The original author in the Patch seems to have had a peculiar bone to pick since he got fired as editor at the Chicago Reader for putting a racist symbol on the paper's cover.

The great-grandson, however, seems to be making a more nuanced point than the headline indicates: how dare the company profit from images of subservient black people for decades, and white people participate in that, and then paper over it without offering reparations?

""This is an injustice for me and my family. This is part of my history, sir," Larnell Evans Sr. told me. "The racism they talk about, using images from slavery, that comes from the other side — white people. This company profits off images of our slavery. And their answer is to erase my great-grandmother's history. A black female. … It hurts.""

"Quaker Oats also used Harrington's pancake recipe, Evans and a nephew claimed in a 2014 lawsuit seeking $3 billion from Quaker Oats for not paying royalties to Harrington's descendants. The attempt to make Quaker Oats pay restitution in federal court failed."

"Evans, a 66-year-old Marine Corps veteran living on disability in North Carolina, says his family and black Americans deserve more from corporations such as Quaker Oats than an acknowledgment that, yes, they profited off images of slavery — the likeness of Green and Harrington from syrup bottles — before removing the evidence from grocery store shelves.

"How many white people were raised looking at characters like Aunt Jemima at breakfast every morning? How many white corporations made all them profits, and didn't give us a dime? I think they should have to look at it. They can't just wipe it out while we still suffer," he said.

"After making all that money —and now's the time when black people are saying we want restitution for slavery — they're just going to erase history like it didn't happen? ... They're not going to give us nothing? What gives them the right?""