Frank Brown

Frank Brown served both as maitre d' and occasional chef at an upmarket Chicago restaurant patronized by the executives of the Houston-based 'Uncle Ben's' rice company before and during World War II; his shrewdly observant smiling expression (eg <https://i.pinimg.com/originals/db/de/e0/dbdee0efd8715c3820abb3d52c1b4165.jpg>) graced packets of the world's first branded rice from 1946 until 2020 when, with exemplary cowardice and, arguably, outright racism, the now-parent Mars company memory-holed Brown and re-named the brand as 'Bens' Original.' (The 'Uncle Ben's' brand name itself, less defensibly, had without permission appropriated that of a respected 1940s Gulf Coast rice farmer with a usefully widely-known reputation for delivering high quality rice to industry buyers.)

Mars apparently considered their acquired portfolio of the many iconic images of Brown to be indirectly tainted by the 'Uncle' appellation which, historically, once served as a diminutive form of 'Mister' employed by whites of blacks in the Democrat-ruled US south; the fact of Brown being a northern restauranteur with absolutely no connection to the farmer was, predictably, quite lost on the mindless droids in Mars's marketing department, who'll be the first against the wall when the counter-revolution comes. One hopes.