From civil rights to Ferguson, Franchise reveals the untold history of how junk food became one of the biggest generators of black wealth in America.

Frequently blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black color Americans, junk food restaurants like McDonald’s possess longer symbolized capitalism’s villainous effects in our nation’s most susceptible communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate dark neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian about Franchise: The Golden Arches in Dark America Marcia Chatelain uncovers a unexpected history of cooperation among junk food companies, dark capitalists, and civil privileges market leaders, who-in the troubled years after King’s assassination-believed they discovered an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality. Using the discourse of sociable welfare all but evaporated, federal applications under presidents Johnson and Nixon promoted a new vision for racial justice: how the franchising of fast food restaurants, by black citizens in their have neighborhoods, could finally enhance the quality of dark life. Synthesizing years of study, Franchise tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the moment a independence movement begun to whither.