Abstract

In 1919 Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, wrote the novella, Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South as a persuasive appeal to white Southern women in Greensboro, North Carolina. This essay takes an intersectional approach to argue Brown rhetorically appropriates the mammy trope within a combination of slave narrative and Southern romantic novella addressing white female Southerner’s responsibility to their Black counterparts. The result is a novella providing evidence of Brown’s conscious use of African American Southern identity disrupting white Southern moral superiority.