The Most Controversial Corporate Mascots In History

Publish date: 2024-05-09

If you're familiar with the racial slur "Sambo," sometimes used to refer to black men and/or men of mixed ancestry, you might be shocked (or not) to learn that in the recent past, people in the United States flocked to a restaurant named Sambo's, which used a mascot — a cartoon image of a young boy, named Little Black Sambo, a la the infamous Helen Bannerman book — that played up the name's associations. According to The Daily Beast, Sambo's could be found in 47 states, at 1,117 locations, and this unnamed mascot was at every one of them.

Weirdly enough, the concept behind the name wasn't originally connected to the racist epithet. First opened by Sam Battistone Sr. and Newell Bohnett in Santa Barbara, California, in 1947 as a place for cheap pancakes and cheaper coffee, Sambo's was a portmanteau of the founders' names: "Sam" from Battistone and "Bo" from Bohnett. Once established, though, Sambo's swiftly adopted the offensive connotations, and the restaurant's walls were decorated with painted wall murals of their mascot going on adventures. During the Civil Rights Movement, marginalized communities began to speak up against the restaurant's imagery, and by the '70s, Sambo's expansion attempts wound up in lawsuits from states like Connecticut and Michigan, garnering the involvement of the Human Rights Commission and the NAACP. Eventually, the controversy grew so hot that Sambo's started downplaying their past, trying out different names, and finally, filed for bankruptcy in 1982.

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