Brand recognition
ROOTS OF THE PAST:
Recent racial reckoning spotlights problematic narratives behind Uncle Ben’s, Imperial Sugar
In the last couple weeks, food brands such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s, Cream of Wheat and more have announced plans to reevaluate their names and logos, which originated from racist stereotypes. For longtime critics, these changes are welcome, albeit belated and cosmetic. As companies rethink their branding, it’s also worth examining how they tell their origin stories.
Forrest E. Mars Sr., of candy bar fame, bought a stake in the patent for parboiled rice in 1942. Developed by European scientists, commercial parboiling is a method that boosts the grain’s nutritional value and softens its texture by partially boiling the rice in its husk. The final product is also known as converted or easy-cook rice. Using this invention as their basis, Mars, along with a scientist, founded Houstonbased Converted Rice Inc.
Not exactly a riveting backstory. By 1946, the brand was renamed Uncle Ben’s, portraying a smiling African American man — Ben, presumably.
In an article, “Who Owns Uncle Ben?” published in the Bitter Southerner, Shane Mitchell writes: “Uncle Ben may never have existed, although Mars Food corporate lore references a Black rice farmer, last name unknown, in Beaumont, Texas, as his inspiration.”
Food brands have long used wholesome narratives of farmers and agrarian scenes to sell their products. It’s a far more romantic image than food zooming around a factory, being parboiled.
While farmer Ben was the inspiration for the name, the man whose portrait is depicted on the rice boxes was actually a Chicago chef and waiter named Frank Brown. In 2007, Mars “promoted” Uncle Ben — the fictional character — to chairman of the board. He still kept the honorific “uncle,” though, which is a disparaging way to refer to Black men, in lieu of “Mr.” (and “aunt” for “Mrs.” or “Ms./Miss”).
But back to farmer Ben, no last name, whose excellence in growing rice supposedly inspired Mars to romanticize him for marketing purposes. As Mitchell says, he may well have not existed. Let’s say he had. Given systemic power structures that perpetuated racial inequality, it is unlikely Ben was a successful entrepreneur and owner of a thriving rice farm in the 1940s, as a Black man in Beaumont.
There is a possibility Ben would
have been a sharecropper. According to the Texas State Historical Association, the number of farmers who were tenant farmers fell to 37.5 percent by 1945, and the proportion of those tenants who were sharecroppers to 16 percent.
There is a greater probability Ben’s parents would have been sharecroppers. It is a near certainty that Ben’s parents, or grandparents, were born into slavery.
A timeline on the Uncle Ben’s “About Us” web page starts in 1000 A.D., when rice reportedly arrived on the African continent. It then jumps to the year 1250, when the word “rice” first appeared in the English language. The next slide highlights the year 1694: “Could this be the year rice made its way to the early American colonies? Could be. According to an old story, a stormdamaged ship paid for repairs at Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, with rice seeds.”
The next slide leaps forward to the 1930s, and covers the invention of parboiling. However, the skipped-over period between the 1700s and the 1930s reveals many tales relevant to rice.
In “Taste the Nation,” the new Hulu series hosted by Padma Lakshmi, an episode about the Gullah Geechee community delves into the history of rice in the United States. Reporting from South Carolina, in and around Charleston, Lakshmi and her interview subjects tell a very different “old story” from these parts.
“In the late 17th century or so, Carolina was a backwater, this was swamp,” culinary historian and writer Michael Twitty says in the show. “No Englishman knew what to do with this land. And then they decided to start bringing in people: ‘Let’s bring in people who know how to grow rice.’”
West Africans were specifically targeted, then enslaved, for their knowledge of rice crops. Mitchell, in the writes that planters “paid a higher premium for slaves from the ancient rice regions of Sierra Leone and the Upper Guinea Coast; traders were quick to advertise these skills in auction posters at the Old Market in Charleston.”
Uncle Ben’s could have started its timeline with the company’s founding in the 1940s, rather than mentioning the history of rice in this country, via a ship that docked at Charleston Harbor, while omitting this crucial part.
Another local company, Imperial Sugar in Sugar Land, provides a further example of opacity in recounting its origins. On a company history page, the story starts in 1843, when two brothers reportedly built a “mule-powered sugar mill.” Then it jumps to 1905, when “the Kempner family of Galveston, under the leadership of Isaac H. Kempner and in partnership with William T. Eldridge, purchased the Imperial Mill and formed the Imperial Sugar Company.” The timeline does not clarify whether this is the same mill.
The fleshed-out history is a little bit more complicated. The brothers, Nathaniel F. and Matthew R. Williams, did indeed buy a mill in 1843 — 22 years before General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston announcing all enslaved Texans were free.
According to the Fort Bend Star, two other businessmen, Benjamin F. Terry and William J. Kyle, bought a plantation from the Williams brothers between 1852 and 1853 — 10 years after they built the sugar mill mentioned on Imperial Sugar’s website. The Oakland Plantation reportedly included 4,400 acres, 19 slaves, 500 head of cattle, 30 mules and horses, and fields of cotton, corn, and sugar cane. In the following years, Terry and Kyle bought more plantations, totalling 12,500 acres by 1858, and renamed the consolidated operation Sugar Land Plantation.
After the Civil War, area sugar plantations struggled to survive without free, forced labor. Over the years, Terry and Kyle’s heirs inherited the business, and eventually sold it to Col. Edward H. Cunningham, who formed a partnership with Little berry A. Ellis. Cunningham and Ellis invested heavily in building new mills, including one that became known as the Imperial Mill. At the turn of the 20th century, Cunningham and Ellis’ sons sold the business — to Kempner and Eldridge.
History is complicated. It often doesn’t fit on a rice box or bag of sugar.
And sometimes, history gets dredged up. In recent years, the remains of 95 men were found at a Fort Bend school district construction site. They are believed to be Black men, who were victim of Texas’ brutal convict leasing system, which many considered a new form of slavery. Cunningham and Ellis leased prisoners from the state of Texas from 1878 to 1883, paying $186,910 in the first two years alone. Even when the lease ended, they continued to use convicts to work their plantations, making millions in today’s money.
The story behind how rice, sugar and many other commodities became so successful in the U.S. is relatively well-documented. It’s difficult to divorce that history from the multimillion dollar brands that sit on our grocery shelves today.
It’ll be interesting to see how these brands evolve. As Uncle Ben’s and Aunt Jemima adopt new names and faces, it remains to be seen whether the stories the companies will tell will reckon with the past.