THE MAMMY STATUE

Early in 1923, Senator John Williams of Mississippi and a Virginia chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, proposed a bill for 'the erection as a gift to the people of the United States ... a monument in memory of the faithful, colored mammies of the South' on the the National Mall in D.C. 

 

African-American men and women across the nation were horrified at the proposal for a Mammy statue. Civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell wrote that if it were built, 'there are thousands of colored men and women who will fervently pray that on some stormy night the lightning will strike it and the heavenly elements will send it crashing to the ground.' 

African-American women had such a visceral reaction to the idea of a national monument to Mammy because they understood the link between a public monument, public image and civil rights. A monument to Mammy would have diluted the brutal reality of slavery by emphasizing Mammy's relationship to her white charges. 

Eventually, the bill failed. 

Time Magazine on Mar. 3, 1923: 

'In dignified and quiet language, two thousand Negro women of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA protested against a proposal to erect at the Capitol a statue to 'The Black Mammy of the South.' A spokesman carried the resolution to Vice President Coolidge and Speaker Gillette and begged them to use their influence against the reminder that we come from a race of slaves.' 

This, of course, will rebuke forever the sentimentalists who thought they were doing honor to a character whom they loved. They desired to immortalize a person famous in song and legend. But that person's educated granddaughters snuffed out the impulse by showing that they are ashamed of her.'