Should Companies Pay Up For Using Racially Tinged Brand Mascots?

CHICAGO — Now that Chicago-based Quaker Oats has publicly admitted to building an iconic global brand with the help of 131 years of slavery-inspired advertising, is it time to talk about whether corporations with racially charged marketing should pay something akin to corporate reparations?

Last week, Larnell Evans Sr., the great-grandson of one of the Black women who embodied "Aunt Jemima" over the last century, told me he thinks his family and others deserve something like royalties for the use of Anna Harrington's likeness and pancake recipe now that Quaker Oats is erasing her legacy "to make progress toward racial equality."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson agreed. On Thursday, the civil rights icon said he thinks the kin of Black women who played the role of "Aunt Jemima" should get royalties like "Bing Crosby's family gets for 'White Christmas.'"

But not everybody shares Jackson's opinion, including Quaker Food's parent company PepsiCo. It pitched a less-expensive way to make amends: dolling out about $5 million in donations over five years to create "meaningful, ongoing support and engagement in the Black community.”

While $1 million a year might sound like a lot of money to mark Aunt Jemima's retirement, let's put the donation into perspective.

The annual payout is about 7 percent of the $14.2 million in total compensation PepsiCo Chairman Raymon Laguarta received in 2019.

Over five years, the Aunt Jemima retirement donation is half the $10 million subsidy Mayor Richard M. Daley's rubber-stamp City Council forked over to keep Quaker Oats from moving to the suburbs in 2000.

And it's definitely way more than what Quaker Oats was willing to spend on the memory of the original "Aunt Jemima," Nancy Green, about 10 years ago.

Green, a South Side cook who was born into slavery, helped make the Aunt Jemima brand famous by serving up flapjacks as she wore a red apron and kerchief at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and serving as the company mascot until her death.

In 1923, Chicago druggist Dr. H.S. Seymour struck and killed Green when he drove his car onto the sidewalk at 37th and State streets to avoid hitting a laundry truck, the Chicago Defender reported.

Contrary to fake news on social media, she did not die a millionaire.

Green was buried in an unmarked grave near a sewer cover, along a red-brick wall where 67th Street meets the Metra tracks at Oak Woods Cemetery on Chicago's South Side.

About 10 years ago, Bronzeville Historical Society founder Sherry Williams said she wrote a letter to the makers of Aunt Jemima pancakes and syrup in hopes they might contribute to installing a marker on the woman's final resting place.

Someone from Quaker Oats explained to Williams that the Chicago-based company had bought the pancake brand in 1926, three years after Green was killed.

"They said they considered her image as a character and trademark, not a living human being. They did not want to contribute to getting a headstone," Williams said.

"They just bought the packaging, and they bought the recipe, and they bought the marketing and everything that came with it. But, sorry, she's not a real person. I have a difficult time wrapping my head around that."

State Rep. LaShawn Ford (D-Chicago) said it seemed pretty straightforward to him.

"That is a fine example of how corporate America considers Black people as property," he said. "We're not talking about the Kool-Aid Man. … We hear Michael Jordan talk about the value of his likeness. Therefore, we know that when the likeness of a person has value, that individual has value as a person."

Quaker Oats isn't the only corporation recently rethinking the future of racially charged brand mascots — corporations that didn't want any part of preserving the memory of the face of their product advertising.

Amateur historian Jesse Lasorda told me he also was taken aback by the reaction he got from the makers of Cream Of Wheat about his request to help preserve the memory of the late Frank L. White, an African American Chicago chef whose picture replaced the breakfast cereal's previous mascot called "Rastus," which is a racial slur for a Black man.

White, who died in 1938, was buried in an unmarked grave in Leslie, Michigan, a small town where he was a beloved restaurateur. While researching Woodlawn Cemetery records, Lasorda discovered White's name on a register along with a notation: "Cream Of Wheat."

He asked the makers of Cream Of Wheat, which recently announced it would investigate whether to rebrand the breakfast cereal, to pay for a burial marker.

"Cream Of Wheat did not want to touch this with a 10-foot pole, and did everything they could do to evade the request," Lasorda said. "I thought they would at least contribute to a headstone. But no, they wanted no part of it."

Lasorda said it was a 70-year-old woman from Leslie, Michigan, who had heard stories of the Cream Of Wheat man. As a girl, she took it upon herself to walk around town with a coffee can collecting donations — $600, according to Jet Magazine — to pay for the granite stone engraved with White's likeness that now marks his grave, Lasorda said.

B&G Foods, which bought Cream Of Wheat from Nabisco in 2007, didn't return messages seeking comment.

Folks at Quaker Oats didn't respond to my requests to talk about their decision to not contribute to place a stone at the still-unmarked grave of Nancy Green, and how they came up with the idea that five years of $1 million payouts seemed like a suitable donation to mark the "Aunt Jemima" brand retirement.

Food activist Devita Davison, director of Food Lab Detroit, offered her thoughts about the latter on Twitter.

"F--- their $5M donation. Let me know when they stop using slave labor to manufacture their products!" she wrote as part of a series of tweets on the subject of Aunt Jemima's last days on syrup bottles and pancake mix boxes.

Chicago Ald. Anthony Beale, who was a freshman ward boss when the city doled out millions to keep Quaker Oats' headquarters in town, called the company's handling of the Aunt Jemima brand's sudden retirement — announced on the same day the City Council passed a resolution to study paying reparations to the "descendants of enslaved Africans" — a "40-acres and a mule scenario."

"It's people making money on the backs of African Americans, and there's never been any reinvestment or restitution toward giving back to the same people they made money off with their images, and the community that buys their products day to day. There's never been any massive giveback from any these brands to the Black community," he said.

"Those images were used to suck the blood and soul out of our communities only for the benefit of companies that make money off of it."

Activist-pastor Corey Brooks surmised that maybe folks at Quaker Oats don't understand why some people think the company is getting off too easy by whitewashing Aunt Jemima's legacy and donating few million bucks.

He summoned the impromptu sermon he sometimes gives to some of his well-meaning white friends.

"Here you are holding up signs talking about 'Black Lives Matter,' but you don't put any time into the community. You don't put any treasure into the community. You don't use your talents in the community," he said.

"You're just holding up a sign that says, 'Black Lives Matter.' If you really believed that, you would do more. So, it's the same principle with corporate America. If they believe what they're saying, they better put their money where their mouth is or put some action behind it, other than just taking Aunt Jemima off a pancake box."

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots.

More from Mark Konkol:

• Aunt Jemima's Great-Grandson Enraged Her Legacy Will Be Erased
• Democrat Push To License Cops Started By Republican 11 Years Ago
• Pandering Pritzker Should Keep Quiet And Listen To Black Voices
• 'Privileged' Activist Urges Chicago To Stop Shouting, Take A Knee
• Protest Is Personal On South Shore Corner Where Cop Shot 'Snoop'
• More Than A Protest: Chicagoans Fight City's Knee On Their Necks