THE
BOOK

Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.

Fast food has historically been tied to the country’s self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life’s simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry’s core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food’s racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s, and more.

Deeply researched, grippingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in the closest thing Americans have to a national meal.

Buy The Book

University of Minnesota Press

Bookshop.org

Table of Contents

  1. Time Line of American Fast Food Restaurants x

  2. Introduction How Did Fast Food Become Black? xiii

  3. Part I. White Utopias

    1. A Fortress of Whiteness 3

    First- Generation Fast Food in the Early Twentieth Century

  4. 2. Inharmonious Food Groups 35

    Burger Chateaux, Chicken Shacks, and Urban Renewal’s Attack on the Existential Threat of Blackness

  5. 3. Suburbs and Sundown Towns 53

    The Rise of Second- Generation Fast Food

  6. 4. Freedom from Panic 79

    American Myth and the Untenability of Black Space

  7. 5. Delinquents, Disorder, and Death 97

    Racial Violence and Fast Food’s Growing Disrepute at Midcentury

  8. Part II. Racial Turnover

    6. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? 125

    (Mis)Managing Racial Change and the Advent of Black Operators

  9. 7. To Banish, Boycott, or Bash? 159

    Moderates and Militants Clash in Cleveland

  10. 8. Government Burgers 183

    Federal Financing of Fast Food in the Ghetto

  11. 9. You’ve Got to Be In 201

    Black Franchisors and Black Economic Power

  12. Part III. Black Catastrophe

    10. Blaxploitation 229

    Fast Food Stokes a New Urban Logic

  13. 11. PUSH and Pull 261

    Black Advertising and Racial Covenants Fuel Fast Food Growth

  14. 12. Ghetto Wars 281

    Fast Food Tussles for Profits amid Sufferation

  15. 13. Criminal Chicken 307

    Perceptions of Deviant Black Consumption

  16. 14. 365 Black 329

    A Racial Transformation Complete

  17. Conclusion The Racial Costs 353

  18. Acknowledgments 357

  19. Notes 363

  20. Index 433

Dramatis Personae

Some of the key players in fast food’s long history.


J. Willard "Bill" Marriott - Creator of A&W Root Beer stands, then Hot Shoppes Restaurants and Later Marriott Hotels.

Joseph Horn & Frank Hardart - Creators of the Horn & Hardart chain of Automat restaurants in Philadelphia and New York City

Edgar W. "Billy" Ingram - Founder of White Castle, the first fast food hamburger restaurant. He developed the chain from short order cook J. Walter Anderson's establishment.

Thomas E. Saxe Jr., and Thomas Saxe - Founder of burger chain White Tower, a White Castle knockoff.

Harry F. Duncan - Founder of another burger chain and White Castle knockoff, named Little Tavern.

Harold Pierce - African American fast food pioneer, an early franchisor with his Chicago-based chain, Harold's Chicken Shack.

Harland Sanders - Given the honorific "Colonel" by the governor of Kentucky, he is the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

John Y. Brown - Bought Sanders' brand and transformed it into a major chain, later becoming president.

Ray Kroc - Founder of McDonald's as a national chain. He bought the rights from the McDonald brothers, Mac and Dick, who created the concept in San Bernadino, California.

John W. Gibson & Oscar Goldstein - Owners of the second major regional McDonald's franchise (Gee Gee), in Washington DC, after Kroc's launch in suburban Chicago.

James McLamore - Along with Dave Edgerton, he founded Burger King in Miami, Florida.

Edward Bood - Vice President of franchising at McDonald's

Roland Jones - African American executive at McDonald's who also rose from a crew position to become an executive.

Willie Taylor - The first African American Burger King franchisee, in Miami.

John Jay Hooker - A Tennessee lawyer who founded a fried chicken chain, Minnie Pearl's, whose explosive rise and calamitous decline exemplified the frenzy of late 1960s fast food.

Herman Petty - McDonald's first African American franchisee, whose operations were in Chicago.

David Hill - Known as Rabbi Hill, Ministerial leader of the House of Israel in Cleveland, he led a 1969 boycott of McDonald's that reverberated across the industry.

Jackie Robinson - Known for breaking baseball's color line, he also worked in fast food, most prominently with the Sea Host chain.

Brady Keys - Former Pittsburgh Steeler and a major Black franchisor as head of All-Pro Chicken.

Mahalia Jackson - A renowned gospel singer, she lent her name to a chain of fried chicken restaurants. 

Caroline Jones - An African American woman whose career in advertising career spanned the largest New York City shops, Black agencies (e.g., with Frank Mingo) and her own firm.

Roger Brown - Another African American football star (Los Angeles Rams) turned fast food franchisor at Afri-Kingdom.

Horace Bullard - An East Harlem billionaire who launched NYC chain Kansas Fried Chicken in 1968. 

Al Copeland - A White New Orleans native who launched Popeyes Fried Chicken in 1972.

Lee Dunham - The first Black McDonald's franchisee in NYC, his Harlem outlet opened on 125th Street in 1972.

Jesse Jackson - The civil rights icon and head of Operation PUSH, his brokering of racial covenants with Burger King and KFC spurred a surge in fast food outlets in Black neighborhoods.

Tom Burrell - African American advertising giant that led Chicago's Burrell Advertising for forty years. The firm won McDonald's Black Market account in 1971.

Jeffrey Campbell - Burger King's president at the helm during the development of PUSH covenants.

Theodore N. Holmes - An African American entrepreneur who created DC & Baltimore area chain Chicken George in 1979.

Acknowledgements

Research reported in this book was supported by the National Library Of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number G13LM012463. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Research and writing was also supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (granted by the Office of Fellowships and Internships); The Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago; and the European Institutes for Advanced Studies (at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Aix-Marseille Université)