Cracker Barrel, in a statement on X/Twitter (via Josh Marcus at The Independent):

We thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel. We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away and our “Old Timer” will remain.

At Cracker Barrel, it’s always been – and always will be – about serving up delicious food, warm welcomes, and the kind of country hospitality that feels like family. As a proud American institution, our 70,000 hardworking employees look forward to welcoming you to our table soon.

I’m not surprised Cracker Barrel retreated from its rebrand in the face of a right-wing MAGA backlash. Down-home Southern hospitality is their brand, and the “anti-woke” activists who executed this contrived “controversy” really hate losing their white-coded imagery that buttresses their sense of superiority, from Uncle Ben to Aunt Jemima, and now, Uncle Herschel. They have excitedly embraced cracker—a derogatory term for poor, rural, white Southerners—because they are desperate for a return to a world where whiteness was an explicit advantage (rather than the implicit one we’ve lived with for the past 60 years), even when poor.

This manufactured furor brought to mind the first time I can recall hearing “cracker” used to describe a person. It was from my boss at my first IT job in New York, in the early ’90s. He was probably in his late 30s or early 40s, white, and proudly declared to me one day that he was a cracker. I don’t recall how it came up, but it sounded vaguely racist, and immediately brought to mind visions of slave foremen on horseback whipping the backs of Black men in a field. That it turned out to be a self-deprecating slur somehow didn’t make it better.

That’s the image I’ve always associated with Cracker Barrel, and I’ve never felt comfortable visiting their restaurants. Imagine expressing nostalgia for a “Peckerwood” restaurant or “Golliwog” café.

I commend Cracker Barrel for even attempting to rewrite its past, doomed though it was.