How close is this to the real story

The character of Aunt Jemima was originally a fictional character in a minstrel show, during the 1880s, who was played by a white man in black face whose name has been lost to history. An executive from R. T. Davis Mills decided to use the character to sell pancake mix. Instead of someone in drag they hired ex-slave Nancy Green to represent their product at the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago and other event. She, of course, had nothing to with the formulation of the mix. She just demonstrated how to use it.

There other brands with fictional black domestic characters on the box. Uncle Ben's Converted Rice and Rostus on the Cream of Wheat box comes to mind.

Neither Davis Mills nor Quaker Oats who took the company over got around to copyrighting the "Aunt Jemima" character until 1937 which goes along way to explaining why Fannie Hurst never had any legal problems with the Delilah character in her novel or the 1934 movie version of "Imitation of Life". There is no question where she got the idea for the pancake formula story line from even though the story itself was completely factional.


TAG LINE: True genius is a beautiful thing, but ignorance is ugly to the bone.

a chef hat instead of the kerchief 'Aunt Jemima' wore