Pépin Lecture Series- Virtual Book Talk with Dr. Marcia Chatelain

For the final event of the spring 2025 Pépin Lecture Series, Boston University Food Studies Programs has invited Dr. Marcia Chatelain to give a virtual lecture on her award-winning book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. This lecture will be held live via Zoom.

Dr. Chatelain received several awards and accolades for this book. Franchise was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the only food history book to ever receive this honor. She also received the 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, the 2021 Hagley Prize in Business History, the 2021 Organization of American Historians Lawrence W. Levine Award, and the 2019-2021 Business History Review Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award. Franchise was also named one of New York Times Critic Jennifer Szalai’s Top Books of the Year and one of Smithsonian Scholars’ Top Books of 2020.

Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald’s have long symbolized capitalism’s villainous effects on our nation’s most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who—in the troubled years after King’s assassination—believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality. With the discourse of social welfare all but evaporated, federal programs under presidents Johnson and Nixon promoted a new vision for racial justice: that the franchising of fast food restaurants, by black citizens in their own neighborhoods, could finally improve the quality of black life. Synthesizing years of research, Franchise tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the very moment a freedom movement began to wither.