Aunt Jemima’s Heirs Continue to Battle

Although Nancy Green, “Aunt Jemima,” was born a slave in Kentucky, her pearls and soft curls depict her as anything but.  However, Green’s heirs are claiming they deserve $2 billion and future revenue from the popular brand. 

The federal suit filed by two great grandsons of Anna S. Harrington, says that she and Green were key in formulating the recipe for the nation’s first self-rising pancake mix.  “Aunt Jemima has become known as one of the most exploited and abused women in American history.” 

Quaker Oats, the current owner of the brand, said in response to the lawsuit that Aunt Jemima was never real.  “The image symbolizes a sense of caring, warmth, hospitality and comfort, and is neither based on, nor meant to depict any one person.”

Harrington’s descendants contend she did exist.  Court documents are riddled with advertising saying that the recipes are Aunt Jemima’s “secret” recipes from the Old South. 

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

Whether or not heirs of the Aunt Jemima women prevail in the lawsuit, she is a figure who will always be looked fondly upon. 

See Jere Downs, Pancake Flap: Aunt Jemima Heirs Seek Dough, The Courier-Journal, Oct. 3, 2014.