13719: Microwaving Aunt Jemima.

Adweek reported Dan Gasby, TV executive and the spouse and professional partner of B. Smith, is going after Aunt Jemima. Actually, he’s going after PepsiCo, demanding that they finally dump the iconic pancake maker. “One hundred and twenty four years ago that product was created,” griped Gasby. “They used nasty grains, and they had freed slaves [to promote it], and it’s still a modern-day, 21st-century company. And someone who pours that syrup [or mix], they’re pouring slavery out of a box.” If Gasby succeeds in his crusade to crush Aunt Jemima, it will probably make Annie the Chicken Queen and The Pine-Sol® Lady really nervous.

B. Smith’s Husband Is Launching a Petition Demanding the Aunt Jemima Brand Change Its Name

Seeks to drop the mascot as well, thereby setting the character ‘free’

By Robert Klara

For well over a century, Aunt Jemima has been among the most successful and recognizable brands of pancake mix and syrup on grocers’ shelves. Starting today, however, it might just get flipped on its head.

A new Change.org petition, announced this morning, demands the company get rid of its brand name and mascot and “set Aunt Jemima free,” in the words of Dan Gasby.

Gasby, a successful TV executive and the husband and business partner of the model-turned-entrepreneur B. Smith, started the petition after his previous efforts to get the Pepsico-owned Aunt Jemima to discard its name and mascot failed. Gasby believes the Aunt Jemima name and character are enduring vestiges of racism and slavery that have no place on store shelves in 2017.

“For 124 years, [that product] has been the very epitome of African-American female humiliation,” Gasby said. “You can’t tell me Aunt Jemima is positive.”

PepsiCo has not responded to an email and a telephone message requesting comment.

Gasby’s campaign, while newly public, has been years in the making. About a decade ago, Gasby and his wife decided to go shopping in some New York bodegas, those dingy little cigarette-and-beer stores that in many of the city’s poorer neighborhoods are the only grocery-shopping options available. The couple had long passed the point where they needed to do such chores (much less in bodegas), but they were considering getting into the grocery business themselves and figured they’d do a little research.

Instead, they found a cause.

When a young black woman the couple was watching put a box of Aunt Jemima pancake mix into her basket, Smith—an actress, restaurateur, chef and among the most elegant black women of her generation—was disturbed. So she approached the young lady. “I just want to ask you something,” Smith said. “You just bought this product—do you know what it stands for?” The woman replied that Aunt Jemima was “a product that stands for us being blacks.”

“My wife was shocked,” said Gasby, still recalling the event clearly. “And from that day on, we said to ourselves that we’d try to make a difference.”

Gasby, co-owner of the B. Smith lifestyle brand, chose today, June 19 or Juneteenth, the day that commemorates the emancipation of African-American slaves, as the launch date for the campaign. He hopes the symbolism will spark a greater sense of urgency and garner more support.

“One hundred and twenty four years ago that product was created,” Gasby said. “They used nasty grains, and they had freed slaves [to promote it], and it’s still a modern-day, 21st-century company. And someone who pours that syrup [or mix], they’re pouring slavery out of a box.”

In 1889, entrepreneurs Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood of the Pearl Milling Company introduced a new brand of ready-mix, self-rising pancake flour called Aunt Jemima—a name Rutt, a newspaperman by trade, had heard at a minstrel show in a song performed by a singer in blackface. After the R.T. Davis Milling Company purchased the brand in 1890, it hired Nancy Green, who’d been born a slave in Kentucky’s Montgomery County, to portray Aunt Jemima in the company’s promotions. The perennially smiling, bandana-wearing Green was paid to be a caricature, and the resulting archetype, which passed to the ownership of Quaker Oats in 1925, survived long after Green’s death in the form of an illustration of the character on the packaging.

Apart from the cultural baggage of the name itself, the Aunt Jemima character has been a liability for the brand for decades. Though the rendering has been mainstreamed over the years—losing the bandana, shedding the housedress and appearing in pearl earrings—Aunt Jemima is still in many people’s eyes a “mammy”—a stereotypical domestic servant in the white households of the antebellum era.

But in Gasby’s view, updating the character did nothing to address what he sees as the foundational offensiveness of the brand name overall and the character in particular.

“You could make her look like Doris Day in dark chocolate—and you can quote me on that—[or] you can bob her hair, and she could look like she’s in the Daughters of the American Revolution,” he said. “But walk up to a black woman and say to them, ‘You remind me of Aunt Jemima!’ and see what they do to you. Walk into the middle of a room of a group of black women and say, ‘You know, I just want to say I hope you live up to the standards of Aunt Jemima,’ or, ‘Your little daughter or baby reminds me of Aunt Jemima,’ and see what you get. We’ve become desensitized to systemic racism—but image still matters.”

Gasby explained that he finally turned to Change.org after his own appeals several years ago to PepsiCo to change the Aunt Jemima brand name came to nothing. Ever since then, he said, “it’s been festering with me, and I know my wife was very adamant about it.”

The couple has more personal reasons for launching the petition now. B. Smith was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2013 and is unable to lead the charge on her own. And while the couple’s plans for their own grocery chain didn’t work out, their hopes to change the Aunt Jemima brand still can.

Gasby’s petition isn’t calling for the liquidation of the company. But he does want the name and mascot eliminated and also suggests PepsiCo consider changing the brand name to that of his wife. Not only is she a well known and widely respected black female entrepreneur, but a portion of sales could be donated to the causes of women’s health and brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

“You could say to me, ‘Well, I’m doing it for financial reasons—no,” Gasby said. “If not now, when? [And] who better than B. Smith?”

8912: B. Smith B Back.

From The New York Times…

B. Smith, a Renaissance Woman, Comes Home

By Lola Ogunnaike

Before B. Smith found success as a fashion model, restaurateur, television host and cookbook author, she was a struggling lounge singer and actress. “I worked all the small clubs throughout Manhattan and the Catskills,” she said. “Anywhere that would have me.”

After a three-decade absence, Ms. Smith recently returned to the stage, starring in the hit Off-Broadway play “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” by Nora and Delia Ephron. Based on the best-selling book by Ilene Beckerman, the play examines the monumental role fashion plays in women’s lives, weaving together tales of Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dresses and frumpy maternity gowns, tacky prom get-ups and classic black turtlenecks.

The show features a star-studded rotating cast (everyone from Rosie O’Donnell to Brooke Shields), and in its most recent incarnation, Ms. Smith joined Anne Meara, Conchata Ferrell, Minka Kelly and AnnaLynne McCord.

“Being on stage at this age, with all that I’ve done, makes me feel like, ‘wow, I’m back home,” said Ms. Smith, 61, perched in her sprawling sun-drenched apartment on Columbus Circle. “It’s where I’m supposed to be.”

Though the women had only a week to rehearse before previews, they quickly grew close. “We’re like a professional sports team in many ways,” she said. “Everybody has their position and we’re really there for one another. It’s a love fest.”

That much was evident at the show’s opening-night party in late April held, of course, at B. Smith’s, her jazzy Southern-themed restaurant in the theater district. As Ms. Smith swirled about in a curve-hugging Herve Leger cocktail dress, cast mates and partygoers marveled at her staying power, her enduring beauty and her uncanny ability for self-reinvention over the years. Asked why Ms. Smith was chosen for the play, Nora Ephron pointed to her and half-jokingly declared, “Um, look at her.”

They’ve been saying that for years. Ms. Smith grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where her multitasking got an early start. “I inherited a paper route, I sold magazines, had lemonade stands, I was a candy striper and into fund-raising,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed being busy.”

She was also a trailblazer for African-Americans. “I was the first to bring a black D. J. to our school,” she recalled, laughing, about her high school years. “That’s still one of the first things people bring up when they see me at the reunions.”

It was a similar tenacity that led her to become one of the first African-American women on the cover of Mademoiselle, in July 1976. After reading an ad in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about a modeling school, Ms. Smith begged her parents, a housekeeper and steelworker, to allow her to attend.

Upon graduating, she moved to New York with dreams of being a big-time model and relentlessly pursued editors for work, at a time when many were hesitant to hire a black woman. “I used to make calls to magazines all the time,” she said, sighing. “I wasn’t discovered. I made them discover me.”

Landing the Mademoiselle cover brought her steady work in fashion capitals, and for several years this was enough. But Ms. Smith couldn’t quell her entrepreneurial spirit. She’d always enjoyed cooking and hosting dinner parties, so in 1986 she opened the B. Smith restaurant. Two more in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and Washington soon followed.

In 1994, she added cookbooks to her burgeoning business with “B. Smith’s Entertaining and Cooking for Friends.” The glossy tabletop work shared bits of her life, recipes for Southern favorites like pecan pie and tips for the perfect beach picnic. Her second book, “B. Smith Cooks Southern-Style,” released in 2009, offers a healthier spin on calorie-laden classics. “Obesity is killing us in the black community,” she said. “We have to make better choices about what we’re eating.”

Although her return to the stage ended a few weeks ago, this renaissance woman has more than a few projects to keep her on the run. Tour her office, a cozy apartment one floor below her home, and you’ll find copies of her lifestyle magazine (which hit shelves in 1999, a year before Oprah’s), pieces from her home collection for Bed, Bath & Beyond (which started in 2001 and includes duvets and dinner plates) and samples from her furniture line (which she describes as “Afrasian” for its combination of African and Asian influences).

Last year, she branched out into food, with a line of olive oil, now selling in more than 2,000 stores. And later this year, she plans to expand with a jewelry collection. The line will be affordable, “but look expensive,” she said. “I’ve used sterling silver, white topaz, turquoise. These will be feel-good pieces that you can keep forever.”

She also wants to restart her television show, “B. Smith With Style,” which began in 1997 and was broadcast on NBC stations. Through her show, she hopes to spread the gospel of holistic living. “I’m not a perfectionist and I don’t want to force anything on anybody,” she said. “But if I can preach to a few people and they get it, that’s how movements start.”

And, she said, she’d like to appear on stage again in the near future. “I’m sure one of these days I will be inviting you to ‘An Evening with B. Smith,’ because I also want to get back to my singing,” she said. “Betty White is my hero. There’s absolutely no reason to slow down if you can keep on doing your thing.”