Aunt Jemima Gets A New Name After Racism Backlash

 Quaker Oats is releasing a new name and logo for its “Aunt Jemima” products, finally retiring the racist stereotype that has adorned its pancake mixes and syrups for decades.

The name “Aunt Jemima,” long criticized as a racist caricature of a Black woman stemming from slavery, will be replaced with the Pearl Milling Company name and logo on the former brand’s new packaging, according to parent company PepsiCo.

“We are starting a new day with Pearl Milling Company,” a PepsiCo spokesperson said. “A new day rooted in the brand’s historic beginnings and its mission to create moments that matter at the breakfast table.”

PepsiCo attorneys purchased brand name and logo trademarks for Pearl Milling Company on February 1. Trademark attorney Josh Gerben of Gerben Perrott, PLLC in Washington DC spotted the filing Monday morning.

“We’ve been looking for it ever since they made the announcement,” Gerben told CNN Business on Tuesday.

The new brand is scheduled to launch in June, one year after the company announced the change. Aunt Jemima was one of several food brands — including Uncle Ben’s, Cream of Wheat and Mrs. Butterworth’s — to announce redesigns as protests against systemic racism erupted across the United States this past summer.

The story behind ‘Pearl Milling Company’

The Pearl Milling Company was the late-19th-century business that created the original ready-made pancake mix, according to PepsiCo. It was founded in 1888 by Chris L. Rutt.

Rutt named the original company after “Old Aunt Jemima,” an 1875 song from a minstrel show that featured performers in blackface who wore aprons and bandana headbands.

The new Pearl Milling Company brand logo replaces the Aunt Jemima image with what appears to be a 19th century watermill, where flour was ground at the time. The new logo’s red, white and yellow color scheme matches the colors that were used on Aunt Jemima’s packaging.

“This name is a nod to where our delicious products began before becoming a family-favorite breakfast staple,” PepsiCo said of its new Pearl Milling Company branding. “While the Aunt Jemima brand was updated over the years in a manner intended to remove racial stereotypes, it has not progressed enough to appropriately reflect the dignity, respect and warmth that we stand for today.”

PepsiCo said it conducted extensive market research to come up with its new brand name.

“Quaker worked with consumers, employees, external cultural and subject-matter experts, and diverse agency partners to gather broad perspectives and ensure the new brand was developed with inclusivity in mind,” the company said.

News of Aunt Jemima’s rebranding in June started a domino effect among food brands with racist or otherwise controversial mascots. Within hours of the announcement, the Mars food company announced it would do away with the brand name and logo for Uncle Ben’s rice, eventually rebranding itself as Ben’s Original.

Conagra-owned syrup maker Mrs. Butterworth’s, whose humanoid bottle shape looks like a woman of color when filled with maple syrup, announced they were changing the brand’s name on the same day. And one day later, Cream of Wheat’s parent, B&G Foods, said it was doing away with its Black chef logo, which was based on a dim-witted, blackface minstrel show caricature seen in early 20th century Cream of Wheat ads.

PepsiCo said Pearl Milling Company will also announce an annual $1 million commitment to empower and uplift Black girls and women in the coming weeks. This investment is in addition to PepsiCo’s $400 million, five-year commitment to advance and uplift the Black community, the company said.

Pearl Milling is inviting the public to visit its website and nominate nonprofit organizations for an opportunity to receive grants to further that mission.

“The commitment we’re making is a reflection of our broader PepsiCo values of diversity and inclusion and support of the Black community,” PepsiCo said.

How will the public react?

It’s tough to gauge the reaction to Aunt Jemima’s new branding, said Apex Marketing Group president Eric Smallwood, who says the reception for the new branding will depend on Pepsi’s rollout plan.

“It’s a little different because you’re changing the name of a brand,” he said after previewing an image of the trademarked logo. “If you just saw it by itself, you’d have no idea it was Aunt Jemima, which had its tie longstanding with pancakes and pancake mix. This doesn’t.”

Allen Adamson, co-founder of New York-based branding consultancy Metaforce, says the new name of Pearl Milling is a strong choice.

“The name has craft and artesian imagery, a key for success in the food category,” he said. “It is also importantly authentic, as it was the product’s original name. Younger consumers are keenly interested in authenticity.”

Howard University Afro-American Studies professor Greg Carr says it appears PepsiCo is trying to strike a balance between continuing to market a popular product while scrubbing every vestige of racism from that product’s new branding.

“In a way, a change to Pearl Milling Company could be interpreted as a form of corporate mea culpa for an original sin it did not commit,” Carr told CNN Business. But, he added, “the market will ultimately determine whether this will be a win for PepsiCo.”

Mary Wilson – a Motown legend and a style icon

 For nearly 20 years, she’d taken second place to a lead singer – first Diana Ross, then, in the 1970s, Jean Terrell.

Launching a solo career meant that, for the first time, she would be the centre of attention.

“I was used to singing ‘oohs’ and ‘babys’,” she said. “Now there are words. I had to learn all over again.”

But Wilson, who has died at the age of 76, was always more than a backing singer. She was the lynchpin of The Supremes, keeping the group intact and on the road after Ross’s departure.

She coached three new line-ups and cultivated their live audience in Europe – where, she realised, “you don’t have to have a current record or product to be remembered and loved and respected for your craft”.

The first of those songs, Where Did Our Love Go, was even beamed into space so that astronauts on the Gemini 5 mission could enjoy The Supremes’ glossy pop harmonies.

For three girls from the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects of Detroit, it was success on a scale they could never have imagined.

“Miracles do happen,” Wilson told Pure M Magazine. “It happened to us. We worked hard for it, but [we] totally, totally enjoyed being on top.

“We travelled the world, we met all kinds of people, worked with all kinds of people, it was one of those great experiences. Maybe everybody can’t handle it, but I certainly did, and I certainly enjoyed it.”

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The Supremes were one of the biggest-selling acts of the 1960s

Wilson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, on 6 March 1944. Her parents separated when she was young and she was raised by family members until she was 10 years old, believing for many years that her mother was actually her aunt.

The family moved to Chicago and later Detroit, where they attended Aretha Franklin’s father’s church every Sunday.

Wilson, who learned to sing by imitating Lena Horne records, formed her first group with Aretha’s sister, Carolyn, when she was in junior school.

The Supremes were the creation of a Detroit group called The Primes who wanted a new girl group to support them at local shows. They’d already found two singers, Betty McGlown and Florence Ballard – who suggested adding Wilson, her classmate, as a third member.

Wilson then recruited Diane Ross, who she’d first spotted from of the window of her apartment, calling her “the most energetic and pretty girl I’d ever seen”.

Diamonds in the rough

Christened The Primettes, the band started performing covers of songs by Ray Charles and The Drifters at social clubs and talent shows around Detroit.

“I recall when we first got together… I absolutely felt complete,” said Wilson in 2014. “I absolutely never had another thought of doing anything else in my life.”

They quickly won an audition from Motown founder Berry Gordy – but he refused to sign the band until they had graduated from school.

Determined not to be forgotten, they would hang out on the lawn outside the label’s headquarters until, one day, a producer came out and told the teenagers he needed someone to perform hand claps on a record.

“We jumped and said, ‘We’ll do it,'” Wilson told The Wall Street Journal last year. “Berry Gordy said, ‘Wow, you girls are serious.’ He signed us.” (In fact, the girls’ parents had to sign the contracts as they were still underage).

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The band are estimated to have sold more than 100 million records

The band were quickly renamed The Supremes (other options included The Melodees, The Jewelettes and The Sweet Ps) and put through the “finishing school” by Maxine Powell, the Miss Manners of Motown.

“She used to tell us, ‘You girls are just diamonds in the rough and we are here to polish you’,” Wilson said.

“At the age of 15, Mrs Powell taught us to keep our knees together, how to get in and out of a car and she also said something that we used to laugh at: ‘Never let your buttocks protrude.'”

Primed and polished the band nonetheless suffered a series of flops at the start of their career. In Motown’s offices, they became known as “the no-hit Supremes”.

McGlown left the band in 1960 and was replaced by Barbara Martin, who then left in 1962.

“We were still learning our trade,” Wilson told the BBC in 2014. “I think after a couple of years, Berry Gordy recognised we were getting more serious about our careers – it wasn’t just a little hobby any more.

“So he put us with his best writing team – Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier. And 1964 was the year it suddenly all happened for us.”

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The Supremes met Princess Anne backstage at the 1968 Royal Variety Performance. “Are those wigs?” she asked the singers.

Their first number one was Where Did Our Love Go, recorded as a trio in 1964.

Holland-Dozier-Holland had originally written it for Wilson, thinking it suited her grittier soul voice, but Gordy insisted Ross – who by this stage had changed her name to Diana – should take the lead vocal.

That set the pattern for the band’s next four number ones – Baby Love, Come See About Me, Stop! In The Name Of Love and Back In My Arms Again – where Ross was consistently thrust into the limelight.

Even after the band’s demise, she curated The Supremes’ legacy, staging exhibitions of their gowns and writing two best-selling books documenting their achievements.

In their 1960s heyday, the Motown group rivalled the Beatles for commercial success – at one point scoring five consecutive number one singles in the US, an achievement that’s still unmatched by any other female vocal group.

By 1967, Gordy, who was romantically involved with the singer, had renamed the band Diana Ross & The Supremes. But Wilson never bore a grudge against the star.

Diana’s ambition was “her strong point,” she told Outsmart magazine in 1986. “She was not like me – she did not wait for things to happen; she went out there and made things happen. I admired that in her.”

Role models

As the hits continued to rack up, The Supremes were a constant presence on radio and television – subtly contributing to shifting perceptions of race in America.

“TV really helped us,” Wilson later recalled. “People were able to see us all over America and see black people in a different light. We were human beings. We were respected. We were loved.”

The band’s glamorous style was also a political statement – projecting black affluence and sophistication in the middle of the Civil Rights era.

“We were role models,” Wilson said. “What we wore mattered.”

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The group’s hit singles included You Can’t Hurry Love, You Keep Me Hanging On and Love Child

The Supremes “were three of the most beautiful women I had ever seen,” wrote Whoopi Goldberg in the foreword to Wilson’s book, Supreme Style.

“These were brown women as they had never, ever been seen before on national television.”

Seeing them perform, Goldberg was encouraged to think that “I too could be well-spoken, tall, majestic, an emissary of black folks” who, like the band themselves, “came from the projects”.

The band’s songs also tackled some of the big social taboos of the day – with Love Child and I’m Living In Shame addressing the stigma around single mothers and illegitimate children.

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The band’s sophisticated style has spawned a touring exhibition of their stage outfits

In 1966, the album Supremes A’ Go-Go became the first record by an all-woman group to top the US album charts, knocking the Beatles’ Revolver off the number one spot.

But by this stage, Ballard, who had been sexually assaulted as a child, was spiralling into depression and alcoholism. She was removed from the group in 1967 and replaced by Cindy Birdsong. She later died of a heart attack, aged 32.

Ross left the group soon after to pursue a (wildly successful) solo career, leaving Wilson as the only original member still in the act,

“I made up my mind that I didn’t want my dream to die,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1986. “Everyone else was giving up the ship, so to speak. I was the ship… I was The Supremes.”

With Jean Terrell on lead vocals, the band scored hits in the early 1970s with songs like Stoned Love and Nathan Jones, but they never really recovered from losing Ross.

Wilson laid the blame with Motown, feeling it had failed to promote or support the group’s new line-up; and she later sued the label over the rights to The Supremes’ name, and the terms of her contract as a solo artist.

“Motown didn’t give me what I thought I should get in the contract,” she explained. “They treated me like I was a newcomer, not someone who had helped build the company.”

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Wilson launched a solo career in the late 1970s

As the band faltered, Wilson’s private life was causing even greater pain. She had married Pedro Ferrer in 1974, calling him “a charismatic man who could handle any problem”, but the relationship quickly turned sour.

“He was a handsome devil with a gorgeous Afro – dashing, charming and seductive,” she wrote in her book, Supreme Faith. “At first he gave me confidence, made me see that I had so much to offer without Diana. But I also found out Pedro had a violent temper.”

Exploding into jealous rages, Ferrer “beat my face, gave me black eyes” and slashed her face with a glass, nearly severing her ear.

In 1979, she gave him a year to clean up his act. When he didn’t, she walked away and their divorce became final in 1981.

The couple had three children, the youngest of whom, Rafael, died in 1994, when Wilson’s jeep hit the central reservation of a Los Angeles freeway and overturned.

She later said it was her faith in God that helped her come to terms with the trauma.

“Physically I have healed. Emotionally it’s ongoing,” she told The Chicago Tribune. “[But] I was probably as strong the first day as I am now because of my belief.

“We’re never taught about how to handle death. Death to me is a wonderful part of the living experience, so when my son passed I pretty much understood and said goodbye at that time. I cry every day, but then I get right back and do what I have to do.”

Legal campaigns

Wilson found major success in the 1980s with her memoir, Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme. The title was taken from the Broadway musical Dreamgirls, which was based on The Supremes’ career (Wilson called the play “dead on”) and the book scrupulously detailed the abuses the band had suffered at the hands of the record industry.

The Supremes were tied to a 3 per cent royalty rate (less expenses), she revealed, meaning they would have made less than $5,000 (£3,629) from a record that sold a million copies.

A New York Times bestseller, it remains one of the most popular rock-and-roll autobiographies of all time. Wilson followed it up with a second volume, and a book on The Supremes’ style.

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The singer was recording and touring up until her death

In 2001, she received an associate’s degree in arts from New York University, the result of five years studying in between touring commitments.

“My mother couldn’t read or write, and the one thing she always stressed was education,” she said as she donned her graduation robes. “It’s a personal achievement and I’m very proud of myself.”

In her later years, she also appeared in musicals, became an inspirational speaker and appeared in the 2019 series of Dancing With The Stars – despite having heart bypass surgery in 2006.

Fiercely protective of The Supremes’ legacy, she also lobbied – successfully – for copyright laws that made it illegal for tribute acts to pass themselves off as the real thing.

And she remained proud of her achievements until the very end.

“The music has lasted, it’s still fresh,” she said in 2019. “Motown music still has a current sound to it, which is really wonderful. And it’s great to be a part of it.”