Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,27
that, tranquility. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” went the blistering conclusion of the Kerner Report, which had been commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to study the causes of the riots. After the unrest that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, Johnson directed the Small Business Administration to dispense loans to help businesses create economic opportunities in the cities. Fast-food franchises were seen as good bets to serve as engines for revitalization.
Later that year, with the riots and antiwar protests as the backdrop, Richard Nixon successfully campaigned for president as a “law and order” candidate, casting the counterculture and civil unrest as un-American and a boon to the Communist cause and its recruitment efforts. In response to the domestic upheaval (and, sure, to shore up potential votes for his 1972 reelection campaign), Nixon established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise shortly after taking office. He pledged to issue tens of millions of dollars in government-backed loans for minority entrepreneurs through Commerce Department programs and the Small Business Administration. Nixon couched the philosophy behind these initiatives in that classic American formulation—work and enterprise, specifically “black capitalism,” rather than disdainful welfare, would lift Americans, particularly members of disadvantaged minority communities, out of poverty and into the middle class.
In spite of some mismanagement issues and shortfalls in dispersing as many loans to minority entrepreneurs as promised, the federal programs did get results. Thousands upon thousands of government-backed loans were issued, and favoring the perceived soundness of the franchise model, many of them underwrote the spread of new fast-food outlets in different US cities. The availability of these loans were also marketed aggressively by fast-food companies, which established urban-development and minority-outreach departments to help facilitate the process. This arrangement would continue for decades to follow.
And so, unlike Wilco and Lilly Pulitzer apparel, fast food successfully moved beyond the suburbs and highways and took root in American cities. As it grew—according to one tally by business historian Robert Yancy, the number of minority-run fast-food franchises sextupled in just five years from about four hundred in 1969 to over twenty-four hundred in 1974—the industry itself surged to meet its increasingly corporate bottom line. The arrangement wasn’t perfect. More than a few minority franchisees would later accuse fast-food chains of redlining as their plans to open stores in new neighborhoods floundered in corporate red tape. Some minority owners were preyed upon in unfavorable business arrangements with white partners, while others claimed they failed to receive the same privileges and general support as white franchisees. In spite of this, expansion created tens of thousands of new jobs in urban areas for decades to come and made what had quickly emerged as a national business phenomenon available to a fuller representation of Americans.
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Like the small towns that coalesced around the Dairy Queens in the 1960s West Texas of Larry McMurtry, new urban institutions in American cityscapes were created around fast food. By the late 1960s, for example, McDonald’s debuted new store designs that included their fabled, ugly brown mansard roofs and widely incorporated dedicated space as dining rooms for the first time. What had started as an enterprise centered around the needs of fast-moving highway commuters adapted in ways that befitted the dynamics of city life.
That fast food’s suburban origins came from prosperity and the exclusive orderliness of the Levittowns, while its urban roots rose out of national disorder, neglect, and economic despair, has a bigger meaning. “The moment when the fast-food industry was beginning to think of the African American market, we were only a few years away from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Dr. Marcia Chatelain, a history and African American studies professor at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post in 2018. “If we go from a moment in which public accommodation in the restaurant was a site of trauma and racial violence to one in which [the industry is] trying to convince consumers that it is a normal place to go, that there are not any prohibitions against you being there—you can understand why it becomes very appealing and very attractive for people to go to a fast-food restaurant.”
From this (imperfect) legacy as well as its inclusiveness, fast food helped secure the loyalty of the neighborhoods it served. One generation after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, riots returned to South Los Angeles following the 1992 acquittal of four LAPD officers in the infamous assault of Rodney King.