This summer, Bay View welcomes Dr. Marcia Chatelain for a week of American Experience lectures and tent discussions based on her Pulitzer Prize winning book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (Liveright Publishers: 2020). The American Experience lectures will be held the week of July 10-14, with morning lectures in Voorhies Hall (10-11 a.m.), and informal tent conversations on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons (July 11 and 13, 4-5 pm).
Fast-food outlets are ubiquitous in the United States, with McDonald’s the most ubiquitous of all. They offer reliably standardized and affordable meals. In the wake of mid-century civil rights struggles, they offered welcoming spaces to populations that traditionally had been excluded from “whites only” restaurants The expansion of McDonalds franchises in Black neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s represented one of the big successes of initiatives to grow Black capitalism, and local outlets were important nodes for civil rights organizing – but many of these gains only came after tough struggles. Most of the jobs they offered were entry-level jobs with no career growth opportunities; much of the wealth they generate goes outside the neighborhoods in which they are located.
So, how should we understand this most iconic of American brands, and how the wider fast-food industry relates to today’s crucial social, economic, and health challenges? Dr. Chatelain will guide us through an examination of this mixed legacy. Dr. Chatelain, a native of Chicago, Illinois, is just moving from Georgetown University to be Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She also notes in her book that she was a frequent McDonald’s customer well through her graduate school days, and that “the chocolate-banana birthday cake offered at the McDonald’s on Western Avenue in Chicago’s Rogers Park is my favorite of all time”.
We look forward to a week of stimulating conversations with another of the country’s leading historians.
Here lecture topics for the week will be:
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, book talk
From Beloved Community to Black Capitalism: Can the Market Intervene on Racial Justice Issues?
Drive Thru America: How the Nation’s Fast Food Frenzy Impacts All of Us.
Seen, But Not Heard: The Untold Stories of the Women of the March on Washington.
The Great Plaintiffs: The Civil Rights Activists who took their Fight to the Courts.
Please join us for a searching but sympathetic consideration of this topic, as Dr. Chatelain helps us understand how “fast food is about more than just food”.