How America Normalized Racism - The Story of Aunt Jemima
In 1888, St. Joseph Gazette editor Chris Rutt and partner Charles Underwood decides to pool their money together and buy a flour factory.
During this time, flour factories were in abundance, so Rutt took the flour, bagged them and sold it as fast rising pancake mix.
But they needed a brand. In 1889, Rutt attended a minstrel show and was enamored with a character on stage. It was a blackface character of a woman in a red. Her name. Aunt Jemima.
So allow me to explain Aunt Jemima and what she means to minstrel shows.
Aunt Jemima was , what is described as a 'mammy' character, a sort of inbetween of both slaves and the unequal foundation of slave master relations. The mamy character LOOOVED her white family but often hated her own. The looks are the same. Black. Obese. Hair scarf. No black friends. Only the white family.
So Aunt Jemima was born.
To go along with with this new brand and marketing, Rutt hired Nancy Green, a slave born woman from Kentucky who would have portrayed Jemima at the 1893 worlds fair where she cooking pancakes, sang songs and had the tagline "I's in town, honey" which was their slogan. Many women came along and played the role of Aunt Jemima throught the years and recieved the key to the city in Albion, Michigan. Even though the image of Aunt Jemima in print had evolved except outside the US where is still, in 2020, still seen as the mammy character from the minstrel shows, the imagery of the bottle remained a staple.
Even though the history of Aunt Jemima is slowly being phased out from history, it painted a false apperance of a happy life filled with cooking and cleaning and fun, rather than what it actually was, pain, torture, humiliation.
So keep in mind the deep history of Aunt Jemima next time you have the cravings of pancakes.