Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America

Marcia Chatelain traces how McDonald's became embedded in Black neighborhoods across the country in the decades after the civil rights movement, and why that embedding came with real costs alongside its benefits. Chatelain follows the years right after the urban uprisings of the late 1960s, when city and corporate leaders alike promoted Black owned McDonald's franchises as a form of Black capitalism, a way to rebuild damaged commercial corridors and build Black wealth through ownership rather than government aid.

Chatelain shows how that promise proved genuinely double edged. Black franchise owners did build real businesses and real wealth in communities banks and other chains had abandoned, but the fast food model that made those franchises viable, cheap, heavily marketed food sold in places with few grocery alternatives, also helped entrench the diet related health problems that later fell hardest on the same Black communities the franchises were meant to lift up. She follows McDonald's own marketing to Black consumers, its relationships with civil rights organizations and Black elected officials, and the political arguments, from the Nixon administration onward, that treated Black entrepreneurship as a substitute for broader economic policy.

Chatelain writes as a historian of Black urban life bringing an unfamiliar subject, the business history of a fast food chain, into a familiar argument about race, capital and public health. Reading the book means seeing a routine trip to McDonald's as the product of decades of policy choices and marketing decisions, and it suits a reader who wants civil rights history extended past voting rights and integration into the economics of everyday urban life.