Lil’ Sambo’s Family Restaurant on Highway 101 is named after an old children’s book with racist illustrations. Now the owner faces pressure to change the name.
For over 60 years, Lil’ Sambo’s Family Restaurant in Lincoln City has been a self-proclaimed “coastal landmark,” named after a children’s book famous for its racist illustrations. Now, Oregonians are calling for the restaurant to change its name.
“During this pivotal time of progression toward racial equality we demand that said restaurant change its name,” reads an online petition calling for the renaming of the restaurant, posted last month by Myriam Macleod of Sandy. As of this morning, it had garnered about 100 signatures.
Several recent reviews on the restaurant’s Yelp page decry the restaurant’s name.
“I live in Lincoln City and refuse to spend my money at a place that condones racism — which this business is doing with their blatant refusal to change the name,” wrote one reviewer.
Management at Lil’ Sambo’s Family Restaurant declined to comment on the restaurant’s name or the petition.
George and Ruth Moore, a white couple, purchased the restaurant in 1995. George died in March at age 93, and now Ruth is listed as the sole owner. She runs Lil' Sambo's with the help of her son, Cary Moore. He is also the editor at Lincoln City Church News and recently participated in protests decrying Gov. Kate Brown's stay-home order.
The “about” section of the restaurant’s website explains the name “is borrowed from the hero of a fictional story about an Indian boy, tigers, and pancakes written by Helen Bannerman in 1899.”
It also dispels any rumor that it is part of the national Sambo’s chain. Owners of the last remaining Sambo’s restaurant, in Santa Barbara, Calif., agreed last month to rename it.
The Sambo’s breakfast restaurant chain, at one point over 1,000 restaurants strong across the U.S., also capitalized on the marketing potential of Bannerman’s story, using references to name menu items and utilizing the image of an Indian boy as the restaurant’s mascot.
Bannerman’s book, “The Story of Little Black Sambo,” which was photographed in the Lil’ Sambo’s gift shop as recently as October, is a story about a boy who gives four tigers his clothing to avoid being attacked and eaten. Outwitted, the tigers eventually turn their frustration onto one another and fight until they turn into ghee, a type of butter used in Indian cooking. Sambo’s mother, Black Mumbo, uses the ghee to make pancakes.
While the children’s story is meant to take place in India, where Scottish-born Bannerman lived for years, the illustrations featured in its numerous reproductions look more like racist depictions of the “pickaninny” stereotype of Black children first popularized by the character Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
By the time “Little Black Sambo” hit U.S. bookshelves at the beginning of the 20th century, other popular books, including “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” already featured Black characters in subordinate roles named “Sambo.”
Sambos often personified the stereotype of a lazy, smiling Black man eager to serve white people.
In a 1932 essay on children’s literature, Langston Hughes famously stated that characters like Sambo and others of the “pickaninny variety” were “amusing undoubtedly to the white child, but like an unkind word to one who has known too many hurts to enjoy the additional pain of being laughed at.”
By the 1960s, the book was widely banned in the U.S. But in 1997, children’s book author and civil rights activist Julius Lester authored an alternate version of the tale with non-racist illustrations called “Sam and the Tigers.”
“When I read (‘Little Black Sambo’) as a child, I had no choice but to identify with him because I am black and so was he,” Lester wrote in an online children’s literature forum in the 1990s. “There was a bit of confusion because I liked the story and I especially liked all those pancakes, but the illustrations exaggerated the racial features society had made it clear to me represented my racial inferiority — the black, black skin, the eyes shining white, the red protruding lips. I did not feel good about myself as a black child looking at those pictures.”
Originally, the Lincoln City restaurant was called Pixie Pancakes, according to Lil’ Sambo’s website. It was later renamed Lil’ Black Sambo’s.
In Lincoln County, where Lincoln City is located, less than 1% of the population is African American, according to 2019 U.S. Census estimates.
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A jovial tiger in jean shorts parades with an umbrella near the restaurant’s sign, advertising Pancakes, Steak and Seafood. Cartoonish images of tigers are painted on the restaurant’s exterior and interior. But formerly, the restaurant’s mascot was a Black boy, according to a 1966 article in the Statesman Journal, which reported that the restaurant changed the race of its mascot to white and dropped “Black” from its name.
“If you take your photo next to the pancake-wielding elves under the ‘Lil Sambo’s’ sign, maybe think twice before putting it on social media,” stated a 2017 article in the Willamette Week that recommended paying a visit to the “problematic landmark.”
Portlander Serena Dressel, who has circulated the Oregon petition against Lil’ Sambo’s on social media, is working to kickstart an Instagram campaign with the help of several others. She said she grew up in Lincoln City but didn’t realize the racist connotation of Lil’ Sambo’s until recently after watching Walidah Imarisha’s “Oregon Black History Timeline” on YouTube.
The Instagram campaign, which is set to launch later this week under the hashtags #BoycottLilSambos, #Whitehavenstate and others, urges people to contact the restaurant via phone or online contact form to encourage making a name change.
“In talking with various groups of Oregonians who had lived in Oregon for several years to decades, I found that many of us had different experiences with our perceptions of Lil’ Sambo’s and our understanding of what it represented,” Dressel said. “My interest in the boycott stems from supporting a change on the physical landscape that has brought people discomfort and pain.”
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