Franchise

Franchise tells the history of how fast food became one of the largest sources of black wealth in America. Fast food chains such as McDonald's are often blamed for rising obesity and diabetes among black Americans, and they have long stood as a symbol of capitalism's harm to vulnerable communities. The book asks how these restaurants came to fill black neighborhoods in the first place. Georgetown University historian Marcia Chatelain finds a surprising record of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists and civil rights leaders. In the troubled years after Martin Luther King's assassination, they believed they had found an economic answer to racial inequality. With the language of social welfare largely gone, federal programs under presidents Johnson and Nixon promoted a new idea of racial justice: that black citizens franchising fast food restaurants in their own neighborhoods could finally improve black life. Drawing on years of research, Chatelain tells an unsettling success story, about an industry that flourished just as a freedom movement began to decline. The narrative runs from the civil rights era to Ferguson.