The Mythical Stereotype of the "Mammy"

In an article entitled, "The Mythification of the Mammy Figure," One of the earliest fictionalized versions of the mammy figure was Aunt Chloe in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Patricia Turner explains in Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies that the difference between this character and subsequent caricatures is the presence of a world away from the white family: "Stowe's decision to portray Aunt Chloe in a cabin feeding her three children while Uncle Tom and George Shelby looked on did give Aunt Chloe something future mammies often lacked--an implied sex life."(1)

Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe at home.

As the mammy moved into the twentieth century and became larger than life (in more ways than one), the personal time was sacrificed to the demands of the white majority that mythologized the figure. Even memoirs, which consistently mentioned mammies from the 1890s to the 1920s (2), downplayed the black woman's relationship to her own family. Cheryl Thurber notes in her essay, "The Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology":

[T]here were several passing comments that mammy had done a better job of raising her white children than she had done with her own, who frequently disappointed her. Consistent with this viewpoint is the suggestion that, after the abolition of slavery, she chose to remain with her master's family. Loyalty and affection were tied together.(p. 100)

Since mammy's loyalty to her white family caused her to neglect her own flesh and blood, when the time came and she had the opportunity to choose who she would stay with, the mammy opted to be a key part of the better family. These myths were perpetuated in the early twentieth century with Thurber noting that descriptions of the mammy in memoirs peaked between 1906 and 1912 (p. 96). Well after the mammy was supposed to have been a key figure in the southern American family, the culture invested a good deal of time and effort into developing her image:

“I want my Mammy” - Eddie Cantor - Sheet Music 1921

References to mammy in the Confederate Veteran magazine, American popular songs, memoirs, and fiction confirm that more was written about mammy at the turn of the century than during the antebellum period, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, the New South movement, and the later phases of the Confederate Lost Cause movement. (p. 95)

In Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies, Patricia Turner compares the proliferation of this stereotype to a similar event occurring in American advertising:

Like Aunt Jemima and her turn-of-the-century literary counterparts, these mammies were happily ensconced in the households of white employers. Implicit in each rendition was the notion that these thick-waisted black women were happy with their lot, honored to spend their days and nights caring for white benefactors. (p. 51)

The people promoting this nostalgia, however, were selling something much more than pancake mix. Catherine Clinton, author of The Plantation Mistress, explains the origins of the caricature:

The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum era, and to embellish it with nostalgia in the post-bellum period. In the primary records from before the Civil War, hard evidence for her existence simply does not appear.(3)

As social and racial demographics changed in the North during the twentieth century, southerners held fast to the myth of the mammy as a way to define themselves and their relation to their northern contemporaries. Cheryl Thurber explains:

With the growth of black migration northward, the North was having its own difficulties with race relations and was ready to believe that the South had solved its racial problems. Certainly the ideal of a loving and faithful mammy contributed to the illusion of peace. With the expression of pious devotion and support for mammy, proper southerners could convince themselves and others of their own goodness. In a sense they were attempting to redeem themselves for the wrongs that had been done because, "I loved my old mammy."(4)

To borrow Snead's terms, it seems southerners were interested in emphasizing the importance of the mammy in their lives because of the omission of other kinds of positive inter-racial relationships. The harsh reality, however, was often much different. Thurber turned to the former slave interviews documented in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration in order to understand the extent of some of the exaggerations:

Very few former slaves mentioned any older relatives who had the role of mammy in antebellum times. In fact, they more commonly mentioned former slaves as having been raised by the white mistress as opposed to the adult black women who took care of the white children.

The few references to mammy by former slaves usually include a story about the special protection the role provided, or the continued concern shown by the white folks toward their former mammy....

There are numerous instances where the devotion of the white children to their black mammy was mentioned, including their care for her as she grew older and after slavery times. But the continued support was inconsistent at best.....
It is likely, however, that mammies did exist in the antebellum period, but in much smaller numbers than the mythology would indicate.(5)

Not only were the number of mammies smaller than imagined, mammies themselves were probably smaller too. Patricia Turner explains that the conditions of slavery rarely allowed for such large old women to be in the position of taking care of their master's children:

Like the field hands, those black bondswomen who worked indoors were unlikely to be overweight because their food stuffs were severely rationed. They were more likely to be light as dark because household jobs were frequently assigned to mixed-race women. They were unlikely to be old because nineteenth-century black women just did not live very long; fewer than 10 percent of black women lived beyond their fiftieth birthday.(6)

Regardless of the facts, however, the belief that white owners loved their mammies became ingrained in the American culture. Some people went as far as erecting a statue as a testament to this fictionalized in a place worthy of a president--the Mall in Washington, D.C. Cheryl Thurber notes that "From about 1910 on, suggestions for memorials to the mammy made their appearance culminating in 1923 with a United Daughters of the Confederacy proposal to erect a monument to her memory in the nation's capital. After extensive and bitter controversy, the bill was finally killed in the House of Representatives." (p. 99)

While Patricia Turner attributes the actual petition of Congress to the Daughters of the American Confederacy (DAC) (p. 53), the point remains clear: many Americans felt so strongly about this mythologized woman that they were willing to erect a statue in the nation's capital as a testament of their love.

One particularly interesting assessment of just how far this love could go comes in the form of Lillian Smith's 1948 description of southern society in Killers of the Dream. In "Race, Region, and Gender in a Reassessment of Lillian Smith," Roseanne Camacho writes:

As Smith's best-known and some would argue, best-written book, Killers of the Dream is the confessional literature, distilled from her magazine's editorials [from issues of Pseudopodia] and her memories of a segregated childhood in northern Florida. It converted Smith's childhood into an allegory of the reproduction of white supremacy in each generation, and aimed to move white southerners to a symbolic confession, a recognition of the evil of segregation.(7)

At one point, Smith addresses questions of race in terms of the mammy. Of particular interest regarding one possible interpretation of Mammy in Gone With the Wind comes in Smith's account of the relationship between a boy and his nurse:

In the old days, a white child who had loved his colored nurse, his "mammy" with that passionate devotion which only small children feel, who had grown used to dark velvety skin, warm deep breast, rich soothing voice and the ease of a mind is tender the touch of a spirit almost free of sex anxiety, found it natural to seek in adolescence and adulthood a return of this profoundly pleasing experience....

Sometimes he found what he sought and formed a tender and passionate and deeply satisfying relation which he was often faithful to, despite cultural barriers. But always it was a relationship without honor in his own mind and his personality. Yet with it was always the old longing, the old desire for something that he could not find in his white life.(8)

By playing on the aesthetic and virtuous qualities of the black female, Smith demonstrates the cruelty of a racially unjust world but she also adds to the mythification of the mammy. Just as notions of the "self" and the "other" transform into communal questions on the movie screen, Smith's representation of the white boy becomes an argument about all white men. Therefore, the virtue of the black woman translates into the enduring virtue of all black women.

The power of the mythic mammy is later established in the relationship with the children, their white mother, and the mammy who raises them:

Of all the painful and humiliating experiences which southern white women endured, the least easy to accept, I think, was that of a mother who had no choice but to take the husk of a love which her son in his earliest years had given to another woman. She valiantly made jokes about it, telling her friends that her child preferred Mammy to her and that was fine, wasn't it, for it gave her so much more time to attend to all she had to do! (p. 134)

Part of the mythification that occurs on screen--particularly in Gone With the Wind--is due in part to the role of the mammy as a surrogate mother. This, we shall see, occurs in Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. Before Hattie McDaniel's Mammy is addressed, however, we must first look at her predecessor in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.

(source: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA99/diller/mammy/fiction.html)

A clip from the documentary _Ethnic Notions_ by Marlon Riggs. The film details the history of popular cultural representations of African Americans from the 19th century into the late 20th century. It focuses, in particular, on stereotypes and how they have changed over time and in response to circumstance. Here we see the example of the "Mammy" character, an ante-bellum construction that was used to demonstrate blacks' contentment with, indeed, need for, white mastery. Because _Ethnic Notions_ understands these stereotypes as social constructions that shift over time, it is an excellent example of how "racial formations" operate.

The stereotype of the "Mammy"

Caged In The Human Zoo

From the Daily Mail, "Caged in the human zoo: The shocking story of the young pygmy warrior put on show in a monkey house - and how he fuelled Hitler's twisted beliefs," by Beth Hale, 31 October 2009

His ebony skin stood out in sharp contrast to the white crowd pressing to get a better view.

The young African boy bared his teeth at the men and women staring at him through the bars. They were sharpened into dagger-like points, making him appear all the more barbaric to the ignorant hordes.

Above the cage hung a sign proclaiming: 'The Missing Link.' A baby chimp sat disconsolately at the bottom of the enclosure, a single companion to the boy.

The year was 1906. This was a pygmy, brought to America as a novelty to be put on display in the monkey house.

The New York Times reported: 'There were 40,000 visitors to the park on Sunday. Nearly every man, woman and child of this crowd made for the monkey house to see the star attraction in the park - the wild man from Africa.

'They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering, and yelling. Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.'

Suddenly, the boy turned. Taking the bow and arrow given to him as an ethnic accessory, he shot at the gawpers. His arrow did no harm, but he did scare the life out of the onlookers.

This was Ota Benga, a pygmy, brought from the Congo and put on display in a zoo as an example of what scientists at the time proclaimed to be an evolutionary inferior race.

His story would divide a nation, and is now told for the first time in a new documentary, The Human Zoo.

The programme lifts the lid on a dark period in history, where 'natives' were paraded as exhibits, fueling the spread of white supremacism and even contributing to the rise of Nazism.

Tragically, Benga became the victim of one of the most awful acts of exploitation ever seen and died a shadow of the proud young tribesman who arrived in America.

So just who was he, and how did this grotesque experiment help shape the 20th century view of race?

A hundred years ago, before television and mass tourism, a handful of enterprising adventurers, anthropologists and businessman decided to bring the far-flung glories of the world to life in one place.

Huge fairs were held in Paris, London and America, exhibiting everything from Italian gondolas to African elephants.

Having promised the world, there was pressure to deliver: people were the next quarry.

In 1904, the showman anthropologist William McGee conceived the idea of a human zoo, to be held in St Louis in the U.S. state of Missouri.

It was designed to be one of the largest scientific experiments ever undertaken and would be spectacular public entertainment.

McGee wanted the tallest people in the world, veritable giants from Patagonia, at the tip of South America. He wanted the Ainu, who lived on an island north of Japan and were supposedly the hairiest humans. He placed an order for 300 Filipinos - there is no record of why he wanted so many.

His grandson, Phillips Verner Bradford, says: 'If you told him that a place was dangerous, he'd say: "I want to go there!" He was that sort of guy.'

Verner took a boat from New York to London, down the European coast and around Africa to the Congo River.

Bradford says: 'He made his way up the Congo River with steamers as far as they would go. Once he arrived at the great waterfalls, he had to hire a crew of natives.'

They encountered crocodiles and hippopotamuses, and deadly whirlpools that could sink a boat.

Eventually, Verner made it into the jungle. He blithely walked into a village of cannibals, and found that they had captured a rival tribe who were being held in cages, ready to be eaten.

To his delight, the prisoners were pygmies, or Mbuti - just what he was looking for. He began negotiating. Talking to the pygmies in their native Chiluba, he established that they would rather be taken to America than eaten. He bought six pygmies from their captors for a roll of brass wire and some salt.

One pygmy stood out. He was Ota. Photos of him taken in the Congo show a playful, chubby young man, a broad smile revealing his sharpened teeth, which were filed in his youth.

He looks healthy, spirited and full of life, standing around 4ft 8in tall.

He had never seen a white man before. Verner realised that he had a hugely marketable proposition on his hands, and made the return trip across the Atlantic with his human treasure.

For their part, the pygmies were intrigued by everything they saw and were full of questions: how did the boat work? Was there a cage of hippopotamuses down beneath pedaling it along? Verner showed them how the steam engine functioned.

Docking at New Orleans in June 1904, the Africans caught their first glimpse of America. They were stunned by the tall buildings and wide streets.

The six pygmies were sent to St Louis by rail. There, they became McGee's most important exhibits, the centerpiece of the St Louis World Fair, feted by society and academics alike.

Adverts proclaimed: 'They live in forests, they are extremely shy. They eat the flesh of wild animals killed with poisoned arrows. They are cruel, finding delight in torturing animals.

'They have long heads, long narrow faces and little red eyes, set close together like those of ferrets. Their bodies are exceptionally hairy.

'A pygmy has been known to eat 60 bananas at one meal, in addition to other food, and then ask for more.

'They seem to be controlled by an impulse that makes them delight in wickedness. If caught young, they are said to make excellent servants.'

He wanted what he considered the most primitive American Indian tribe, the Cocopah in Mexico. He asked for Eskimos.

But most of all, he wanted the smallest people in the world. He needed pygmies. He had heard that they were very short and very black, and he had to have one.

Explorer Samuel Phillips Verner was dispatched by McGee to the Belgian Congo with a shopping list.

It read: 'One pygmy patriarch or chief. One adult woman, preferably his wife. One adult man, preferably his son. One adult woman, the wife of the last or daughter of the first. One female youth unmarried. Two infants. A priestess and a priest, or medicine doctors, preferably old. All of the above to be pygmies.'

Duly detailed, Verner set off for deepest Africa. He knew that this operation could be the making of him, putting him in the same league as Henry Stanley and Dr David Livingstone.

As the sales pitch shows, the human zoo played into the hands of white supremacists, teaching the public that there was a hierarchy of races, with the white man at the top and all others beneath.

McGee himself, in his book The Trend Of Human Progress, published in 1899, wrote: 'Those who know the races realise that the average white man is stronger of limb, fleeter of foot, clearer of eye, than the average yellow or red or black.'

Bastardising Darwin's theory of evolution, McGee saw each race as a stage in human evolution - with pygmies the least evolved of the species. With his rudimentary Victorian understanding of science, he believed they were the living missing link between apes and humans.

The human zoo was a fantastic success - and widely copied. Dr Sadiah Qureshi, a historian at the University of Cambridge, says: 'Millions of people went to see these shows at their peak. Originally you would get a show in a local theatre. By the late 19th century you would see hundreds, if not a couple of thousand people living on site, eating and on constant display.'

Indeed, some years later, in 1924, King George V and Queen Mary inspected the live exhibits at the British Empire Exhibition, at Wembley. Some Europeans' curiosity knew no bounds, however.

Qureshi says: 'The 1899 exhibition Savage South Africa held at Earl's Court in London caused quite a stir. At one point women were banned from going inside because they had supposedly been touching the natives.' For almost a year, Ota and the other pygmies lived in America as human exhibits. They were made to build native houses, perform traditional dance ceremonies, live partially naked and cook authentic food.

Ota was described in the press as 'a dwarfy, black specimen of sad-eyed humanity'. With his filed tribal teeth, he was the most celebrated pygmy and dubbed 'Lord of the savage world'. He posed for photographs for 25 cents.

In 1905, after they had been viewed by a total of 20 million people, Verner took the pygmies home to the Congo.

Ota had planned to rejoin his tribe - but discovered that they had been entirely wiped out by Belgian soldiers. He married a girl from the nearby Batwa tribe, and appeared to settle back into life in Africa.

Then his wife was bitten by a poisonous snake and died. The Batwa rejected him, believing he was cursed and responsible for the young woman's death. Ota was cast adrift, a stranger in his own land.

He begged his friend Verner to take him back to America. Verner was reluctant, but eventually acquiesced, taking him to New York.

The pair shared the 3,000-mile sea voyage with crates of live animals, parrots, monkeys, snakes and other exotic booty, which Verner planned to sell in America. On the ship, Ota discovered cigarettes and drink.

Arriving in New York, Verner - who had business to do - bade him farewell, arranging accommodation in a spare room - this time he was not on show - at the American Museum of Natural History. There, he thought Ota would be safe.

Soon, however, he came to the attention of William Hornaday, a conservationist and director of the Bronx Zoo.

Collaborating with one of America's most notorious racists, Madison Grant, he conceived a plan.

Grant wanted to promote 'scientific racism', talking in terms of 'purity of type', and the survival of the white master race.

In 1930, after his work The Passing Of The Great Race was translated into German, Grant received a letter from an aspiring politician, saying 'your book is my bible'.

The man was Adolf Hitler. He would indeed use 'scientific racism' as the foundation for the Third Reich, giving academic grounding to the Holocaust.

Together, Hornaday and Grant offered to take charge of Ota Benga, who initially believed he would be looking after the Bronx Zoo's elephants.

In fact, he was going to be put on public display as a living example of 'racial inferiority'. Immediately, the exhibition prompted criticism. The New York Times reported on September 9, 1906: 'The exhibition was that of a human being in a monkey cage. A human being. In a monkey cage.

'The human being happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale, but to the average nonscientific person in the crowd of sightseers there was something about the display that was unpleasant.

'It is probably a good thing that Benga doesn't think very deeply. If he did it isn't likely that he was very proud of himself when he woke in the morning and found himself under the same roof with the orang-utans and monkeys, for that is where he really is.'

The exhibition was a sensation. On a single day, 40,000 people arrived to see Ota and his chimp. The show lasted only two weeks, however, due to a public outcry, and human zoos as a phenomenon died out by the Forties.

So what became of Ota Benga? After he was removed from the Bronx Zoo, there was great debate regarding his fate. African-American church ministers insisted he be released - not for his comfort, but because they wanted to convert the pygmy to Christianity.

He was eventually placed in an orphanage for black children, the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, to be 'civilised'. He was dressed in Western clothes and taught how to eat, talk and behave like an American.

He had his pointed teeth capped and attended a Baptist seminary, where he started to study English.

He was kept out of the public eye for four years. Eventually, he moved from New York to the backwater town of Lynchburg, Virginia, where he became a local curiosity and was known as Otto Bingo.

Forevermore haunted by his time in the monkey cage, he would repeatedly slap his chest, declaring: 'I am a man. I am a man.'

He began to save money to return to the Congo, working in a tobacco factory. With the outbreak of World War I, this became impossible and Ota sunk into depression.

He never did make it home. One evening, he went into a barn behind the village general store. He chipped off the caps hiding his teeth, restoring them to their filed-down glory, lit a small ceremonial campfire, and shot himself in the head, dying ten years after being put on display at the Bronx zoo. He was 32 years old.

His story now bears testament to the ignorance of those who believed themselves superior to him.

He was buried in an unmarked grave, but he left his mark on the world, exposing as moral pygmies the lesser men who would cage a human. (source: Daily Mail)

Human Zoos - Dirty Secrets of Science

Susan Smith White Woman Murders Her Children and Blames a Black Man

Susan Smith's mugshot

Dr. David Pilgrim writes: In 1994 Susan Smith, a young mother in Union, South Carolina, claimed that a man had commandeered her car with her two boys -- Alex, 14-month-old, and Michael, 3-year-old. She described the carjacker as a "Black male in his late 20s to early 30s, wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and a toboggan-type hat." A composite of her description was published in newspapers, nationally and locally. Smith appeared on national television, tearfully begging for her sons to be returned safely. An entire nation wept with her, and the image of the Black brute resurfaced. The Reverend Mark Long, the pastor of the church where Smith's family attended services, said in reference to the Black suspect, "There are some people that would like to see this man's brains bashed in."

Susan Smith's fictitious black brute

After nine days of a gut-wrenching search and strained relations between local Blacks and Whites, there was finally a break in the case: Susan Smith confessed to drowning her own sons. In a two-page handwritten confession she apologized to her sons, but she did not apologize to Blacks, nationally or locally. "It was hard to be Black this week in Union," said Hester Booker, a local Black man. "The Whites acted so different. They wouldn't speak (to Blacks); they'd look at you and then reach over and lock their doors. And all because that lady lied."

Susan Smith

The false allegations of Charles Stuart and Susan Smith could have led to racial violence. In 1908, in Springfield, Illinois, Mabel Hallam, a White woman, falsely accused "a Black fiend," George Richardson, of raping her. Her accusations angered local Whites. They formed a mob, killed two Blacks chosen randomly, then burned and pillaged the local Black community. Blacks fled to avoid a mass lynching. Hallam later admitted that she lied about the rape to cover up an extramarital affair.

How many lynchings and race riots have resulted from false accusations of rape and murder leveled against so-called Black brutes? (source: Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology, Ferris State University; Nov., 2000)

Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima

The figure of the mammy occupies a central place in the lore of the Old South and has long been used to ullustrate distinct social phenomena, including racial oppression and class identity. In the early twentieth century, the mammy became immortalized as Aunt Jemima, the spokesperson for a line of ready-mixed breakfast products. Although Aunt Jemima has undergone many makeovers over the years, she apparently has not lost her commercial appeal; her face graces more than forty food products nationwide and she still resonates in some form for millions of Americans.

In Slave in a Box, M.M. Manring addresses the vexing question of why the troubling figure of Aunt Jemima has endured in American culture. Manring traces the evolution of the mammy from her roots in the Old South slave reality and mythology, through reinterpretations during Reconstruction and in minstrel shows and turn-of-the-century advertisements, to Aunt Jemima's symbolic role in the Civil Rights movement and her present incarnation as a "working grandmother." We learn how advertising entrepreneur James Webb Young, aided by celebrated illustrator N.C. Wyeth, skillfully tapped into nostalgic 1920s perceptions of the South as a culture of white leisure and black labor. Aunt Jemima's ready-mixed products offered middle-class housewives the next best thing to a black servant: a "slave in a box" that conjured up romantic images of not only the food but also the social hierarchy of the plantation South.The initial success of the Aunt Jemima brand, Manring reveals, was based on a variety of factors, from lingering attempts to reunite the country after the Civil War to marketing strategies around World War I. Her continued appeal in the late twentieth century is a more complex and disturbing phenomenon we may never fully understand. Manring suggests that by documenting Aunt Jemima's fascinating evolution, however, we can learn important lessons about our collective cultural identity.

Reviews

"In the white imagination few images are as recognizable as Aunt Jemima. As a negative stereotype reinforcing both racism and sexism, Aunt Jemima symbolically valued the humanity of black women. As M.M. Manring's thoughtful and well written account makes clear, the racist image of the black mammy has had a powerful impact upon American culture and society. Slave in a Box documents the continuing commodification of racial and gender inequality within white America." --Manning Marable, Professor of History, and Director, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University

(source:http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/manring.html )

Marlon Riggs: Ethnic Notions

Ethnic Notions is Marlon Riggs' Emmy-winning documentary that takes viewers on a disturbing voyage through American history, tracing for the first time the deep-rooted stereotypes which have fueled anti-black prejudice. Through these images we can begin to understand the evolution of racial consciousness in America.

Marlon Riggs

Loyal Toms, carefree Sambos, faithful Mammies, grinning Coons, savage Brutes, and wide-eyed Pickaninnies roll across the screen in cartoons, feature films, popular songs, minstrel shows, advertisements, folklore, household artifacts, even children's rhymes. These dehumanizing caricatures permeated popular culture from the 1820s to the Civil Rights period and implanted themselves deep in the American psyche.

Narration by Esther Rolle and commentary by respected scholars shed light on the origins and devastating consequences of this 150 yearlong parade of bigotry. Ethnic Notions situates each stereotype historically in white society's shifting needs to justify racist oppression from slavery to the present day. The insidious images exacted a devastating toll on black Americans and continue to undermine race relations.

Ethnic Notions has quickly become a mainstay of university, high school, and public library collections. It is a basic audio visual text for American History, Sociology, Black Studies, Anthropology, Social Psychology, Media Studies, and any training program concerned with stereotyping and cross-cultural understanding.

Approaching a complex and delicate subject with great sensitivity, Ethnic Notions equips viewers to view media and other cultural representations with a more critical eye. It's a direct challenge to those who say, "It was just a joke."

Ethnic Notions

Ethnic Notions Transcript

VOICE-OVER: A is for Aunty, de odes 'er all, she rocks all us chil'ren t' sleep in her shawl.
D is for Daniel, who tends to de do', he took care of massa, way back 'fo de woh.
F is for Felix, who won't do no wuk, he's lazy and shif'less and ready to shirk.
Z is for Zonia, chunky and small, but 'ere comes de Missus so I guess dis am all.

VIDEO/SYNC: (Cartoon) SCRUB ME MAMA WITH THE BOOGIE WOOGIE BEAT

"Listen, Mammy, that ain't no way to wash clothes. What you all need is rhythm!"

"Wh- wh- what do you all mean, rhythm?"

"Ha ha ha ha. I'll show you what I mean!" (music)

NARRATOR: The mammy … the pickaninny … the coon … the sambo … the uncle: Well into the middle of the twentieth century , these were some of the most popular depictions of black Americans

By 1941, when this cartoon was made, images like these permeated American culture.

These were the images that decorated our homes, that served and amused and made us laugh.

Taken for granted, they worked their way into the mainstream of American life. Of ethnic caricatures in America, these have been the most enduring.

Today there's little doubt that they shaped the most gut-level feelings about race.

LEVINE: When you see hundreds of them, uh in all parts of the country persisting over a very long period of time, they have to have meaning. They obviously appeal to people. They appeal to the creator, but the appeal also to the consumers, those who read the car - look at the cartoons, or read the novels, or buy the artifacts.

CHRISTIAN: It is not just that it's in the figurines, and the uhn coffee pots and so on, it is that we are seen that way, perceived that way, even in terms of public policy. And that our lives are lived under that shadow, and sometimes we then, even become to believe it ourselves.

LEVINE: Blacks don't really look like that. So why is it so appealing to people to think they look like that, and pretend they look like that, and to like to look at icons that look like that. You look at them often enough and black people begin to look like that, even though they don't. Um, so that they've had a great impact in our society.

They therefore tell us both about the inner desires of the people who create and consume them, and also they tell us about some of the forces that shape reality, for large portions of our population.

VIDEO/SYNC: UNCLE TOM'S CABANA

Well now chil'ren, ol' Uncle Tom's gon' tell you the real true story about Uncle Tom's Cabin

NARRATOR: Contained in these cultural images is the history of our national conscience striving to reconcile the paradox of racism in a nation founded on human equality - a conscience coping with this profound contradiction … through caricature.