An estimated one-third of all American adults eats something from
at a fast-food restaurant every day. Millions start their mornings
with paper-wrapped English muffin breakfast sandwiches, order
burritos hastily secured in foil for lunch, and end their evenings
with extravalue dinners consumed in cars. But while people of all
ages and backgrounds enjoy and depend on fast food, it does not
mean the same thing to each of us. For African Americans, as
acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain reveals in Franchise, fast
food is a source of both despair and power-and a battlefield on
which the fight for racial justice has been waged since the 1960s.
On the one hand, we rightly blame fast food for the rising rates of
obesity and diabetes among black Americans, and fast food
restaurants are viewed as symbols of capitalism's disastrous
effects on our nation's most vulnerable citizens. Yet at the same
time, Chatelain shows, fast food companies, and McDonald's in
particular, have represented a source of economic opportunity and
political power. After Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in
1968, many activists turned to entrepreneurship as the means to
achieving equality. Civil rights leaders, fast food companies,
black capitalists, celebrities, and federal bureaucrats began an
unlikely collaboration, in the belief that the franchising of fast
food restaurants, by black citizens in their own neighborhoods,
could improve the quality of black life. Equipped with federal
loans and utterly committed to the urban centers in which they
would open their little sites of hope, black franchise pioneers
achieved remarkable success, and by the late 2000s,
black-franchised McDonald's restaurants reported total sales
exceeding $2 billion. Fast food represented an opportunity for
strivers who had been shut out of many industries, denied
promotions in those that would tolerate them, and discouraged, in
numerous ways, from starting their own businesses, all because of
the color of their skin. But a parallel story emerged, too-of
wealth being extracted from black communities, of the ravages of
fast food diets, of minumum wage jobs with little prospect for
advancement. Taking us from the first McDonald's drive-in in San
Bernardino in the 1940s to civil rights protests at franchises in
the American South in the 1960s and the McDonald's on Florissant
Avenue in Ferguson in the summer 2014, Chatelain charts how the
fight for racial justice is intertwined with the fate of black
businesses. Deeply researched and brilliantly told, Franchise is an
essential story of race and capitalism in America.
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