| 1. | Rastus | ||
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1. Rastus, the Cream of Wheat chef, created circa 1890 by Emery Mapes, one of the owners of Diamond Milling Company. Mapes adapted the image of an African American chef for a wood-cut image used as a logo for the product. In the 1920s, the woodcut image was replaced by the face of a Chicago waiter who was paid $5 to pose in a chef's hat and jacket. This logo has been used with only slight modifications until the present day.
2. A stereotype of the jolly, former slave, and a character of the coon type often featured in minstrel shows. 3. A pejorative name used by white folk for African American males in the 20th Century. "By no means a lesser virtue of Toole's novel is his rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech, its ethnic whites -- and one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy."
--Walker Percy, Foreword to 'A Confederacy of Dunces' |
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| 2. | Rastus | ||
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The gentleman whose picture is on the Cream of Wheat box. Rastus has had his picture on the Cream of Wheat box since the 1890s.
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