#BTBlackHistory – Frank White: face of Cream of Wheat

There are many Barbadians of an earlier vintage who would have been fed a regular diet of Cream of Wheat in the formative years. And on their boxes of cereal was a smiling black face which seemed to suggest that the contents in the box were good for you or likely to bring a ‘smile’ to your day.

The product was sold across the world and the smiling face on the boxes belonged to Barbadian Frank L. White. Bu White’s depiction was not without controversy in later years with respect to racial stereotypes and branding. Eventually, though, there was acknowledgement of the racist undertones and an effort to engender change.

White was born in 1867 and moved from Barbados to the United States of America in 1875. He became a citizen in 1890. White was working as a master chef at a Chicago restaurant at the time he was photographed for the cereal box in 1900.

The fictional character for which he posed was known as Rastus. At the time White’s name was not even recorded by the company Kraft Foods Inc who used him as its model.

While the company continued to depict its chef as someone who was happy to serve others (and still used problematic language) in its ads, White worked as a chef in cities and on trains and steamships. He eventually settled down and ran his own restaurant, the Holly House.

White lived in Leslie, Michigan in his last decades and died age 70 in 1938. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Leslie in an unmarked grave. It was after his death years later that attention really started to be paid to the face on the Cream of Wheat box and what was its import.

The story of his posing for the Cream of Wheat picture was known in his home city of 2,000 located between Jackson and Lansing and about 70 miles west of Detroit. He had also told neighbours that his was the face on the cereal box.

Many years after White’s death a granite gravestone was placed at his burial site bearing his name and an etching taken from the Cream of Wheat box. Jesse Lasorda, a family researcher from Lansing, started the campaign to put the marker and etching on White’s grave.

The face on the box, however, drew controversy related to racism. Scholars suggested that White’s image replaced Cream of Wheat’s original black mascot, Rastus, which was a racist caricature of black Americans that commonly appeared in blackface minstrel shows from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Rastus was depicted as a dim-witted former slave who spoke broken English in early Cream of Wheat ads. Today, the name Rastus is regarded as a racial slur.

“We understand there are concerns regarding the Chef image, and we are committed to evaluating our packaging and will proactively take steps to ensure that we and our brands do not inadvertently contribute to systemic racism,” B&G Foods, which took over ownership from Kraft Foods Inc., said some years ago.
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, an associate professor of Africana studies at Rutgers University, said the image of White might have helped Cream of Wheat tone down the overt racism Rastus invoked, but the subtext behind the imagery remained.

She pointed out that Aunt Jemima (of Quaker Oats pancake mix and syrup fame) went through a similar transformation over the years, having originally been inspired by a minstrel show song before evolving into a composite image of black actresses hired to portray her until the 1960s.

“You still are referencing the place of black people as servants, as your chefs,” Kwate said, referencing Cream of Wheat’s mascot.

“You can still draw on that legacy of what slavery meant and what black people’s natural position is supposed to be – your own personal slave in a box,” she said of the long history of black stereotypes in marketing Kwate’s book “Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now” illustrates just how common it once was to use racist black stereotypes to sell food and other products in America.

A century ago, a pair of animated black children named Goldie and Dusty, aka the Gold Dust Twins, once helped make Fairbank’s Gold Dust Washing Powder a household name. Extinct eateries like Salt Lake City’s Coon Chicken Inn and Richard’s Restaurant and Slave Market outside Chicago once used racist themes to the delight of white customers.

Some of those themes still remain at other restaurants in 2020. The last Sambo’s restaurant in Santa Barbara, California, announced a few years ago it was changing its name, which is also a racial slur that stems from an 1899 book about a dark-skinned south Indian boy. The term later became a pejorative for African Americans.

Greg Carr, professor of Africana studies at Howard University, said racist brands have persisted for so long because people have grown numb to their origins, and the subtle and common dehumanization of black people is what makes it possible for systemic racism.

“That’s really how white supremacy works,” Carr said. “It is most potent when it is invisible. It isn’t the overt, in-yourface, clearly offensive image. It’s the one that has so penetrated your consciousness until it’s almost as if you don’t see it.”

In addition to White’s depiction on Cream of Wheat and Aunt Jemima, others such as Uncle Ben’s (rice) and Mrs. Butterworth’s (syrup) have seen changes in depictions whether physical characteristics or the dropping of titles such as “Uncle” from the marketing strategy because of the stereotypes they promoted.
(Adapted)