replaced her kerchief with a headband.[32] People satisfied with these changes believed that Quaker Oats differentiated Aunt Jemima enough from slavery. For example William Raspberry in 1977, said that the terms “Aunt” and “Uncle” were no longer terms of endearment for enslaved people, right? So therefore, Aunt Jemima’s wasn’t offensive anymore.[33] But again there were lots of people, Black people, like the writer and historian Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who went on a 1980 Public Radio program to say the Quaker Oats should permanently retire Aunt Jemima.[34]

Marissa: Aunt Jemima underwent her most significant image change in 1989. Quaker Oats removed her head coverings, permed her hair, and gave her a pair of pearl earrings. This made Aunt Jemima look like a professional, working mom. In 1994, Gladys Knight did a campaign with Aunt Jemima to really lean into this new image. The campaign showed Gladys Knight taking care of her grandchildren. In response to the advertisement, novelist Alice Walker claimed that Aunt Jemima couldn’t be updated because she was still rooted in slavery.[35] Throughout the 1990s, the brand appeared to distance itself from its troubling past by partnering with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) for the Women of Wonder award.[36]

Carly: Since 2016, Quaker Oats appeared more cognizant of Aunt Jemima’s brand and her impact. They hired Dominique Wilburn, a Black woman, as an Executive Assistant to rebrand Aunt Jemima. Some of her ideas were changing the name to “Aunt J” and depicting her with natural hair, making a new backstory that wasn’t, uh, based off of slavery, haha. She also suggested educating employees by teaching them about the negative consequences of slavery and releasing an apologetic letter about the company’s history. But, unfortunately, none of these things happened in 2016.[37]

Twitter meme from @MattNegrin, showing Kendall Jenner offering a can of Pepsi to a police officer. The caption says, "Nevertheless, she Pepsisted."
One of the many critical memes of the Kendall Jenner/Pepsi Commercial | @MattNegrin

Marissa: So at this point, PepsiCo incorporated Quaker Oats. (They did that in 2001.) In 2017, Pepsi was accused of trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement with a commercial starring model, Kendall Jenner. The commercial staged a protest, but if you watch it, it’s really unclear what they are protesting. Haha, it has all these young and conventionally attractive people. Of course, they’re all racially diverse. And they’re holding up signs like, “Love,” and “Peace,” and “Join the conversation!” But like, the conversation about what?? It’s really vague. The commercial shows Kendall Jenner at a modeling gig. She’s at this shoot and she sees this march. She makes friendly eye contact with one of the protestors and he gives this look, like, “Come and join us!” She, then, has this grand moment where she wipes off her lipstick and throws her modeling wig at ­­­— I kid you not — a black woman! And then she goes and joins the protest and the marchers all come up to this line of police officers. And this is the part that upset people the most: Jenner takes a can of Pepsi and offers it to a police officer as like a gesture of peace or something? And as he accepts it, this other woman takes a photograph of Jenner like it’s going to win a Pulitzer Prize, and all the protestors erupt in cheers. So, why do you think this commercial was offensive?

Carly: Well, it totally trivialized the Black Lives Matter movement. It commercialized it. And it used all of the imagery of a protest without any of the context. According to a New York Times article about this event, Pepsi “[appropriated] imagery from serious protests to sell its product, while minimizing the danger protestors encounter and the frustration they feel.”[38]

Marissa: Exactly. So afterwards, both Jenner and PepsiCo publicly apologized, and they pulled the commercial. (But you can still watch it if you search for it. At least pieces of it.) Because of social media, this fiasco really spread. There were some good memes about it, haha. And I mean, this wasn’t that long ago and Kendall Jenner is one of the Kardashians…. So some of us might not really see this ad campaign as historically significant. It just might seem silly. And it kind of is, but it shows perhaps the first time where the public overwhelmingly responded negatively to the Aunt Jemima/Quaker Oats/PepsiCo company. Like, they’d been criticized before (mainly from black people). But because it had a big name like Jenner’s attached to it, it was during this time of social media, and probably because more people were aware with systemic racial issues at this point, it’s probably a combination of those things as to why this was such an advertisement failure.[39]

Carly: Yes. So, if this Pepsi incident didn’t retire Aunt Jemima, then what did? As we’ve hinted throughout this episode, something needed to happen to make Aunt Jemima’s image incredibly unpopular and therefore, unprofitable. Throughout this episode we’ve talked about subtle tweaks and changes the Aunt Jemima company made. But it wasn’t until last Summer, 2020, when Aunt Jemima could finally retire.

Marissa: On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, arrested and killed a Black man, George Floyd.[40] Because George Floyd’s murder was video recorded, Officer Chauvin’s actions were clearly unjust (even to those who previously turned a blind eye to police brutality) and social media made the video viral.[41] Floyd’s murder sparked worldwide protests and conversations centered on police brutality against people of color.

Carly: Because of a recently “enlightened” consumer base, leaders of businesses and corporations have also felt compelled to make changes in their structures and practices. For example, companies like Adidas made public commitments to donate proceeds to BLM organizations or to consciously hire Latinx/POC people to their workforce. Other companies, like Nike and Twitter, declared Juneteenth an official employee holiday. HBO Max temporarily removed Gone With the Wind, the same movie we mentioned earlier in this episode. Companies like Ben & Jerry’s and Warner Bros. Pictures included resources like a guide to “Dismantle White Supremacy” or a free rental of the movie, Just Mercy, respectively.[42]

Marissa: On June 15, 2020, singer Kirby Lauryen, created and released a viral TikTok video criticizing Aunt Jemima’s brand.  Two days later and coinciding with national protests against police brutality, Quaker Oats and PepsiCo finally announced their decision to retire Aunt Jemima. In tandem, other companies like Cream of Wheat, Uncle Ben’s, and Land O’Lakes have also chosen to retire racist stereotypes.[43]

Carly: Executives at PepsiCo learned their lesson from the tone-deaf Kendall Jenner 2017 commercial and wanted to avoid another PR disaster. The Aunt Jemima brand is now the Pearl Milling Company, which was, actually, the original name of the mill that Rutt and Underwood bought. Despite a successful century and a half campaign with Aunt Jemima, she’s no longer a profitable asset, but a liability. Quaker Oats and PepsiCo can’t “repackage” her anymore.[44]

Marissa: We of course, touched on Nancy Green, the first black woman to act as Aunt Jemima. She tragically died in 1923 at the age of 89 when she was hit by a car, thirty years after her Chicago Exposition debut. Unfortunately, there isn’t as much documentation about Green’s life as there is about her brand persona. What we do know is that after her debut at the fair, she was offered a lifetime contract with Quaker Oats and she travel the country making appearances as Aunt Jemima. Green was also a philanthropist and a ministry leader in her church, Olivet Baptist Church, which is the oldest active Black Baptist church in Chicago. According to researcher, Romi Crawford, the huge irony about Nancy Green’s situation was that, “she [was] playing a role: a derogatory type and caricature of Black women… [but] In actuality, …Her actual mobility in so many ways defied the statis of the problematic caricature-type.”[45]

Carly: Another irony is Green lived this very public life, however, her burial place was unmarked until recently.[46] Sherry Williams, a historian at the Bronzeville Historical Society, has been working hard for about fifteen years to preserve the history of Nancy Green. She was able to locate Green’s burial plot with the Oak Woods Cemetery staff. However, because the cemetery had a policy that a descendant must approve of a headstone, Williams also had to do some genealogical research to find one of Green’s distant living relatives. That was difficult because when Green died, she had already lost her husband and children. Eventually she got approval when she connected with Nancy Green’s great-great-nephew, Marcus Hayes. Unfortunately, when Williams reached out to the Quaker Oats company to see if they’d support her, they responded that “Nancy Green and Aunt Jemima aren’t the same – that Aunt Jemima is a fictitious character.”[47] I wasn’t able to find anything about Quaker Oats financially contributing to Green’s headstone and I’m guessing they didn’t? Because Williams ended up creating an online fundraiser to do just that.[48]

Marissa: There have been other Aunt Jemima actresses. Shortly after the rebranding announcement more than a year ago, some of the descendants of those actresses have spoken up. Vera Harris, who was the great niece of the Aunt Jemima actress, Lillian Richard, expressed her pride for her relative and her work. She said, “I just don’t want that erased from my family history because it’s almost like erasing a part of me.” The family of another Aunt Jemima actress, Anna Short Harrington, filed a $2-3 billion lawsuit against the company for appropriating her image in 2014. (Their claim was denied.) However, the great-grandson of Harrington, Larnell Evans Sr., said after the rebranding announcement, “This comes as a slap in the face… She worked 25 years doing it. She improved their product … what they’re trying to do is ludicrous.” [49] Carly, what do you think of this?

Carly: So, my opinion about this has actually shifted since I’ve been researching more in-depth about these women, namely Nancy Green. To me, it doesn’t feel okay to have Aunt Jemima as the face of a brand. But at the same time, it feels also wrong to wipe away the history of Nancy Green, and Lillian Richard, and Anna Harrington, and Hattie McDonald. What’s difficult is that I think there is a difference between history and memorialization. And I feel uncomfortable memorializing what Quaker Oats did. Does that make sense?

Marissa: Yes, it does. Scholars A. Ward and Lorraine Fuller said it pretty succinctly in this quote: “…it is more a matter of how people are included rather than that they have been included. Often, the images that [Black people] see of themselves are either negative, offensive, or simply not there.”[50] The continual negative depiction of Black people, especially when it’s disguised as harmless or benign with the case of Aunt Jemima, subconsciously affects how we interact and view Black people.

Carly: Yeah, and with that being said, I’d like to plug that the Bronzeville Historical Society is doing an Aunt Jemima exhibit right now. And it looks like it’ll be highlighting some of the actual women who acted as Aunt Jemima, including Nancy Green. It’ll be open until the end of the year, 2021. So if you are in Chicago during that time, I recommend going and seeing it. We will link to information about it online

Marissa: Awesome, thank you. We can learn from Aunt Jemima (and her retirement) how our culture and values are reflected through advertising. One of the most important things we can learn from Aunt Jemima is how ordinary, seemingly harmless, things like pancake mix can represent complex racial and social issues. If we aren’t willing to examine a box on our grocery shelf, what else are we potentially missing?


[1] Aunt Jemima, “Our History,” Aunt Jemima, 2021.

Tiffany Hsu and Maria Cramer, “Aunt Jemima To Be Renamed, After 131 Years,” New York Times 169, no. 58728 (June 18, 2020), B1.]

[2] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 60, 62, 64

Aunt Jemima, “Our History,” Aunt Jemima, 2021.

[3] 3. M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 61, 65, 67.

Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9, no. 1 (1995), 88.

[4] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 11, 22, 66.

Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9, no. 1 (1995), 94-95.

[5] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 61, 67

Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9, no. 1 (1995), 88.

[6] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 21, 38, 53.

Lorraine Fuller, “Are We Seeing Things? The Pinesol Lady and the Ghost of Aunt Jemima,” Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 1 (September 2001), 123.

Jennifer Bailey Woodard and Teresa Mastin, “BLACK WOMANHOOD: Essence and Its Treatment of Stereotypical Images of Black Women,” Journal of Black Studies 36, no. 2 (November 2005), 272.

Cheryl Thompson, “‘I’se in Town, Honey’: Reading Aunt Jemima Advertising in Canadian Print Media, 1919 to 1962,” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 1 (Winter 2015), 211-213.

Maria St. John, “‘It Ain’t Fittin’.’,” Studies in Gender & Sexuality 2, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 131-132, 134.

Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9, no. 1 (1995), 87–88, 89, 96.

[7] Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, ch 2.

[8] Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9, no. 1 (1995), 94-96.

[9] “Black Mammy ,” TIME Magazine 1, no. 1 (March 3, 1923): 4–4.

M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 83.

[10] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 21.

Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9, no. 1 (1995), 89.

[11] Jennifer Bailey Woodard and Teresa Mastin, “BLACK WOMANHOOD: Essence and Its Treatment of Stereotypical Images of Black Women,” Journal of Black Studies 36, no. 2 (November 2005), 271.

M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 8-9.

[12] Tiffany Hsu and Maria Cramer, “Aunt Jemima To Be Renamed, After 131 Years,” New York Times 169, no. 58728 (June 18, 2020), B6.

[13] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 21, 72, 74, 75.

Cheryl Thompson, “‘I’se in Town, Honey’: Reading Aunt Jemima Advertising in Canadian Print Media, 1919 to 1962,” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 1 (Winter 2015), 214.

Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9, no. 1 (1995), 88, 96.

[14] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 75.]

[15] Cheryl Thompson, “‘I’se in Town, Honey’: Reading Aunt Jemima Advertising in Canadian Print Media, 1919 to 1962,” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 1 (Winter 2015), 214.

M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 21, 72, 74.

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[33] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 171.

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[35] M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (United States of America: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 171.

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[42] Tiffany Hsu and Maria Cramer, “Aunt Jemima To Be Renamed, After 131 Years,”New York Times, 169, no. 58728 (June 18, 2020), B6.

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[48] Bronzeville Historical Society, “‘Aunt Jemima’ Removed from Pancake Products… Commentary by Sherry Williams,” Bronzeville Historical Society (blog), June 23, 2020.

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[50] Lorraine Fuller, “Are We Seeing Things? The Pinesol Lady and the Ghost of Aunt Jemima,” Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 1 (September 2001), 121.


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