The stereotype of the overweight, self-sacrificing and dependent mammy figure would also grow alongside the American film industry through works including "Birth of a Nation" (1915), "Imitation of Life" (1934) and "Gone with the Wind" (1939). In 1899 the company hired real-life cook Nancy Green to portray the character at various state and world fairs. The Pearl Milling Company’s incarnation of the smiling domestic, Aunt Jemima, became synonymous with the mammy stereotype. Considered a trusted figure in white imaginations, mammies represented contentment and served as nostalgia for whites concerned about racial equality. During this time her robust, grinning likeness was attached to mass-produced consumer goods from flour to motor oil. The Mammy stereotype gained increased popularity after the Civil War and into the 1900s. This image ultimately sought to legitimize the institution of slavery. The trope painted a picture of a domestic worker who had undying loyalty to their slaveholders, as caregivers and counsel. Enslaved black women were highly skilled domestic works, working in the homes of white families and caretakers for their children. The Mammy stereotype developed as an offensive racial caricature constructed during slavery and popularized primarily through minstrel shows.
Yet laziness, as well as characteristics of submissiveness, backwardness, lewdness, treachery, and dishonesty, historically became stereotypes assigned to African Americans. Many of the stereotypes created during the height of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and were used to help commodify black bodies and justify the business of slavery. For instance, an enslaved person, forced under violence to work from sunrise to sunset, could hardly be described as lazy. This legal precedent permitted the image of African Americans to be reduced to caricatures in popular culture.ĭecades-old ephemera and current-day incarnations of African American stereotypes, including Mammy, Mandingo, Sapphire, Uncle Tom and watermelon, have been informed by the legal and social status of African Americans.
Taney dismissed the humanness of those of African descent. In the 1857 Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Widespread and Pervasive Stereotypes of African Americans Stereotypes of African Americans grew as a natural consequence of both scientific racism and legal challenges to both their personhood and citizenship.
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