Please welcome Pulitzer Prize winner, Marcia Chatelain!
We are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History, Marcia Chatelain, will be joining us at this year’s festival to discuss her astonishing book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.
Since the dawn of the fight for civil rights, many marginalized Americans have looked to entrepreneurship and economic opportunities as a means to achieve equality. Fast food franchises have offered success to Black entrepreneurs and brought business to struggling communities while simultaneously extracting wealth and preventing the potential advancement of workers. Just as The Color of Law provided a vital understanding of redlining and racial segregation, Franchise investigates the complex interrelationship between black communities and America’s largest, most popular fast food chain. Taking us from the first McDonald’s drive-in in San Bernardino to the franchise on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, Chatelain shows how fast food is a source of both power—economic and political—and despair for African Americans. As she contends, fast food is, more than ever before, a key battlefield in the fight for racial justice.
Marcia Chatelain is a Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. The author of South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration, she teaches about women’s and girls’ history, as well as black capitalism. Her latest book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America examines the intricate relationship among African American politicians, civil rights organizations, communities, and the fast food industry. In 2021, Chatelain received the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Hagley Prize in Business History, and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Lawrence W. Levine Award for Franchise. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. At Georgetown, she has won several teaching awards. In 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education named her a Top Influencer in academia in recognition of her social media campaign #FergusonSyllabus, which implored educators to facilitate discussions about the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. She has held an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at New America, a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.