Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America

Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America investigates the complex interrelationship between Black communities and America’s largest, most popular fast-food chain, McDonald’s.

Author and NEH Fellow Maria Chatelain maps a journey from the first McDonald’s drive-in in San Bernadino to the franchise on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri in the summer of 2014. Throughout Franchise, Chatelain shows how fast food is both only a source of economic and political power, but also one of despair for African Americans. Chatelain contends throughout Franchise that fast food is, more than ever before, a key battlefield in the fight for a racial justice.  

The NEH grant-supported Franchise was the winner of both the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Award [writing]. Read an interview with author Maria Chatelain in NEH’s Humanities magazine.