Art Eatman
Moderator In Memoriam
Aw, Barbara, you're probably right, but inaccurate slurs just really offend my own sense of fair play. This last year or so has seen just way too much of that sort of sleazoid doings.
Art
Art
Dr.Rice referred to as "Aunt Jemima" by radio dj in Wi
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fallingblock
Member
Too right, Art....
"That poor old Rio Grande can be shallow enough to walk on the rocks and stay dry while crossing..."
*********************************************************
When I was living in south Brewster Co., the term 'wetback' was merely a standard descriptor for those illegally in the U.S..
Even a couple of five year olds who crossed the river to (illegally) attend the Terlingua School referred to themselves as such. To the amusement of their classmates but not their principal, who eventually cut short their budding academic careers.
The Rio Grande at the time had about enough flow in an average month to suggest the term "damp socks" as a more appropriate epithet.
"That poor old Rio Grande can be shallow enough to walk on the rocks and stay dry while crossing..."
*********************************************************
When I was living in south Brewster Co., the term 'wetback' was merely a standard descriptor for those illegally in the U.S..
Even a couple of five year olds who crossed the river to (illegally) attend the Terlingua School referred to themselves as such. To the amusement of their classmates but not their principal, who eventually cut short their budding academic careers.
The Rio Grande at the time had about enough flow in an average month to suggest the term "damp socks" as a more appropriate epithet.
joab
Member
I bet she does.
Given her background and connection to the Alabama church bombings, she has to be at least a little disheartened by the comments.
The fact that they have gotten so much publicity gives them at least some credibility.
Now as potentially the most powerful woman in America and possibly the world and getting there on her own merits and all the while having the audacity to be black, she may well be thinking about a variation of an old joke.
"What do you call a black secratary of state in Alabama"?
Last edited:
tommytrauma
Member
Sylvester went to High School with my wife. He was a sniveling, snot nosed little punk perv then, and he's gotten worse as he's gotten older. He's a wannabe shock jock who has been relegated to an AM sh*%hole talk show.
He'll say anything for attention. Dr. Rice is a better person and more of a man than sylvester can ever hope to be.
People like him exist only because dueling isn't legal.
He'll say anything for attention. Dr. Rice is a better person and more of a man than sylvester can ever hope to be.
People like him exist only because dueling isn't legal.
ACP
Member
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2002
- Messages
- 1,334
Who said this guy is a "leftie" and a Kerry supporter? He's just an a**hole shock jock. I don't think they have political convictions as much as ratings convictions. Check his bio. He shouldn't have been hired to begin with.
From the radio web site:
Born in Milwaukee in 1961, Sly became interested in radio in high school where he got into a lot of trouble broadcasting on WJMM-- like the time he blew out the PA speakers by playing Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner too loud. Sly attended UW- Platteville, where at campus radio station WSUP, he was suspended from the airwaves for insulting "community standards".
Sly got his first job in commercial radio while still in high school, on his 18th birthday, working for Q106, WWQM. In April of 1980 he moved to WMAD in Madison, working part-time. In 1982, he got his first full-time job in radio, broadcasting from WAHC in Oshkosh. Six months later the station stopped playing rock, and started playing elevator music.
Later that year, Sly returned to Madison and WMAD where he worked until 1985. After being fired for fighting with the owner's daughter, Sly started his 12 and a half year stint with WIBA-FM. Sly became a local legend on over-nights, winning the Best Announcer media poll by the Capital Times in 1986. Sly broke all the rules late night, playing callers requests. He was the first DJ in Madison to broadcast the Beastie Boys. In 1988 the management at the radio station had no idea what they were about to unleash, when they moved Sly to morning drive. Rather than doing corney bits and hokie gags, Sly started mornings in Madison with a feature called "Social Dilemma". Between the Pink Floyd, Journey and Bob Seger, callers could actually spar with Sly on the issues of the day. Sly and his regular callers such as Jimmy the Drunk, Crazy Susan, and Bill the Truck Driver became fixtures in South Central Wisconsin's morning radio.
There were boycotts-- like when the parents and teachers from West High School boycott Sly when he encouraged students to block Regent Street in order to draw attention to their grievances. There were lawsuits-- like when the owners of the Mile-Away Motel in Ft. Atkinson sued Sly for encouraging listeners to pull into the parking lot and moon the owners. But there were also incredibly serious moments-- like when Sly exposed Janesville KKK leader Ken Peterson as a fraud living on the public dole for years.
In 1998, Sly decided to take the next step in his radio career and do full-time talk radio on the AM dial. WTDY, then on 1480-AM, was a conservative radio station with an older listening audience. The emails, letters, faxes and telephone calls poured in: "How could you have hired Satan?" But soon enough people realized Sly had evolved well beyond just a "shock-jock". Five years later and WTDY, now Talk Radio 1670, has evolved into one of the country's most unique places on the radio dial. People can tune in and hear a variety of exciting personalities that young people and old, alike, can be informed and entertained at the same time.
In August of 2000, Sly became the Program Director for Talk Radio 1670. Since then, he has adapted the radio station to a changing marketplace, making Talk Radio 1670 one of the most unique talk stations in the country. He has mixed local and national personalities with widely varying views and styles. One of the things Sly enjoys most about his Program Director duties is teaching young people how to do talk radio. One of Sly’s proudest accomplishments has been helping Shawn Prebil, Lee Rayburn, and Casey Hoff reach their potential as great, young talk personalities.
Sly can also be heard on WHIT FM, 93.1 The Lake, weekdays from 3-7pm where he brings back his old dj style that many Wisconsinites still remember and love from his days on WIBA FM and WMAD FM.
This year, Sly has just completed his 25th year in commercial broadcasting, making him one of the most veteran radio personalities in Madison.
From the radio web site:
Born in Milwaukee in 1961, Sly became interested in radio in high school where he got into a lot of trouble broadcasting on WJMM-- like the time he blew out the PA speakers by playing Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner too loud. Sly attended UW- Platteville, where at campus radio station WSUP, he was suspended from the airwaves for insulting "community standards".
Sly got his first job in commercial radio while still in high school, on his 18th birthday, working for Q106, WWQM. In April of 1980 he moved to WMAD in Madison, working part-time. In 1982, he got his first full-time job in radio, broadcasting from WAHC in Oshkosh. Six months later the station stopped playing rock, and started playing elevator music.
Later that year, Sly returned to Madison and WMAD where he worked until 1985. After being fired for fighting with the owner's daughter, Sly started his 12 and a half year stint with WIBA-FM. Sly became a local legend on over-nights, winning the Best Announcer media poll by the Capital Times in 1986. Sly broke all the rules late night, playing callers requests. He was the first DJ in Madison to broadcast the Beastie Boys. In 1988 the management at the radio station had no idea what they were about to unleash, when they moved Sly to morning drive. Rather than doing corney bits and hokie gags, Sly started mornings in Madison with a feature called "Social Dilemma". Between the Pink Floyd, Journey and Bob Seger, callers could actually spar with Sly on the issues of the day. Sly and his regular callers such as Jimmy the Drunk, Crazy Susan, and Bill the Truck Driver became fixtures in South Central Wisconsin's morning radio.
There were boycotts-- like when the parents and teachers from West High School boycott Sly when he encouraged students to block Regent Street in order to draw attention to their grievances. There were lawsuits-- like when the owners of the Mile-Away Motel in Ft. Atkinson sued Sly for encouraging listeners to pull into the parking lot and moon the owners. But there were also incredibly serious moments-- like when Sly exposed Janesville KKK leader Ken Peterson as a fraud living on the public dole for years.
In 1998, Sly decided to take the next step in his radio career and do full-time talk radio on the AM dial. WTDY, then on 1480-AM, was a conservative radio station with an older listening audience. The emails, letters, faxes and telephone calls poured in: "How could you have hired Satan?" But soon enough people realized Sly had evolved well beyond just a "shock-jock". Five years later and WTDY, now Talk Radio 1670, has evolved into one of the country's most unique places on the radio dial. People can tune in and hear a variety of exciting personalities that young people and old, alike, can be informed and entertained at the same time.
In August of 2000, Sly became the Program Director for Talk Radio 1670. Since then, he has adapted the radio station to a changing marketplace, making Talk Radio 1670 one of the most unique talk stations in the country. He has mixed local and national personalities with widely varying views and styles. One of the things Sly enjoys most about his Program Director duties is teaching young people how to do talk radio. One of Sly’s proudest accomplishments has been helping Shawn Prebil, Lee Rayburn, and Casey Hoff reach their potential as great, young talk personalities.
Sly can also be heard on WHIT FM, 93.1 The Lake, weekdays from 3-7pm where he brings back his old dj style that many Wisconsinites still remember and love from his days on WIBA FM and WMAD FM.
This year, Sly has just completed his 25th year in commercial broadcasting, making him one of the most veteran radio personalities in Madison.
KRAUTGUNNER
Member
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2002
- Messages
- 255
I can't understand why "Aunt Jemima" is such a horrible insult.
Who is/was that "Aunt Jemima"? What were her crimes?
Who is/was that "Aunt Jemima"? What were her crimes?
Art Eatman
Moderator In Memoriam
KG: "Aunt Jemima" pancake mix was for decades a very popular grocery store item. The box had a picture of a stereotypical "colored woman" as the cook--to use the parlance of the era--with an apron and kerchief, holding a box of the mix.
Danged good pancakes, too...
With the rise of the Civil Rights movement, such stereotyping fell by the wayside, along with TV shows like "Amos'n'Andy".
The term later became a pejorative used by blacks, much like "Oreo" (black on the outside, white on the inside; used against those blacks who succeeded in essentially white milieus and who didn't expouse counter-culture ideas. Thomas Sowell, for example.)
Art
Danged good pancakes, too...
With the rise of the Civil Rights movement, such stereotyping fell by the wayside, along with TV shows like "Amos'n'Andy".
The term later became a pejorative used by blacks, much like "Oreo" (black on the outside, white on the inside; used against those blacks who succeeded in essentially white milieus and who didn't expouse counter-culture ideas. Thomas Sowell, for example.)
Art
Stand_Watie
Member
For our European friends, here is a little essay that encompasses the notion of "Aunt Jemima". Condi Rice is anything but an aunt Jemima in regards to her relationship with George W. Bush. Not that if you were a nurturing caregiver like the sterotype it would be an insult to be recognized as such...
***
http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/links/mammy/
Mammy's Cupboard is an informal monument to one of the most problematic and profound icons of American culture: Mammy. She is a character as powerfully imprinted as the English nanny, a psychological, social, commercial and racist stereotype who looms large in the American commedia dell'arte of legend and literature. Southern earth mother, source of nutrition, wisdom, comfort and discipline, cook, advisor, mediator, In such personifications as theater's Ma Rainey and TV's Beulah, in literature and film, she remains in myth and memory, the most positive and yet most dangerous of all racist stereotypes. Sambo is no longer acceptable, but Aunt Jemima remains on the pancake mix box, repeatedly updated, a shiny happy face.
The strangest turn in Mammy's biography, however, is that she should be so much in demand today, when the enforcers of political correctness patrol our culture and a rising tide of scholarly and popular interest in heroic black women from Harriet Tubman to Marian Wright Edelman has swept the country. While bookstores are full of reissues of Sojourner Truth and Zora Neale Hurston, collectors of Mammy cookie jars, postcards and packaging have become more numerous and more fervent. (See sidebar) Odder still is that the two groups overlap.
As Aunt Jemima, her most cartoonlike incarnation, Mammy stands with Sambo, Uncle Tom and Uncle Ben, the tom the coon, the pickaninny and the golliwog. As a commercial character, she was close kin to the Cream of Wheat chef, the Gold Dust Twins and Hambone. Food and cleaning products were the chief ones to use black stereotypes: these were subjects, it was implied, about which blacks knew better than whites.
But Mammy was more complicated. All sorts of feelings and ideas became associated with her stereotype. She not only fed and raised white children, but often mediated between whites and blacks. "Miss Scarlett, I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies," was the classic line of Butterfly McQueen as Prissy in Gone with the Wind, but Hattie McDaniel as Mammy did know midwifing and child raising and much more.
Nurturing and protective, self sacrificing, long suffering, wise, often world weary but never bitter, Mammy mixed kindness with sternness and wreathed her own identity inside the weight of heartiness, her own sexuality inside her role as surrogate mother, teacher and cook. Her outside life--especially her love life--is almost always problematic. If she has children, they tend to be treated more brusquely than the white children in her charge. And she never escapes her sense of the limitations of being black.
While Mammy's legend was created in answer to the critics of slavery and Jim Crow, her reality was to become an ambivalent, often haunting register of the complexities of guilt and love white Americans felt.
Mammy's mythology was created, some academics argue, before the Civil War, as a Southern rebuttal to Northern charges of sexual predation on black women--she was a counterbalance to the octaroon mistress. Argues historian Catherine Clinton, "the Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men with slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the north."
Only later did Mammy enter the public stage. One of the known minstrel singers of his day, Billy Kersands made a song called "Old Aunt Jemima" popular in the 1870's. But in America, images become characters when they get jobs in sales: Mammy as stereotype was given her most vivid visual embodiment by Aunt Jemima, who debuted a century ago in the person of Nancy Green, hired to stand atop a flour barrel at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Mammy was usually depicted as behaving more kindly to the white children in her care than to her own. In figurines and post card, she was frequently the butt of jokes and, bent over her washing, would sometimes be depicted with her tit literally caught in the wringer.
It was as a commercial icon that the stereotype of Mammy was sharpest. Customers confronted with commercial Mammies were disarmed by laughing at her caricature, but sold by her positive qualities--her asserted knowledge of food and housekeeping. In Sambo: the Rise and Fall of an American Jester, Joseph Boskin shows that it was food products made the most use of Mammy, Sambo and other black caricatures. As idealized servant types, they suggested heartiness, quality, the approval of those who really ran the kitchen, who knew food. "Always clean, ready to serve with a crisp smile, intuitively knowledgeable and distinctively southern in their spoken words, they epitomized servility with exceptionally natural cheerfulness, " writes Boskin. Mammy and her kin were images as prepackaged as the sort of products they advertised--new sorts of branded and processed products, in a world where generic flour oatmeal and rice were still the rule. As early as 1875 the Mammy like "Aunt Sally" had appeared on cans of baking powder, one of the first products to be branded. But if the Cream of Wheat chef was unabashedly touted as "the most famous ****** (later "man") in the world," it was Aunt Jemima who lasted the longest.
Jemima's story, as sketched out in Jackie Young's Mammy and Her Friends, began in 1889 when Charles Rutt, a St. Joseph, Missouri, newspaper man, got the idea of a self rising pancake mix that required only the addition of water. He took the name Aunt Jemima from a vaudeville song of the time by the well known team of Baker and Farrell. The R.T. Davis Mills in St. Joseph bought the idea--and with it the supporting story.
To give character to the logo--wide mouthed, rag headed, crudely rendered--Davis Mills invented a whole legend for Aunt Jemima. Aunt Jemima, the story went, had been a cook on the Louisiana plantation of a certain Colonel Higbee and that her reputation for fine pancakes had spread far and wide. Ads showed smiling belles and laughing older white gentlemen trying to wheedle the "secret recipe" out of the reticent--and loyal--Jemima. But somehow, the story went on, the shy Jemima had not only been persuaded to relinquish the secret to the Davis Mills but to tour the states, like a patent medicine salesman, championing its wonders from the top of a flour barrel.
Jemima premiered for a national audience at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago--the "White City" from which blacks were banned. (Frederick Douglass called it a "Whited Sepulcher.") Her popularity was immediate. She quickly acquired a family: Uncle Mose, Diana and Wade these appeared as rag dolls included in boxes of the pancake mix, then filled with paper or rags by the customer. Later, mailing in box tops or redeeming coupons would get you AJ mixing bowls, or syrup pitchers cookie jars, and salt and pepper shakers. There were cookbooks and pamphlets of her "temptilatin'" recipes.
Aunt Jemima herself traveled from town to town, cooking up pancakes. Local organizations tied into the promotions. One highly valuable collectible is a portable griddle complete with syrup and seasoning shakers all in the familiar red skirted shape of Jemima. "I'se in town honey" was a frequent slogan, which lasted for more than half a century after it was first employed in 1905.
Nancy Green died in a car accident in the early Twenties, after having been redrawn in 1917 to reflect as less cartoonish, more maternal figure. In 1925 Davis sold the Aunt Jemima brand and operation to Quaker Oats, whose gentle Penn figure was about the same age.
In the 1950's Jemima took on another new face: that of Edith Wilson, formerly a star of Amos and Andy and To Have and Have Not, who served as the touring Aunt Jemima for eighteen years. Ethel Ernestine Harper sang with the Three Ginger Snaps and appeared in The Hot Mikado with Bill Bojangles before taking the role. She died in car crash in 1973?.
Aunt Jemima was updated--made thinner and lighter--in 1968. But not until 1989 did she get her present face--a sort of Diane Carroll look, slimmer and lighter--and only after the company had carried out five months of delicate research in twelve cities. The aim, Quaker said, was to "present Aunt Jemima in a more contemporary light ( !), while preserving the important attributes of warmth, quality, good taste, heritage and reliability." Aunt Jemima at last lost her kerchief.
But Aunt Jemima was only Mammy's best known commercial identity. She also sold Luzianne Coffee and cleansers and appeared in cereal ads. Mammy graced fruit box labels and sold molasses. An assurance of concerned family style cooking she graced menus for the Old Dixie Restaurant in Los Angeles and Mammy's Cabin, outside Atlanta.
She became a figure in all sorts of kitchen and other equipment. In July 1930, one Lilly Daigre-Gore of New Orleans filed a design patent for a smoker's stand that whose tray stood atop a mammy figure's head. She would hold pot holders and grocery lists.
Mammy began in slavery--or at least in the minds of slavery's defenders. She was idealized by the defenders of slavery and then segregation as evidence of the humanity of the system.
"Up to the age of ten we saw as much, perhaps more, of the mammy than of the mother...The mammy first taught us to lisp and to walk," wrote southerner Lewis Blair in 1889 in his tract, The Prosperity of the South Dependent Upon the Elevation of the Negro. How could they be cruel to blacks, defenders of the system asked, after having been "nursed at black breasts."
But not only slavery's defenders noticed Mammy's influence on language. Linguist J.L. Dillard argues that the southern accent is at base an African American accent and Mammy its prime mode of transmission. During his travels in the United States in 1842 Charles Dickens observed that the women he encountered in the South, "speak more or less like Negroes, from having been constantly in their childhood with black nurse."
On the plantation, Mammy bore a special relationship to the Mistress. As a surrogate for mother, she grew to share many of her idealized qualities--not least because the limits to the role of white women echoed those of black women in the quarters. The southern cult of Mama, which for instance fairly drips from classic country music, often extended to Mammy.
The Old South linked women and blacks, argued William Taylor in Cavalier and Yankee from the beginning. As early as 1836, plantation fiction such as that of Beverley Tucker drew a parallel. Tucker offered a list of the qualities women and blacks held in common: "their humility, their grateful affection, their self-renouncing loyalty, their subordination of the heart."
Later literature depicted Mammy sometimes as a kind of vicar of the white mistress and sometimes her shadow sister, an extension of the ideal of slavery's defenders. As Catherine Clinton wrote in The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South, Mammy is "not merely a stereotype, but in fact a figment of the combined romantic imaginations of the contemporary southern ideologue and the modern southern historian." There are few records of Mammies who actually served, as the legend has it, as the Mistress's right hand, the administrative head of the plantation.
"Not until after emancipation did black women run white households or occupy in any significant number the special positions ascribed to them in folklore and fiction." ...
***
http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/links/mammy/
Mammy's Cupboard is an informal monument to one of the most problematic and profound icons of American culture: Mammy. She is a character as powerfully imprinted as the English nanny, a psychological, social, commercial and racist stereotype who looms large in the American commedia dell'arte of legend and literature. Southern earth mother, source of nutrition, wisdom, comfort and discipline, cook, advisor, mediator, In such personifications as theater's Ma Rainey and TV's Beulah, in literature and film, she remains in myth and memory, the most positive and yet most dangerous of all racist stereotypes. Sambo is no longer acceptable, but Aunt Jemima remains on the pancake mix box, repeatedly updated, a shiny happy face.
The strangest turn in Mammy's biography, however, is that she should be so much in demand today, when the enforcers of political correctness patrol our culture and a rising tide of scholarly and popular interest in heroic black women from Harriet Tubman to Marian Wright Edelman has swept the country. While bookstores are full of reissues of Sojourner Truth and Zora Neale Hurston, collectors of Mammy cookie jars, postcards and packaging have become more numerous and more fervent. (See sidebar) Odder still is that the two groups overlap.
As Aunt Jemima, her most cartoonlike incarnation, Mammy stands with Sambo, Uncle Tom and Uncle Ben, the tom the coon, the pickaninny and the golliwog. As a commercial character, she was close kin to the Cream of Wheat chef, the Gold Dust Twins and Hambone. Food and cleaning products were the chief ones to use black stereotypes: these were subjects, it was implied, about which blacks knew better than whites.
But Mammy was more complicated. All sorts of feelings and ideas became associated with her stereotype. She not only fed and raised white children, but often mediated between whites and blacks. "Miss Scarlett, I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies," was the classic line of Butterfly McQueen as Prissy in Gone with the Wind, but Hattie McDaniel as Mammy did know midwifing and child raising and much more.
Nurturing and protective, self sacrificing, long suffering, wise, often world weary but never bitter, Mammy mixed kindness with sternness and wreathed her own identity inside the weight of heartiness, her own sexuality inside her role as surrogate mother, teacher and cook. Her outside life--especially her love life--is almost always problematic. If she has children, they tend to be treated more brusquely than the white children in her charge. And she never escapes her sense of the limitations of being black.
While Mammy's legend was created in answer to the critics of slavery and Jim Crow, her reality was to become an ambivalent, often haunting register of the complexities of guilt and love white Americans felt.
Mammy's mythology was created, some academics argue, before the Civil War, as a Southern rebuttal to Northern charges of sexual predation on black women--she was a counterbalance to the octaroon mistress. Argues historian Catherine Clinton, "the Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men with slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the north."
Only later did Mammy enter the public stage. One of the known minstrel singers of his day, Billy Kersands made a song called "Old Aunt Jemima" popular in the 1870's. But in America, images become characters when they get jobs in sales: Mammy as stereotype was given her most vivid visual embodiment by Aunt Jemima, who debuted a century ago in the person of Nancy Green, hired to stand atop a flour barrel at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Mammy was usually depicted as behaving more kindly to the white children in her care than to her own. In figurines and post card, she was frequently the butt of jokes and, bent over her washing, would sometimes be depicted with her tit literally caught in the wringer.
It was as a commercial icon that the stereotype of Mammy was sharpest. Customers confronted with commercial Mammies were disarmed by laughing at her caricature, but sold by her positive qualities--her asserted knowledge of food and housekeeping. In Sambo: the Rise and Fall of an American Jester, Joseph Boskin shows that it was food products made the most use of Mammy, Sambo and other black caricatures. As idealized servant types, they suggested heartiness, quality, the approval of those who really ran the kitchen, who knew food. "Always clean, ready to serve with a crisp smile, intuitively knowledgeable and distinctively southern in their spoken words, they epitomized servility with exceptionally natural cheerfulness, " writes Boskin. Mammy and her kin were images as prepackaged as the sort of products they advertised--new sorts of branded and processed products, in a world where generic flour oatmeal and rice were still the rule. As early as 1875 the Mammy like "Aunt Sally" had appeared on cans of baking powder, one of the first products to be branded. But if the Cream of Wheat chef was unabashedly touted as "the most famous ****** (later "man") in the world," it was Aunt Jemima who lasted the longest.
Jemima's story, as sketched out in Jackie Young's Mammy and Her Friends, began in 1889 when Charles Rutt, a St. Joseph, Missouri, newspaper man, got the idea of a self rising pancake mix that required only the addition of water. He took the name Aunt Jemima from a vaudeville song of the time by the well known team of Baker and Farrell. The R.T. Davis Mills in St. Joseph bought the idea--and with it the supporting story.
To give character to the logo--wide mouthed, rag headed, crudely rendered--Davis Mills invented a whole legend for Aunt Jemima. Aunt Jemima, the story went, had been a cook on the Louisiana plantation of a certain Colonel Higbee and that her reputation for fine pancakes had spread far and wide. Ads showed smiling belles and laughing older white gentlemen trying to wheedle the "secret recipe" out of the reticent--and loyal--Jemima. But somehow, the story went on, the shy Jemima had not only been persuaded to relinquish the secret to the Davis Mills but to tour the states, like a patent medicine salesman, championing its wonders from the top of a flour barrel.
Jemima premiered for a national audience at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago--the "White City" from which blacks were banned. (Frederick Douglass called it a "Whited Sepulcher.") Her popularity was immediate. She quickly acquired a family: Uncle Mose, Diana and Wade these appeared as rag dolls included in boxes of the pancake mix, then filled with paper or rags by the customer. Later, mailing in box tops or redeeming coupons would get you AJ mixing bowls, or syrup pitchers cookie jars, and salt and pepper shakers. There were cookbooks and pamphlets of her "temptilatin'" recipes.
Aunt Jemima herself traveled from town to town, cooking up pancakes. Local organizations tied into the promotions. One highly valuable collectible is a portable griddle complete with syrup and seasoning shakers all in the familiar red skirted shape of Jemima. "I'se in town honey" was a frequent slogan, which lasted for more than half a century after it was first employed in 1905.
Nancy Green died in a car accident in the early Twenties, after having been redrawn in 1917 to reflect as less cartoonish, more maternal figure. In 1925 Davis sold the Aunt Jemima brand and operation to Quaker Oats, whose gentle Penn figure was about the same age.
In the 1950's Jemima took on another new face: that of Edith Wilson, formerly a star of Amos and Andy and To Have and Have Not, who served as the touring Aunt Jemima for eighteen years. Ethel Ernestine Harper sang with the Three Ginger Snaps and appeared in The Hot Mikado with Bill Bojangles before taking the role. She died in car crash in 1973?.
Aunt Jemima was updated--made thinner and lighter--in 1968. But not until 1989 did she get her present face--a sort of Diane Carroll look, slimmer and lighter--and only after the company had carried out five months of delicate research in twelve cities. The aim, Quaker said, was to "present Aunt Jemima in a more contemporary light ( !), while preserving the important attributes of warmth, quality, good taste, heritage and reliability." Aunt Jemima at last lost her kerchief.
But Aunt Jemima was only Mammy's best known commercial identity. She also sold Luzianne Coffee and cleansers and appeared in cereal ads. Mammy graced fruit box labels and sold molasses. An assurance of concerned family style cooking she graced menus for the Old Dixie Restaurant in Los Angeles and Mammy's Cabin, outside Atlanta.
She became a figure in all sorts of kitchen and other equipment. In July 1930, one Lilly Daigre-Gore of New Orleans filed a design patent for a smoker's stand that whose tray stood atop a mammy figure's head. She would hold pot holders and grocery lists.
Mammy began in slavery--or at least in the minds of slavery's defenders. She was idealized by the defenders of slavery and then segregation as evidence of the humanity of the system.
"Up to the age of ten we saw as much, perhaps more, of the mammy than of the mother...The mammy first taught us to lisp and to walk," wrote southerner Lewis Blair in 1889 in his tract, The Prosperity of the South Dependent Upon the Elevation of the Negro. How could they be cruel to blacks, defenders of the system asked, after having been "nursed at black breasts."
But not only slavery's defenders noticed Mammy's influence on language. Linguist J.L. Dillard argues that the southern accent is at base an African American accent and Mammy its prime mode of transmission. During his travels in the United States in 1842 Charles Dickens observed that the women he encountered in the South, "speak more or less like Negroes, from having been constantly in their childhood with black nurse."
On the plantation, Mammy bore a special relationship to the Mistress. As a surrogate for mother, she grew to share many of her idealized qualities--not least because the limits to the role of white women echoed those of black women in the quarters. The southern cult of Mama, which for instance fairly drips from classic country music, often extended to Mammy.
The Old South linked women and blacks, argued William Taylor in Cavalier and Yankee from the beginning. As early as 1836, plantation fiction such as that of Beverley Tucker drew a parallel. Tucker offered a list of the qualities women and blacks held in common: "their humility, their grateful affection, their self-renouncing loyalty, their subordination of the heart."
Later literature depicted Mammy sometimes as a kind of vicar of the white mistress and sometimes her shadow sister, an extension of the ideal of slavery's defenders. As Catherine Clinton wrote in The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South, Mammy is "not merely a stereotype, but in fact a figment of the combined romantic imaginations of the contemporary southern ideologue and the modern southern historian." There are few records of Mammies who actually served, as the legend has it, as the Mistress's right hand, the administrative head of the plantation.
"Not until after emancipation did black women run white households or occupy in any significant number the special positions ascribed to them in folklore and fiction." ...
joab
Member
Please forgive the racial slur
But there is no other way to put it
A house ****** who bowed and scraped at massa's feet because they lacked backbone and self respect.
A women who wiped and diapered the white babies and slept with the white master so the mistress could do more genteel things.
The image is not accurate but that is the theory behind calling someone Uncle Tom or Aunt Jemima.
The names were chosen from literature and pancake boxes and are much nicer than the names they were called back then.
As far as mammies go.
My father was raised by one, the only time in my life I have ever seen my father cry was at Missy Martha's funeral
But there is no other way to put it
Aunt Jemima is the female equivilant of Uncle Tom
A house ****** who bowed and scraped at massa's feet because they lacked backbone and self respect.
A women who wiped and diapered the white babies and slept with the white master so the mistress could do more genteel things.
The image is not accurate but that is the theory behind calling someone Uncle Tom or Aunt Jemima.
The names were chosen from literature and pancake boxes and are much nicer than the names they were called back then.
As far as mammies go.
My father was raised by one, the only time in my life I have ever seen my father cry was at Missy Martha's funeral
KRAUTGUNNER
Member
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2002
- Messages
- 255
@ Art Eatman, Stand Watie and joab:
Thank you very much! Now I understand.
A nitwit like that "Sly" Sylvester character just can't insult a person with such a brillant intellect like Dr. Rice!
He can make himself a nuissance but that's all. Like a small mangy mutt, yapping at people passing by.................
Thank you very much! Now I understand.
A nitwit like that "Sly" Sylvester character just can't insult a person with such a brillant intellect like Dr. Rice!
He can make himself a nuissance but that's all. Like a small mangy mutt, yapping at people passing by.................
What it comes down to for the Democrats is that a black person can work for
them but not a republican. The far left fears any educated minority because
it doesnt fit there idea of the perfect socialist world in feeding and taking
care of the masses.
them but not a republican. The far left fears any educated minority because
it doesnt fit there idea of the perfect socialist world in feeding and taking
care of the masses.
joab
Member
I completly agree with all but the first line. I think it's OK for them to work for the Dems but not be in a position of authority for the Republicans or any body else.
How can we help "those people" if they don't know their place
Respect is blind
Their place is where they make it. If they out score me on test scores for a position at work then I guess I better work harder and learn the subject better than I know it now.
Otherwise the PC afirmative action laws and regs will continue to leave that segment behind as they make their place for themselves.
I have found everyone I meet deserves some measure of respect for just being human. Color blind. It is when performance, actions, and delusional aspirations of what they can get or be as a "green" or "blue" dude will my respect for them evaporate as if it was never there.
I have lotts of patience with lotts of different people. Have to in a customer service part of my work.
Do you think Condi Rice needed a crutch to get where she is today. I think maybe but she sure doesn't need it now.
Their place is where they make it. If they out score me on test scores for a position at work then I guess I better work harder and learn the subject better than I know it now.
Otherwise the PC afirmative action laws and regs will continue to leave that segment behind as they make their place for themselves.
I have found everyone I meet deserves some measure of respect for just being human. Color blind. It is when performance, actions, and delusional aspirations of what they can get or be as a "green" or "blue" dude will my respect for them evaporate as if it was never there.
I have lotts of patience with lotts of different people. Have to in a customer service part of my work.
Do you think Condi Rice needed a crutch to get where she is today. I think maybe but she sure doesn't need it now.
The_Antibubba
Member
I despise his every word...
...and I'll defend to the death his right to say it.
All the Amendments, folks-or none at all.
...and I'll defend to the death his right to say it.
All the Amendments, folks-or none at all.
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