When McDonald's Was A Road To Black Liberation

With the distance of time, I can see that my first McDonald's was an unremarkable thing. There were the antagonistically hard plastic seats. The interior lights that seemed meant to shoo you away. The PlayLand with the broken-down carousel that yelped out tinny renditions of John Philip Sousa songs. And of course, there was that smell: maybe a little bleach, but mostly the aroma of cooking french fries that seemed engineered to induce a limbic response.

But as it was my first McDonald's, it was the one I imprinted on and to which I would compare all other fast-food establishments forevermore. The store on Broad and Carpenter was a waypoint between my mother's South Philly rowhouse and my grandmother's, which meant that several times a week, my mom had to bat away entreaties from my sister and me when we walked past.

So much of my neighborhood has changed since I was a kid — the notorious Martin Luther King projects were razed, public schools were shuttered and once-thriving churches shriveled up — but that McDonald's still sits brightly and defiantly on the corner of Broad and Carpenter. It's almost certainly changed hands in the four decades it's been there, but that McDonald's remains one of my old neighborhood's most enduring institutions.

And as I learned recently from Marcia Chatelain's new book, , the preponderance of Golden Arches in locations like my poor, , black neighborhood was hardly some accident. Chatelain, a historian at Georgetown and host of outlines a forgotten history of