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. 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. 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. 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.

After Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in 1968, many activists turned to entrepreneurship as the means to achieving equality. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. An estimated one-third of all American adults eats something from at a fast-food restaurant every day.

Franchise by Marcia Chatelain