This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and so many other fast food franchises are truly emblematic American enterprises, as much as Ford or U.S. steel.

And on any given day, it's estimated that a third of Americans eat some kind of fast food.

It's part of our after-school rituals, our workday lunches, our road trips.

We know all that, and we've all read about the effect on the national health, too.

But what's less known is that fast food

is also deeply and unexpectedly intertwined with the struggle for civil rights in this country.

Marsha Chatlin, a historian at Georgetown, recently won the Pulitzer Prize for History

for her book called Franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America.

And she looks at how McDonald's managed to leverage the social upheaval of the 60s into a

permanent foothold in black communities across the country. And in the decades since,

black franchise owners have navigated the economic promise and the economic pitfalls of that

corporate relationship. I spoke with Professor Chatlin earlier this week. Where did you grow up

in what was your relationship with McDonald's when you were growing up? So I grew up in Chicago

in the 1980s and I grew up in a time where it wasn't a big deal if your kids ate

McDonald's all the time. We could eat McDonald's after church. I went to McDonald's with my

friends. And I think as a kid who grew up without the internet, this is where our social

exchanges happened. It was, you know, sharing a giant tray of French fries at McDonald's.

Well, fast forward to your career as a historian. How did you, how do you pick this subject,

of all subjects arrayed in front of you, to write about McDonald's and its effect on and

its interrelationship with black community in the United States.

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