https://andscape.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt-jemimas-image-to-go/
“They feel so adamantly about it they won’t buy the product,” Ron Bottrell, director of media relations for Quaker Oats, told me in 1991. I was writing an article for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about an Aunt Jemima pancake breakfast held at Red Oak Presbyterian Church in rural Ohio, in honor of Rosa Washington Riles, an Aunt Jemima actress. She spent about 30 years touring Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and parts of Illinois portraying Aunt Jemima and giving cooking demonstrations. She is buried at the church cemetery.
I attended the 1991 breakfast, held during Memorial Day weekend, interviewing the organizers and observing the scene. The breakfast was a fundraiser for the church cemetery, where black and white people are buried. There was a collection of Aunt Jemima memorabilia, including sheet music for the “Aunt Jemima Two-Step,” a cakewalk tune; salt-and-pepper shakers dressed like Aunt Jemima; an “Aunt Jemima Breakfast Club” pin; a penny bank; and a syrup pitcher. There was a portrait of Riles dressed like Aunt Jemima, painted by a California artist who, according to one of the organizers, used a Hershey’s chocolate bar to achieve the right shade of brown.
Fewer than 25 black people attended out of the reported 900 total, which baffled the organizers. Ruth Salisbury, a member of Friends of Red Oak, which coordinated the breakfast, told me: “We tried to get them to be a part of it.” The group received no response after repeated appeals to area black churches and individuals.
“We never asked why,” so few black people attended, she said. “I’m not sure I know why.” She said she had never heard of the negative image of Aunt Jemima. “We thought it was helping the black community as well as the white community to help the cemetery,” said another organizer, Clyde Neu.
“I get a sense sometimes that white people can do whatever they want. I think it offends people. I would never attend,” a black Brown County, Ohio, woman told me.
I had never encountered such a parallel racial divide: white people believing that they are doing a good thing by creating a fundraiser to honor a black woman, and black people who hated the image she represented refusing to attend. That is, white people doing whatever they wanted with racial imagery without asking black people how they felt about it.