A feature in Time’s Made by History section examines the long, often overlooked role of mermaids in African American cultural and political life, arguing that mermaid imagery has served not only as fantasy and fashion but as a recurring symbol of collective resistance.
The piece, written by Lindsey Stewart, associate professor of philosophy and author of The Conjuring of America, traces mermaid motifs from West African water spirits brought across the Atlantic in the 16th century through to contemporary mermaid-themed trends such as "mermaidcore" and renewed popular interest in 2025. Stewart and other historians cited in the feature describe how enslaved Africans transposed the simbi, orisha and vodun traditions into New World forms such as Mami Wata, a figure worshiped for healing, protection and—as sources report—justice.
The article outlines a dual history: plantation owners and slavers sometimes invoked mermaid imagery as a talisman of safe sea passage and as a symbol used to justify the slave trade, while enslaved people turned water-spirit traditions into a language of revolt. West African beliefs often portrayed water spirits as arbiters of social harmony; when that harmony was violated by greed or violence, the spirits could bring watery retribution, a theme that appears repeatedly in oral histories and ritual practice.
In the United States, Mami Wata and related figures surfaced in regional variations, from the "cymbee" in the Georgia and South Carolina lowcountry to "Mama Jo" in the Sea Islands and as Erzulie and Lasirèn in Louisiana Voodoo. Ritual practices recorded by historians included drawing heart symbols in cornmeal during Voodoo ceremonies, creating mermaid figurines of cloth and beads, incorporating snake motifs and flower patterns in quilts, and gathering at springs and wells for healing rituals. Stewart and other scholars cited in the Time feature say that these practices were often led by conjure women—spiritual leaders who worked as healers, midwives and community mediators and who held botanical and medicinal knowledge that could be used to treat or to harm.
The article recounts several episodes in which mermaid lore intersected with direct political action. It describes a 19th-century event in Charleston known in local memory as the "Mermaid Riot," when enslaved and free Black residents reportedly stormed a white pharmacist’s office to demand the release of a purportedly captive mermaid, an action historians connect to broader protests against forced breeding, bodily experimentation and the seizure of Black bodies for medical research. The feature also highlights the life of Marie Laveau, the New Orleans Voodoo practitioner long associated in folklore with mermaid imagery. Laveau, a free woman of African, European and Indigenous descent, was described by formerly enslaved interviewees in the Federal Writer’s Project as "the most powerful woman there is." Time’s account notes that Laveau’s shrine included a mermaid figurine, which police confiscated after raiding her meetings in 1850.
Historians tell Time that centuries of repression and policing of Black spiritual life helped erase much of this history from mainstream narratives. That erasure, the article suggests, contributes to contemporary surprise and backlash when Black people are cast in mermaid roles. The feature cites the racist criticism that greeted Disney’s 2023 casting of singer Halle Bailey as Ariel in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid as evidence of public resistance to the idea of a Black mermaid despite the longer, historical presence of such figures in African diasporic traditions.
At the same time, the article documents how mermaid imagery has remained a site of cultural creativity and reclamation. American mermaid culture has long included public rituals and spectacles—from New York City’s annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade to live mermaid performances at places such as Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida—and more recently a fashion movement dubbed "mermaidcore," which revives sequins, wet-look hair and sea-themed accessories. Stewart’s account frames that popular fascination alongside the older, more politicized mermaid practices, arguing that escapism and fantasy can coexist with and even enable forms of resistance.
The Time feature situates the mermaid’s American story within a broader diasporic continuity. Early West African water spirits, the article notes, were mutable and multiform—appearing as snakes, fish-tailed women or other aquatic entities—and were carried across the Atlantic by people who reinterpreted European depictions such as ship figureheads and chromolithographs to produce new syncretic figures like Mami Wata. Those figures, Stewart writes, were woven into everyday objects and acts of survival: in quilts, in the indigo dyes enslaved women used to make cloth, and in the medicinal practices of conjure women who provided reproductive care, including abortifacients, and protection against violence.
By exploring this history, the feature aims to expand public understanding of what mermaids have meant in American life. Rather than a single symbol of seaside fantasy, the mermaid emerges in the Time account as a polyvalent figure that has signified healing and maternal power, the threat of supernatural retribution against injustice, and a language for organizing and asserting dignity under conditions of enslavement and racial oppression. The article concludes that renewed popular interest in mermaid imagery in 2025 offers an opportunity to recognize those older, more political currents as central—not peripheral—to the American mermaid story.