Pancake flap: ‘Aunt Jemima’ heirs seek dough

Quaker Oats and other companies “made false promises to Nancy Green … and Anna Harrington,” their lawsuit says, adding that each time their “name, voice or likeness was used in connection with the products or goods, (the ladies) would receive a percentage of the monies or royalties received.”

Documents in the lawsuit show advertising claiming that the mix is Aunt Jemima’s “secret” recipe from the Old South. One ad, which shows Green serving a handsomely dressed white family, says that only she has the recipe to mix four flours — corn, wheat, rice and rye. Another calls it her “magic recipe” to “turn out dese tender, ‘licious, jiffy-quick pancakes.”

And Diane Roberts, a professor of Southern culture at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author of The Myth of Aunt Jemima, said that “Mammy” stereotype “romanticized the cruelty of slavery for a nation reconciling the trauma of the Civil War.”

“It’s one of those representations of black people that white people love because Mammy loved her white children so much,” Roberts said. “It proved to white people that we couldn’t have been that mean to black people because Mammy loves us.”

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