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History is not the simple recitation of dates, facts or the recalling of famous individuals. At the bottom line, history can be a tool to oppress people or a means to liberate people. It is important to understand that history is a combination of knowledge, identity, and power. History is a collection of information which should be employed to understand the present and project the future. History also creates an identity. This identity can be based upon negative images or positive images. Lerone Bennett contended,

The two books under consideration in this essay address the ongoing revision in Civil Rights historiography in ways that add immensely to our knowledge, while also raising questions for further study. Each work has strengths and weaknesses, but they both share a similar theme that is of importance to the revisionist project; the role of local people actively moving their communities towards social justice.

Chapter 3, Aunt Jemima, the Fantasy Black Mammy Servant, turns to the continuing derogation in the fantastications of Aunt Jemima and Black Mammy. The exaggerated grins and gestures of these and other caricaturizations were not totally mitigated by the knowledge that they might indeed have been intentional signifyin' or spoofing white folk ways p. 86 . For the mammy, in discourse and in life, remained the inferior and menial cook, servant, and wet-nurse in spite of her veneration in the South, where at one time there was an attempt to memorialize her in monuments and in a projected school for the training of new versions: In Athens, GA, a Black Mammy Memorial Association was formed in 1910 to charter a Black Mammy Memorial Institute, which would train young blacks in domestic skills and moral attitudes that were generally associated with 'old black mammy' in the South p. 92 . These images are indeed a grotesquerie, even though their associations with Esu Elegba or the Trickster can show them intentionally working to destabilize and undermine power.