Spike Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled features Aunt Jemima (played by Tyheesha Collins) as one of the dancing "pickaninnies" in the film's deliberately racist TV show Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, alongside other stereotypical black antebellum South characters like Rastus. So, what exactly is the history behind Aunt Jemima, and was the controversial character based on a real person?

Why not check out our full Aunt Jemima range, so you can team your pancake syrup with authentic Aunt Jemima American pancakes, for an amazing Stateside breakfast. Here’s everything you need to know: Aunt Jemima was based on a caricature that a real Black woman, Nancy Green, was hired to portray. In retiring the name and character, the company acknowledged that Aunt Jemima’s origins were “based on a racial stereotype.A British image in the Library of Congress, which may have been created as early as 1847, shows a smiling black woman named "Miss Jim-Ima Crow," with a framed image of " James Crow" on the wall behind her.

Quaker Oats announced earlier this month it's rebranding Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup because of its racist history. Within one day of the June 2020 announcement, other similarly motivated rebrandings and reviews of brand marketing were also announced, including for Uncle Ben's rice (which was renamed Ben's Original), the Mrs. Quaker Oats is releasing a new name and logo for its “Aunt Jemima” products, finally retiring the racist stereotype that has adorned its pancake mixes and syrups for decades. I mean who else has experienced slavery and then walked through all of the experiences of America, Jim Crow, segregation, lynching,” Williams said.Pepsico on Tuesday unveiled a new name and logo for Aunt Jemima, the pancake mix and syrup brand that for decades featured a caricature of a Black woman on the packaging, after a surge of criticism amid the national reckoning over racism that followed the death of George Floyd last year. Quaker worked with consumers, employees, external cultural and subject-matter experts, and diverse agency partners to gather broad perspectives and ensure the new brand was developed with inclusivity in mind,” the company said. The back of the box could list their names and put a spotlight on one of the women each month, she suggests. PepsiCo referenced the Aunt Jemima brand by logotype on the front of the packaging for at least six months after the rebrand.

In the 1930s, after Quaker Oats bought the brand, the character was played in a radio series by a white actress who had performed in blackface on Broadway. Lewis became well known posing for pictures with visitors and serving pancakes to dignitaries, such as Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Aunt Jemima embodied a post-Reconstruction fantasy of idealized domesticity, inspired by "happy slave" hospitality, and revealed a deep need to redeem the antebellum South. In 1989, Quaker Oats redesigned and updated Aunt Jemima, changing her from an outdated stereotype to the design that is still in use today: a modern Black woman. Her face on the box, that image on the box, was probably the one way that households were integrated," Sherry Williams, president of the Bronzeville Historical Society in Chicago, told ABC News.Aunt Jemima has come under renewed criticism recently amid protests across the nation and around the world sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. A Ralphs in Culver City, California, also had bottles of the new syrup right next to Aunt Jemima items. In a 2015 piece for The New York Times, Richardson wrote that the inspiration for the brand's name came from a minstrel song, "Old Aunt Jemima," in which white actors in blackface mocked and derided Black people. The company specialized in packaging and label design for a number of iconic brands ranging from Marlboro cigarettes to Aunt Jemima to Sara Lee. A 1967 company history commemorated this journey as "the day they loaded 350 pounds of Anna Robinson on the Twentieth Century Limited.

Rag doll versions were offered as a premium in 1909: "Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour/Pica ninny Doll/ The Davis Milling Company. The African American Registry of the United States suggests Nancy Green and others who played the caricature of Aunt Jemima [21] should be celebrated despite what has been widely condemned as a stereotypical and racist brand image.

Butterworth’s, whose humanoid bottle shape looks like a woman of color when filled with maple syrup, announced they were changing the brand’s name on the same day. a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own.