Welcome to Pride in America Month. Every day in the month of June and through Independence Day, we will be highlighting a figure who has demonstrated and defended American values. Consider it a healthy alternative to the Left's June celebration that has taken over the media and corporate America.
In the interest of “political correctness,” leftists have erased from history people with remarkable stories. One of those is Nancy Green. Green was born a slave on a Kentucky plantation. She served as nurse, nanny, housekeeper, and cook for a wealthy man named Charles Walker. After the Civil War, with her husband and children dead, Green accompanied Walker to Chicago, helping raise his two sons who would go on to become a judge and a doctor, respectively.
In 1893, Green debuted the character of Aunt Jemima at the World’s Columbian Exposition on behalf of the R.T. Davis Milling Company. For the next 20 years, she traveled the country selling pancakes, drawing from her long experience as a cook.
Nancy Green was tragically killed in a car accident in 1923 but the character lived on. Aunt Jemima went from a so-called “mammy” stereotype to a prim and proper middle class woman before being forcibly retired in 2020. That means Green’s legacy is being erased, and her story with it.
Whether or not Green’s original portrayal is considered racist today is beside the point. Here was a woman who was literally a slave, yet made a second career as the face of a product that would go on to be familiar to millions of American children. Advertising is all about caricatures and archetypes anyway — the same company that discontinued Aunt Jemima still uses a stern old Quaker to advertise oatmeal, after all. Green is gone, but a man who pretends to be a woman is the newest hero of beer advertisements. Can you imagine?
The memory of Nancy Green and the women who followed in her footsteps should not disappear because some corporate executives decided to juice their ESG scores with some anti-racist virtue signaling. Her legacy deserves to live on, and that’s why we recognize her and her achievements as part of our Pride in America celebration.
Do you have a great American who deserves to be celebrated this month? Let us know!
