The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Golden Arches in Black America

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Marcia Chatelain, a historian at Georgetown, recently won the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.” Chatelain looks at how McDonald’s leveraged the social upheaval of the nineteen-sixties to gain a permanent foothold in Black communities across the country. McDonald’s strategically positioned franchise ownership as an economic goal for Black entrepreneurs. Black franchisees, she notes, have navigated the economic promise and the pitfalls of that corporate relationship, while the wages for fast-food workers, who are disproportionately Black and Latino, have remained notoriously low. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and so many other fast food franchises are truly emblematic American enterprises, as much as Ford or U.S. Steel. And on any given day, it's estimated that a third of Americans eat some kind of fast food. It's part of our after-school rituals, our workday lunches, our road trips. We know all that, and we've all read about the effect on the national health, too. But what's less known is that fast food is also deeply and unexpectedly intertwined with the struggle for civil rights in this country.

Marcia Chathlin, a historian at Georgetown, recently won the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book called Franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America. And she looks at how McDonald's managed to leverage the social upheaval of the 60s into a permanent foothold in black communities across the country. And in the decades since, black franchise owners have navigated the economic promise and the economic pitfalls of that corporate relationship. I spoke with Professor Chatlin earlier this week. Where did you grow up in what was your relationship with McDonald's when you were growing up? So I grew up in Chicago in the 1980s, and I grew up in a time where it wasn't a big deal if your kids ate McDonald's all the time. We could eat,

McDonald's after church. I went to McDonald's with my friends, and I think as a kid who grew up without the internet, this is where our social exchanges happened. It was, you know, sharing a giant tray of French fries at McDonald's. Well, fast forward to your career as a historian, how did you, how do you pick this subject, of all subjects arrayed in front of you, to write about McDonald's and its effect on and its interrelationship with black community in the United States? United States. Well, I think part of it is growing up black in a big city and having all of these interactions with McDonald's that go beyond having, you know, a hamburger and a milkshake. And I remember going away to college. I went to the University of Missouri and Columbia and meeting other black

students from Kansas City or St. Louis or, you know, Detroit and saying, like, how many of you have scholarships that were sponsored by black McDonald's operators? And, lot of us did. And that was always such a point of curiosity to me, the way that everyone knew what McDonald's was, but you wouldn't know who the franchise owner was because that person didn't have this unofficial kind of title in the community. But when you talked to other black people my age, McDonald's had this other life that was tied to historically black colleges, that was tied to sports that was tied to community activities. And for me, you know, this was just a fact of my life. And it wasn't until, you know, I was training to be a historian in graduate school that I thought,

this is kind of a strange way of understanding corporate relations in people's everyday life. And that's partly why I wrote this book to see how we got here and why that is a fundamental problem if we're serious about addressing racial and economic justice. Now, your research really starts in the 60s, and you argue that the assassination of Dr. King in 68 was a turning point in corporate America's relationship with black communities. And so how does McDonald's capitalize on that moment and in what spirit? Well, after King's assassination, there are all of these questions about what directions the civil rights movement can take. And it's happening at a time of incredible exhaustion on the part of

people who had been motivated and moved by King's message at mid-century. And I think that you have this moment where people are saying, maybe it isn't legislation. You know, maybe the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 didn't fundamentally change my life because black unemployment is still a problem. And so you have people who are saying, our next move is black capitalism. We need to grow up out of marches and trying to seek integration and beloved community. And the bottom line is business and its capital. And the Nixon administration is incredibly cynical. And they say, okay, how can we try to make a gesture toward black America that isn't going to challenge segregation, that isn't going to really equalize opportunities,

we'll say black businesses for black communities, you know, Nixon even says, black power in the most constructive sense of the term. Not in the radical term or the good term, right? And, you know, for McDonald's part, McDonald's is successful because they know when to shape shift. They're seeing communities change demographically and they're seeing white franchise owners who no longer want to do business and black communities. And they're saying, okay, we'll open the door to black people to franchise restaurants and black communities and see what happens. And it was incredibly successful. And so they kept on investing in that strategy under the guise of participating in the new civil

rights. What's really struck by the way you trace the history of the relationship between McDonald's corporate headquarters and the National Black McDonald's Operators Association. Describe what the N-B-M-O-A is, and it's fleeting but interesting and starring role in a part of American history. So this is an incredible group that forms in the early 70s, and they represent the cohort of the first black men, and they were all men, who had the opportunity to franchise a McDonald's. And these men are from very different places. And these guys are all, you know, kind of brought together by the fact that they are pillars of the community as black business owners. They're incredibly generous with philanthropy. And they're getting the short end of the stick

with McDonald's because they're often doing business in places that have a lot of high crime, broken equipment. And so they kind of come together and they try to advocate with McDonald's to say, you know, we're actually doing really well and our sales are really high, but you're not advertising in the publications and on the radio stations and TV stations that our customers are tuned into. You are not attentive to our need. So it's a strange kind of world that if you comply with the rules, you could make lots of money and you could still comply with all the rules and lose a lot of money. And this is part of the grievance that has long been part of the black franchisee experience, that they are at a double disadvantage in a system where, you know, there's a lot of risk.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. You mentioned advertising and you devote an entire chapter, in fact, to the ways McDonald's has marketed to the black community over time. What were the messages these campaigns were trying to send? And which do you remember most vividly? The Calvin commercials seems especially important to you. So Calvin is an icon.

Hey, isn't I Calvin? I haven't seen him for a while. Wonder where he's heading. The setup is it's the early 90s and it's New York City. And you get this stereotypical representation of African-American young men on the block. They're not doing anything. They're loitering. And Calvin is bopping around the neighborhood.

And you think, ooh, is he bad as well? Now that you mention it, there is something different about him. But uh-oh, here's a surprise. Looks like responsibility's been good for him. Well, I'm just glad somebody believed in him enough to give him a chance. Calvin is actually on his way to work and he flips his hat and he says, welcome to McDonald's. How can I help you? Welcome to McDonald's. May I help you?

It was a multi-commercial campaign and you follow Calvin as he gains more responsibility and people start to appreciate and look up to Calvin because he's working hard at McDonald's with the aspiration of one day becoming a franchise owner. So the thing that I found fascinating when I looked at the ads, you know, going back to the 1970s is that a number of the ads that are targeting black consumers for McDonald's don't talk about food. They talk about how McDonald's has economically empowered black people. Well, Ryan, you make this interesting point that McDonald's often shows up in moments of cultural crisis in the country, especially racial conflict, like the 92 riots in L.A.

How did the company help create the blueprint for quote-unquote disaster capitalism in black communities? The animating event that brought. brought McDonald's into black communities was King's assassination. And it grew out of this sense that if McDonald's could be the anchoring institution for communities in crisis, then it is proving itself to be more than just a restaurant in black people's lives. And so after the LA uprising, McDonald's issued a press release that said, you know, none of our restaurants were damaged in South Los Angeles. And this is proof that our social investments in the late 1960s paid off. And I thought, wow, this is a wildly inappropriate thing to say. I don't think it's entirely true.

But what I found fascinating is that people believed it. And they said, see, it's because McDonald's has been in our community. They've been giving us opportunities. And then when Ferguson happened and that Ferguson McDonald's on Florescent Avenue, which is franchised by an African American, you know, became kind of the epicenter of where people gathered during this crisis. I thought, this is really strange. But I think the idea that McDonald's is proximate or special to black America is both problematic and strangely true all at the same time. It is about more than just food. It's about nostalgia.

It's about emotion. It's about belonging. And so the reason why I think this is important is because when we hear all the chatter about health, and obesity and race and food deserts. And we often reduce it to personal choices or we suggest that it's because people don't know better about nutrition. It is very easy for us to dismiss why McDonald's might be important to someone. But from the perspective of 1970, when you think about the fact that black people can't legally be everywhere they want to be in a public and accommodation until 64, having a McDonald's in your community is a big deal. It does matter. And I think that those

relationships have continued throughout the generations, even as McDonald's has been exposed as a creator of a lot of problems. I think in some communities, McDonald's has been seen as an entity to solve a lot of problems as well. Your book is deeply nuanced. I don't want you to be reductive except can you be. When you look at McDonald's now, how do you think about the question of whether McDonald's has done more harm than good for black communities. Is that even the right question to ask? I get asked this question, versions of this question often. And all I can say is this, capitalism starves people and never feeds them. That's the full stop. And I really wanted to Let's pause on that. What do you mean by that? Well, I think that any time we look to the marketplace,

Anytime we think that if we open up the pathways to enjoy the fruits of capitalism, someone and something gets left behind that is more critically important. And so when I think about McDonald's and Black America, I am concerned about how much McDonald's is paying people and the conditions in which people have to work. I'm concerned about the impact of this massive supply chain on the environment. and I'm concerned about people's health and well-being. And I think more importantly, I'm concerned that in moments in which black people are crying out for freedom, for justice,

for an ability to create stable communities, what they're offered is, let's open a business, or how about a franchise? But I want to be very clear. For all my critiques of fast food, I have a great deal of gratitude for all the people who have fed me through this portal called fast food. I ate a lot of fast food meals growing up and through my PhD program in my early adulthood. And I think I came to a deep appreciation for the high level of skill that is required to feed a lot of people in a short period of time. And so if one day, McDonald says, you know what, we're going to do this a little differently. and we're going to use our influence in order to upend, you know, poverty wages and the problem of work,

then I think we get closer to this ideal that we are no longer going to allow corporations to have this incredible role in vulnerable communities, and we are just going to have a restart on how we imagine the quality of American life. A girl can dream. That's Dr. Marcia Chattlin. She's Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University, and her book is called Franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America. And it won the Pulitzer Prize for History this year. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program.

I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Calalea, David Prasnow, Gauphin and Putuguele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle, and Stephen Valentino. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.