This reactionary crusade culminated in a UDC campaign to build monuments to slaves who remained faithful out of "love of masters, mistresses and their children." Initially, this effort was confined to the South. But black migration to the North, race riots, and growing anxiety about what whites called the "Negro problem," made the nation more receptive to Southern images of bygone racial order.

So did the ubiquity of nurturing mammies in popular culture.

"Mammy was appealing at a particularly fraught time in national history," says Micki McElya, a historian at University of Connecticut and author of Clinging to Mammy: the Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. "Mammy represents paternalism and affection between the races, a world where everyone understands their places."

This was certainly the message of Charles Stedman, a North Carolina Congressman who in January 1923 introduced a Mammy monument bill on behalf of the Jefferson Davis Chapter of the UDC.

"They desired no change in their condition of life," Stedman said of the faithful slaves who would be honored. "The very few who are left look back at those days as the happy golden hours of their lives."

Stedman added that the bill "should find a responsive echo in the hearts of the citizens of this great Republic." It did, at least in the Senate, which voted for a land grant in the capital, so the UDC could erect the monument as "a gift to the people of the United States." The next day's Washington Post printed only a two-paragraph item, noting that the Senate had approved three monuments: to baseball, to a "former District commissioner," and to "faithful colored mammies."

African Americans, however, took far greater notice, led by the growing black press and by newly formed civil rights groups. "My own beloved mother was one of those unfortunates who had the flower of her youth spent in a slave cabin," one NAACP official wrote the Washington Star, describing the mammy statue as "a symbol of our servitude to remind white and black alike that the menial callings are our place." He added: "if the South has such deep gratitude for the virtues of this devoted group from which it reaped vast riches, let it remove the numberless barriers it has gone out of its way to throw up against the progress" of blacks.

One such barrier was lynching, which claimed some 2,500 lives between 1890 and 1920. The Senate, just weeks before approving the Mammy monument, had allowed a Southern filibuster to defeat an anti-lynching bill. (One Southern Senator called it "a bill to encourage rape" by blacks, while another contrasted this menace with the "unspeakable love that every southern man feels for the old black nurse who took care of him in childhood.") The proximity of the lynching and Mammy debates prompted the Chicago Defender to publish a cartoon titled "Mockery," in which a Southerner presents plans for the mammy statue to the dangling body of a lynching victim. The Baltimore Afro-American offered its own vision of the planned monument: a frowning Mammy perched atop a wash tub instead of a pedestal, her empty hand extended above the inscription: "In Grateful Memory to One We Never Paid a Cent of Wages During a Lifetime of Service."