• DOI:10.2307/2714687
• Corpus ID: 149661079

The Role of the Black Mammy in the Plantation Household

@article{Parkhurst1938TheRO,
  title={The Role of the Black Mammy in the Plantation Household},
  author={Jessie W. Parkhurst},
  journal={The Journal of Negro History},
  year={1938},
  volume={23},
  pages={349 - 369}
}

• Jessie W. Parkhurst
• Published 1 July 1938
• History
• The Journal of Negro History

The present generation of Americans, both white and Negro, are acquainted with the "Black Mammy". as she has been handed down in tradition. They are acquainted with her as she is represented on the legitimate stage, in the moving pictures, and in fiction. Newspapers and periodicals from time to time print stories about this character, and people living who came under her influence relate their experiences with the "Mammy" to their children, friends, and acquaintances. Negroes and whites in the South held different attitudes toward what came out of slavery. To the majority of Negroes anything that savored of the period of slavery was objectionable. Even the spirituals once came under the ban. To whites the period of slavery has been sentimentalized and glorified. Because the "Black Mammy" originated in and came out of the period of bondage she is an acceptable symbol to whites and an unacceptable one to Negroes. Never was this made more evident than it was by the controversy which was kept up for many months through the press by the suggestion made in 1923 by the Daughters of the Confederacy that Congress set aside in the National Capital a site upon which they would erect a monument to the memory of this group of Negro women. The monument proposal was generally opposed by Negroes, who said a better memorial would be to extend the full rights of American citizenship to the descendants of these Mammies."I The proposals made by the Negroes included the discontinuation of lynching, the inequality in educa-