In reality, “this Aunt Jemima logo was an outgrowth of Old South plantation nostalgia and romance,” Riché Richardson, an associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, wrote in The New York Times in 2015. It was an image, she said, “grounded in an idea about the ‘mammy,’ a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own.”
Green was said to have received a lifetime contract and made a fortune, but it’s more likely that she simply worked for the company (she described herself in the 1910 census as a “housekeeper”) while serving as a missionary for the historic Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago.
