Whatever business arrangement they had is at the heart of the dispute.
“PepsiCo and Quaker are actively searching for contracts that would pertain to Ms. Anna S. Harrington, which if they exist go back 60 years or even longer. We thus far have not located these documents in the places that have been searched,” PepsiCo lawyer Dean Panos wrote in a March e-mail cited in the lawsuit.
Don Cox, a lawyer in Louisville, Ky., who has represented Kern’s Kitchen Inc. in defending its trademark Derby-Pie, said the claimants in the Aunt Jemima case are “throwing the dice.”
“This happened so long ago and continued for so long with nobody doing anything about it,” he said.
Legal standards for whether someone is misled in a contract are governed by time limits, or statutes of limitations, that likely have long expired, Cox said, adding that ignorance on the part of Green or Harrington will probably not be taken into consideration in court.
“If a person doesn’t take action within an applicable period of time, their claim goes away,” Cox said.
Hunter, Harrington’s great-grandson, said in a Sept. 29 e-mail that the case represents a “fight for the economic parity of rights of people whose civil and human rights have been violated.”
Hunter, a self-described civil-rights activist based in Minneapolis, Minn., said if he recovers proceeds from the lawsuit, he will “buy the agricultural crops from disenfranchised African women farmers that are in villages to help them make a decent living wage in Africa and Brazil.”