This week on Our Body Politic, creator and host Farai Chideya interviews Bryan Greene, consulting producer on the Oscar-winning documentary, “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” and Vice President of Public Advocacy at the National Association of REALTORS. Farai and Greene discuss how events like the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival serve as opportunities for Black Americans to thrive in the face of social and housing discrimination. Then in our series, “Our Body Politics Presents…” we feature the podcast Truth Be Told with host Tonya Mosley who interviews author and scholar Dr. Marcia Chatelain and founder of Feed Our Soul Adrienne Wilson about how Black Americans are seeking and achieving equity by decolonizing their relationship to food.
Farai Chideya:
Hi, folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcast. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We're here for you, with you, and because of you. Thank you. This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. This week, we get the origin story behind an Oscar-winning documentary about the power of music and community.
Speaker 2:
Now, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to bring up some folks. Gladys Knight.
Tonya Mosley:
Now, when I stepped on stage, I was totally taken aback because I didn't expect a crowd like that.
Speaker 2:
And the Pips.
Farai Chideya:
That sound from this year's winner for best documentary, Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), directed by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson. The film spotlights unused footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a massive event that drew thousands to Harlem between the years 1967 and 1969. The film zeroes in on that final year, which drew performers like Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, and a young Stevie Wonder along with the massive crowds that attended six consecutive weekends. Despite being filmed professionally from start to finish, the footage was barely aired and nearly forgotten until Bryan Greene wrote an article in 2017 and hinted that someone should make a documentary of this. I wanted to ask Bryan about his role in this incredible doc, Summer of Soul. Hey, Bryan, welcome to Our Body Politic.
Bryan Greene:
Hi, Farai. Thanks for having me.
Farai Chideya:
Yes, I am so excited about this conversation and you're someone who has such a broad range. I want to ask about some of the other journalism you've done about historical Black culture and American culture, but let us dig in with Summer of Soul. So the Harlem Cultural Festival had more than 300,000 attendees and it happened during the same weekend as Woodstock. Woodstock caught fire as a significant cultural touchstone in American history, but footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival was hidden for 50 years and very little was known about the festival. Why was that?
Bryan Greene:
Well, a lot of people believe it's because there wasn't interest in a Black festival, and that's what the man who filmed the over 50 hours of footage reported, that he couldn't interest anyone in a larger project. It did appear on TV in two one hour specials that were quickly forgotten and really never spoken about again, and so it's really quite something, the attention that this has received and my part in it was really to help unearth it again.
Farai Chideya:
And when you wrote this article, tell us who you wrote it for, and maybe describe not only who you wrote it for, but how it ended up finding the connection to the producers who worked with you.
Bryan Greene:
Yeah, Farai. So I wrote an article for an obscure policy journal called Poverty and Race, and I was focusing on the social, political, and the cultural aspects of this festival. I was particularly interested in the New York politics and the national politics around civil rights and advancing African American socioeconomic status, and so I wrote it for this journal and some people began to see it online, but then in 2017, the man who filmed over 50 hours of footage of the festival died.
Bryan Greene:
And there was an obituary in the New York Times, and I saw that some filmmakers were trying to get a hold of the footage and so I reached out to them and said, hey, I've written the most comprehensive article on this festival and I've done a whole lot of research, let's talk, and they recognized that this movie was more than a concert movie, that it was about everything that was going on, both in Harlem and in the country in terms of African American civil rights, Black power, cultural change, and I was asked to join them in this effort as a consulting producer.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. And so you're someone, again, we will dig more into this, but you really do these incredible contextual articles that talk about Black life and culture as it integrates with the broader American life and culture. What made you think that this was really worth digging into and what did you hope that it would do in the world when you wrote about it?
Bryan Greene:
Well, I hoped it would become a movie, and I sometimes describe it as Babe Ruth pointing to the right field stands and saying, I'm going to hit the ball there because in the article, I open by saying, whenever I tell people about the Harlem Cultural Festival, they ask why isn't there a film, and I said, this article is my treatment for the film that will inevitably come, and I recognize that someone had to do this movie and I wrote in 2017, 2 years before the 50th anniversary, and I thought, okay, someone's going to see the opportunity to seize on that anniversary, but the reason why I thought it would make a film wasn't just because there were all these amazing performers, but it was also how this festival intersected with so many other events that were happening that summer.
Bryan Greene:
Woodstock, you mentioned, but also there was a gospel performance the night of the moon landing, and I grew up as something of a space nerd and so I knew that date, July 20th, 1969 by heart, and so when I was researching this festival and I saw that there was a performance on that date, I said, wait a minute, and having grown up in New York, I also knew that in Central Park, people had gathered to watch the moon landing and so I put two and two together and said, okay, this is the New York City Parks Department hosting two different events on that same date. Why aren't the people at the festival at home watching the moon landing?
Bryan Greene:
And that really was my first understanding of the disillusionment many African Americans had about the space program, and so that's a major feature in my story, but what I found so attractive was just really how this intersected with other events that were happening at the time, politically, culturally, and then also just the role too of the New York City government in this. Having grown up in New York, I was fascinated by Mayor Lindsay and what my parents had even said about Mayor Lindsay and his support for African Americans and his commitment to civil rights and African American uplift that I really came into this story trying to better understand what was going on in the country, that there was this apparent support for this kind of African American cultural event.
Farai Chideya:
I also lived in New York as a small child. I grew up mainly in Baltimore, which is my mom's hometown, and I have some really wonderful memories of living in New York. I lived on the upper west side in the early seventies, but New York wasn't and isn't a paradise. So give us a little sense of the good, bad, and ugly of what might be the neighborhood around this concert and why people would, you talk about people wanting to talk to the mayor about what he was or wasn't doing for Black people. So what should we understand about Harlem 1969?
Bryan Greene:
Well, New York then and New York today remains one of the most segregated metro areas in the country, and so everyone knew that Harlem had become the quintessential African American neighborhood in New York, and with that came neglect by the city, and this was true throughout New York. All the boroughs have intense segregation and communities that were neglected, and I think for many New Yorkers, that was just fine and Mayor Lindsay actually was explicit in acknowledging that segregation, and there were many new Yorkers who were calling attention to it and the need to bring the city together and to address historic inequity, and so this is the time when head starts getting underway.
Bryan Greene:
And so another fascinating intersection between this festival and another cultural event is the same summer was when Sesame Street was launched, and that was launched not only out of New York, but with a cast that consisted of Harlemites, and the creator of Sesame Street was specifically intending to create a program targeted to what she described as the inner city of African American four year old, and it so happens that the folks who were filming this, all of the cameramen to a person were working on Sesame Street that same summer. So all of that zeitgeist there was happening at the time, and Mayor Lindsay was very much in the mix and supported these kinds of events in the parks to help bring more people of color into the parks.
Farai Chideya:
There is so much joy, Black joy built into this documentary and music festivals have been defining moments of cultural identity and style in the US, and this is just a little bit of some of the attendees describing the scene.
Speaker 2:
When you looked at the audience, you could see the change in the scene as it was happening. There would still be people [inaudible 00:10:14] and shark skin, but you would see the bell bottoms, the cut off shirts. You saw platform shoes, hip huggers, men wearing no shirt and leather. Yes, it was hip. No, it was real hip. At that time, Harlem was a melting pot for Black style. When we got into the late sixties, there was a new movement after over a century. It's A revolution, style revolution, cultural revolution.
Farai Chideya:
As a native New Yorker, Bryan, what do you remember as a kid because I only lived in New York for a few years, but I still remember the fashion and I have great photos of me in my own little early seventies fashion. So what do you remember about New York back in, not necessarily that day because you would've been an infant and a toddler, but shortly after?
Bryan Greene:
Yeah, Farai. Well, I'm glad you asked that question because that, it was another draw to this subject for me because I remember dimly this period because the late sixties lasted till about '73 or so, and so we had Afros and we had the picks and some of the picks had the raised fist on the pick. I had one of those when I was a kid. I almost feel like I was there because this is reminiscent of the New York that I saw as I was growing up. I was so excited, especially to see Sly and the Family Stone perform in Harlem because it was the kind of thing I might have imagined they had done because it just seemed like a place they ought to be, and so just to hear like, yes, of course, this happened, and so that's the thing too is just, I think in my popular imagination, these kinds of festivals took place.
Farai Chideya:
That was writer Bryan Greene, consulting producer on Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Coming up next, more from Bryan Greene on Summer of Soul and some related insights from his other specialty, fair housing policy.
Bryan Greene:
Today, that history of home ownership that whites have had that African Americans have been excluded from has resulted in whites having about 10 times the wealth of African Americans.
Farai Chideya:
Plus, Our Body Politic presents part of a new episode from Truth Be Told with Tonya Mosley on food and culture, starting with the complicated legacy of McDonald's in Black and Brown communities. That's on Our Body Politic. Welcome back to Our Body Politic. If you're just tuning in, we are continuing our conversation with writer Bryan Greene, who published a 2017 piece about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. It helped inspire the Oscar-winning documentary, Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
Farai Chideya:
Bryan was a consulting producer on the documentary and here's more of our discussion. So Bryan, the festival was attended by politicians and civil rights leaders like New York Mayor John Lindsay and Reverend Jesse Jackson, Marcus Garvey, Jr. Some of them spoke about racial tensions like Dr King's assassination, but why do you think that the politicians came to the festival and what effect did their presence, politicians, civil rights leaders have during this period with a lot of tension?
Bryan Greene:
So in my article, I describe this period as Harlem at crossroads and I think many others have described the Black community as being at a crossroads at this time, and I think many politicians recognize that. I believe some had an interest in maintaining order and wanted to engage the African American community to ensure that there were no more violent outbreaks like we saw following the assassination of Dr. King in '68, but I think there were others, including Lindsay who were genuinely concerned about the fate of African Americans.
Bryan Greene:
Mayor Lindsay was on President Johnson's Kerner commission and this was the commission President Johnson created to study the civil disorders, and it was Lindsay who really took the lead on that commission and he was the one who crafted the statement, the country is becoming two nations, one Black, one white, separate and unequal. So he was giving voice to these concerns and I also think there was still hope. I think there was still hope that we were coming through this civil rights period and that we were going to do more to create equal opportunity. So I was drawn very much to this story, in part because I saw this period as one where there was still a glimmer of hope, and I talk about that a bit in my article too.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. I mean, I've written about the Kerner commission report and wrote specifically about the section talking about journalism when the implications of having a two nations perspective on journalism, and I think that's one of the reason we ended up in an insurrectionist world is because we have not been able to reconcile certain truths within journalism. So the echoes of that era, I think persist in many different ways. I also want to share, because we're going to be talking more about your work on housing, a clip from the film about some of the housing issues and the atmosphere of Harlem at the time.
Speaker 2:
Harlem was heaven to us. It was a place where I was safe, happy, and made life long friends. Of course, you had those destitute areas you might consider ghetto. Where the tight, packed tenements stew forth the overcrowded thousands onto the overheated streets, but to us, Harlem was Camelot. It is a creative forest where you are honed by the hardships of experience and many a creative gem comes forth.
Farai Chideya:
How would you describe Harlem then and how it's evolved? This may bring us a little bit closer to some of the topics we'll talk about next, but Harlem is a neighborhood that is owned by various people and entities and who lives there and who owns there has changed a lot.
Bryan Greene:
That's true, and if we go way back, we know that Harlem was a white community at the beginning of the 20th century and it was an Italian community and we had many different ethnic groups, Germans there as well, and then segregation in the United States was planned and African American opportunities were limited by practices like redlining, racially restrictive covenants, other local policy including zoning, and then discrimination, outright discrimination, violence, and other measures, which then created, for more than a century, Harlem as predominantly an African American community, almost a century or so.
Bryan Greene:
And at this point in 1969, we really do see the height of urban neglect and you hear in the film, the discussion also of drugs and the impact of drugs on the community too and violence that often accompanies that and accompanies poverty, and so Harlem, we know about because it's in New York, but we have these communities throughout the country in our metro areas that are the traditional segregated African American communities. Harlem just also happened to be the cultural capitals of the world, so it's unique in that respect.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. So we're going to return to real estate later from a more contemporary and top level view, but I want to talk a little bit more about your writing career. You manage to have, as some people do, not a lot of people, but really distinct careers where you're dealing with housing policy and then you're also dealing with culture and history, and one story I'm completely obsessed with is an article that you wrote for the Smithsonian Magazine on Patrick Francis Healy. Who is he and what did you tell us about?
Bryan Greene:
I am drawn to these stories about historical figures and historical events that people don't know about, but have had a great impact, and so Patrick Francis Healy was the president of Georgetown University in the mid to late 19th century, so during the reconstruction period, and what I found fascinating was to learn that this most consequential president of Georgetown University and whose flagship building I've walked by many times on the Georgetown campus since I lived in Washington DC these days, that he was born enslaved, and when I first heard that, I was like, how could that be, and people hear the name, Patrick Francis Healy and they assume, okay, this was an Irish Catholic priest, and that, he was as well, but he was biracial and had been born to an Irish immigrant to the United States and a biracial woman whom his father enslaved.
Bryan Greene:
And apparently, according to the history we have, his parents lived as a common law man and woman and had several children who passed as white, and so from a very young age, Patrick Francis Healy's father saw that his children were educated up north. The Healy brothers were among the first students at Holy Cross in Massachusetts and they were standout students, graduating at the top of their classes, and then the Catholic church promoted them through its hierarchy and willingly hid their big secret that they had been born enslaved in Georgia, and so I just became fascinated with this story because also Georgetown, at the same time, was doing some reflection on its own history with slavery and how it had sold 232 slaves in 1838 in order to keep-
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. So not-
Bryan Greene:
The university afloat.
Farai Chideya:
A bit before Healy's time, but not that far before.
Bryan Greene:
Yeah, no. Actually, at that time, Healy was enslaved in Georgia technically by his father, and that's the other point too is the Georgia slavery laws were so strict that Healy's father couldn't liberate his wife or his children. So he actually had to find ways to get them out of Georgia if they weren't to be legal slaves. So just that fact that the Jesuit university had this history and then its most consequential president was someone who had been born enslaved was just fascinating story to me, and then just his own relationship to that history because they all hid it. The Healy children all hid this background, no doubt for survival and advancement, but I also think there's a degree of internalized racism as well. So that's a story that is illuminating just about that period, but also just has many interesting layers to it based on what was going on at universities at the time.
Farai Chideya:
Bryan, thank you so much. We're going to talk to you about housing, but I feel like just understanding the range of your creativity is pretty amazing. So thank you for talking to us about that and we will return shortly with more on the other work you do.
Bryan Greene:
Great. Look forward to it.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic. We're speaking with writer Bryan Greene, consulting producer on the documentary Summer of Soul. His article inspired the Oscar-winning documentary. The backdrop of Summer of Soul is Harlem, a neighborhood that has had many different iterations in Black life and life in America from the Harlem Renaissance to today. It's also been one of the many places in America where housing laws and real estate practices have thwarted Black homeownership. Black homeowners continue to receive lower appraisal quotes than their white counterparts. Let's listen to a clip from Andre Perry of the Brookings Institute speaking to CNN about how some Black owners are resulting to whitewashing their homes in hopes of yielding fair appraisals.
Speaker 2:
We found that homes in Black neighborhoods are underpriced by 23%, about 48,000 cumulatively. There's about 156 billion in lost equity in Black neighborhoods, 156 billion.
Farai Chideya:
Last month, the New York Times spotlighted a Black couple who initially received a quote of $472,000 for their newly renovated house in Baltimore from one appraiser, and after removing family photos and having a white male colleague stand in for them, another appraiser returned with a value of $750,000, nearly $300,000 more.
Speaker 2:
Took down everything that resembled that this home belonged to us or to an African American family. Art, pictures. Even I would say, even my hair products, I put them away so that someone wouldn't be tipped off by them.
Farai Chideya:
That was Tenisha Tate-Austin sharing to CNN what she and her husband, Paul Austin, did to whitewash their home in Northern California. Like the couple in Baltimore, the Austins also had a white friend stand in as the owner during the appraisal. Bryan Greene has spent years working on fair housing policy first for the federal government at HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and now as vice president of policy advocacy at the National Association of Realtors. I asked Bryan to explain more about appraisal bias and how people are dealing with racial inequality in the housing market, as well as what's happening with the housing market overall.
Bryan Greene:
So people have alleged that if you are African American and occupying a home, that you may face discrimination in that home appraisal if an appraiser knows an African American resides there and that people who own homes in African American communities may see them devalued. Many have alleged that they don't see their homes appraised as they would expect a comparable home in a white area to be appraised. You have even couples who are biracial alleging that they have seen different appraisals based on which member of the couple was at home at the time.
Farai Chideya:
And these appraisals affect what you can sell your home for, so they are a part of your wealth.
Bryan Greene:
That's right. That's absolutely right, and of course, appraisals affect lending as well as home sales too. So all of the different aspects of the housing market are implicated in this question. So it's important that we get to the root of it, no doubt. Many appraisers are concerned at the allegations that have been made and don't want to be perceived as an industry that's mistreating people. There are very few appraisers of color and so the appraisal industry has committed to do more to diversify.
Bryan Greene:
It's very much committed to more training of appraisers to make sure that everyone's aware of what kind of bias can enter into a transaction unwittingly and that it addresses that. Obviously, there's long been laws against this kind of discrimination and more people now, when they encounter this, are beginning to file complaints under the Fair Housing Act or file federal lawsuits. So it's getting a whole lot of attention and hopefully, the result will be people will come together to make sure that the market's treating everyone fairly and that people are seeing appraisals for what their homes are worth.
Farai Chideya:
You've written about closing the racial home ownership gap. So tell me more about what's caused that gap and what's being done to address it.
Bryan Greene:
Sure. Well, I think really, to understand the home ownership gap today, you really have to understand housing policy for the last century or more. Most of our American cities tried to maintain some form of racial segregation until the United States Supreme Court said you could not do that, but then people found other ways. One way was violence to keep people out of neighborhoods, and there was a great deal of fire bombing of African American homes and other violence to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods, racially restrictive covenants, terms written into deeds, which prohibited the sale of homes to African Americans and other people of color, often Jews as well, but quite uniformly, African Americans were excluded and financing was denied to communities and to purchases in African American neighborhoods or to people of color.
Bryan Greene:
And then we had whole subdivisions that excluded African Americans. In order to get the financing that created the United States suburbs, they had to exclude African Americans to even construct the suburbs, not to mention transportation policy and all manner of other infrastructure that was designed in America to create and maintain racial segregation, and so the net effect of this was one, African Americans couldn't buy homes in many areas, sometimes couldn't buy homes at all, certainly couldn't amass the wealth that home ownership brings, and that created this magnifier effect for white wealth vis a vis African American wealth. So that today, that history of home ownership that whites have had that African Americans have been excluded from has resulted in whites having about 10 times the wealth of African Americans.
Farai Chideya:
What I'm thinking about is just what lies ahead for potential home buyers. I became a first time homeowner last year, I was kind of dragged, kicking and screaming into home ownership. I didn't want the responsibility of having a home and I still kind of don't. If anyone knows a good contractor, let me know because they're hard to find these days, but I will say that I locked in on that 3% interest rate and now with some of the volatility in the economy, interest rates are going up. So how does that affect particularly potential home buyers of color trying to plant their flag?
Bryan Greene:
It certainly makes housing more expensive long term for anybody, the fact that interest rates have gone up, but what's probably affecting prices and affordability even more than that for much of the country is the lack of inventory, the fact that in the United States, we haven't been building enough, and so by some estimates, we're 20 years behind where we should be on construction of homes and with scarcity comes higher home prices. That's making it particularly challenging for people of color to buy. When you think about this history, which has left African Americans with less wealth to begin with, now in this highly competitive housing market and you don't have cash to offer, you're losing out on this scarce commodity.
Bryan Greene:
And so the lack of wealth really ends up being the biggest challenge for African Americans because that affects also your credit because everything costs the same across society, but if you have less money to pay for those things, even your rent, that puts a downward pressure on your credit, which of course, then is really important to getting a mortgage loan. So it becomes very, very challenging to find a way for us to close this gap. No doubt there are certain things we always have to make sure we address like housing discrimination and that we enforce those laws whenever housing discrimination occurs, but this issue of supply really is the big roadblock right now. If we can increase the supply, we should have a greater range of affordable housing options for people.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. This is a longer conversation, but I think we're going to have to wrap it up right here. Bryan, so grateful to have you on about Summer of Soul and also about housing. Thank you.
Bryan Greene:
Thank you, Farai. Thanks for having me.
Farai Chideya:
That was Bryan Greene, freelance writer and vice president of policy advocacy at the National Association of Realtors. Coming up next, Our Body Politic presents another important conversation on Black community and economic mobility from Tonya Mosley's Truth Be Told, The Source.
Tonya Mosley:
When we think of Dr. King's assassination, we think of the gravitas of the moment and the confusion and the outrage people had over his loss, and I think very few people really understand that this was an entry point for people to start thinking about Black owned businesses as a solution to the distress that people are experiencing.
Farai Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic. Welcome back to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. We're just coming off of our conversation with housing policy expert and writer, Bryan Greene, about discrimination and inequality in the housing market, particularly as it impacts Black folks. That affects every American system, housing, education, transportation, and more. In our series, Our Body Politic presents, we bring you stories and conversations from independent voices in audio and today, we bring you an excerpt from the podcast Truth Be Told from their episode, The Source.
Farai Chideya:
Host Tonya Mosley asks another question about neighborhoods and inequality. Why are so many Black and Brown communities living in food deserts, places without healthy and affordable grocery stores? Mosley talks to author and scholar, Dr. Marcia Chatelain, and the founder of Feed Our Soul, Adrienne Wilson about food swamps where despite the lack of fresh produce, there's an abundance of fast food chains like McDonald's. They also examined the complicated cultural significance of fast food in Black and Brown communities. Let's take a listen.
Tonya Mosley:
For a long time, McDonald's and fast food more broadly held this prominent space in Black and Brown communities.
Adrienne Wilson:
McDonald's may not provide food that can give long lasting nourishment, but I think that the fast food industry satiates something in us, and I think that it's the desire for there to be easy answers to our social problems.
Tonya Mosley:
Social problems like access to fresh foods, time to make our own meals. I mean, fast food makes things easier, but we also know it comes at a cost and as we learn more about the importance of nutrition and nourishment, what are the ways we can better connect to our food sources and what disconnected us from them in the first place? Growing up in Chicago, Georgetown professor, Marcia Chatelain was always fascinated by McDonald's.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
McDonald's, I often tell my students, before the age of cell phones is where we would all gather to get going. So for me, going to a McDonald's was about my adolescence and my independence, but it was also a gateway to learning a lot of Black history. The first time that I read a serious piece of Black history in high school was because the local McDonald's franchise organization, Black franchisees had sponsored a quiz bowl called know your heritage.
Tonya Mosley:
I had a similar experience. In Detroit, I grew up within walking distance of several fast food spots, but grocery stores with fresh food, we had to drive across city lines to find that. Urban farmer, Adrienne Wilson, who grew up in Los Angeles, calls this a food swamp.
Adrienne Wilson:
So a food swamp is where you are oversaturated with processed foods. So those usually go hand in hand. If you don't have natural foods or access to natural foods or grocery stores in that area, you probably have a lot of McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC, Popeye's.
Tonya Mosley:
Yeah. That's how I grew up.
Adrienne Wilson:
Yeah. Right. All around you and that's all you know.
Tonya Mosley:
I thought for a long time that maybe this was part of some grand plan because wouldn't it be just as easy to have a grocery store in place of one of these fast food chains? Well, Dr. Marcia Chatelain says in a way, it was part of a grand plan. In her Pulitzer prize winning book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia reveals the influx of McDonald's in Black communities is directly tied to initiatives to build Black wealth after the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The message was that owning a McDonald's franchise or working there would be like a key that would unlock educational opportunities and economic freedom.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
So a lot of it in the sixties and seventies was like, we are cool too. We are also down. We have Afros and bell bottoms, and then in the 1980s, it was really about how McDonald's is creating Black wealth and the early 1990s, they created the series of Calvin ads to show that it is still cool to work at McDonald's.
Speaker 2:
Oh baby, I'm so proud of you. It's only afternoons, but still, it's a promotion. I got to get back to work. Guess what, Anna? Calvin is the new manager at McDonald's. Straight up.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
But to also capitalize on the fact that in the nineties, there was so much very racist reporting about super predators and gang members.
Speaker 2:
For real? Calvin? Calvin used to hang out on the corner. So your own McDonald's. No, not yet.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
And it was supposed to be an inversion of this idea that Calvin is this kid on the streets, but McDonald's gives him the discipline and gives him something to hope for. There was a lot of suggesting that you can work your way from being a cashier to owning a franchise. Today, that is really, really difficult to happen. The capital you need to franchise a McDonald's escalated over this period of time, and so you see fewer commercials saying that and what they'll say now is we give college scholarships, fighting against a critique that it's a dead end job, but rather saying it's a job that gives you access to benefits to move on with your life.
Tonya Mosley:
You ask this question, how did McDonald's, this largely suburban fast food restaurant, becomes such a mainstay in urban primarily Black and Brown communities, and what you found is that it actually started during the civil rights era and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
Yeah. When we think of Dr. King's assassination, we think of the gravitas of the moment and the confusion and the outrage people had over his loss, and I think very few people really understand that this was an entry point for people to start thinking about Black owned businesses as a solution to the distress that people were experiencing, and so there was a call for Black capitalism, more Black ownership of businesses, and the McDonald's corporation seized that moment to start recruiting Black franchise owners in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
Tonya Mosley:
And to put this year, 1968, into even greater context, you say that Black Americans had only gained access to public accommodations a few years prior to this.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
The opportunity to franchise McDonald's in 1968 if you are Black, if you have grown up in the Jim Crow south, if you have been terrified to stop at a restaurant, if you have ever experienced the humiliation of being refused service, and then all of a sudden, you have access to the most important American brand, the first publicly traded fast food company, it's unbelievable. I think that it's important for us to take really seriously why this intervention with McDonald's and Black America is so important for our understanding of race and consumerism and marketplace and the unfinished business of civil rights. A lot of the uprisings in the 1960s, when there was property damage on grocery stores, those stores had such slim margins.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
And a lot of those grocery stores shuttered and said that they would not go back into the community. During that period of time, for the purposes of small business administration, programs where people could access capital for businesses, grocery stores were not considered small business and so fast food franchises were, and the capital that McDonald's had behind it to take this risk and go into communities that had not been served by business was a lot more certain than the supermarket industry, and so there, you see the origins of some of the issues that we have today.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
But in addition to that, for a really long time, Black people have organized not only about access to fresh foods and good grocery stores, but there had long been complaints that in Black neighborhoods, the quality of groceries were more expensive and of lower quality. The grocery store had always been a real site of tension and so I think that a lot of people assumed that, oh, well, fast food just replaced the grocery stores and the grocery stores were great. The grocery stores were also a place where people had to protest and fight to get access to good foods, even when they were in the community.
Tonya Mosley:
What's your sense of the perception of McDonald's in Black communities today?
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
I had several birthday parties at McDonald's and for me as a city kid, it was because you lived in apartments. You didn't have a big house to have people over, and kids loved it, but some things have changed. One, I think people of our generation who have maybe more wealth now than they grew up with or maybe the same, they don't feed their kids McDonald's. Their kids have a really diverse palate by the time that they're nine. It's not just, they don't like McDonald's. It's they're eating fast casual. Some of it is the ways that fast food is tied to class that a lot of educated Black and Brown folks that I know, they don't take their kids to McDonald's and if they do, it's because they're traveling or because a grandparent is involved.
Tonya Mosley:
What happened to McDonald's push? I think it was a little more than a decade ago when many fast food places, not just McDonald's, were offering these healthier choices like salads and fruits.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
I think because people didn't want it. You don't go to McDonald's to have a chef salad.
Tonya Mosley:
You don't go there for that.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
No, absolutely not, but also structurally, it's a really tough thing to offer because what makes McDonald's possible is there's a lot of shelf stable products, products that are frozen and then prepared, but if you're trying to bring in fresh lettuce for salads, you have to create a whole new assembly lines for people to prepack the salads for the lunchtime rush. A lot of these innovations, they really struggled with and a lot of these things had to be ended or changed because of the pandemic and supply chain. So fast food may not be the most sophisticated, but its meanings, its preparation, its system is incredibly nuanced.
Farai Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. This is an excerpt from the podcast Truth Be Told, hosted by Tonya Mosley. We're listening to The Source, an episode about race, community and food with author and scholar, Dr. Marcia Chatelain, and Adrienne Wilson, founder of Feed Our Soul.
Tonya Mosley:
We are currently at the Crenshaw farmer's market on a lovely Saturday. I recently met up with urban farmer, Adrienne Wilson in south central LA, which is considered a food desert. According to the nonprofit story maps, there are more than 750,000 people who live here, but only seven grocery stores. Adrienne grew up here and in her twenties, she had a wake up call. After years of overworking and eating fast food and convenient foods, Adrienne's body shut down.
Adrienne Wilson:
I started getting cramps in my stomach. I wasn't really digesting well. I went to the doctor and they were like, you have an ulcer, ma'am. You have to take these antibiotics stat. You have to rest for a week. So I took off three days of work and then they were just like, you have to make some different lifestyle decisions. You have to change your lifestyle.
Tonya Mosley:
And so she did. That health scare was the seed that got her on the path to creating Feed Our Soul, an organization built on creating access to community gardens and nutritional health.
Adrienne Wilson:
I really got into it when I was trying to understand the cost of restaurants because that was my dream. I wanted to open my own restaurant. I was like, well, why does this food cost so much money? I was like, if this stuff comes from the ground, why am I charging so much, and it's because of cost of delivery, transportation. It's cost of someone else growing it for you and because it has a shelf life. So all those things come into effect when you think about our food ecosystem and I was just like, this is wrong. When you think about slaves, we brought seeds back from the motherland to grow so that we can have familiarity, things that connect us back to our home. I was just like, we have to fix this, and especially because it affects Black people so directly. It affects us so directly, and I grew up in Los Angeles and I was fortunate enough to be able to go to a school in the west side.
Adrienne Wilson:
And they have more grocery stores. They have all the Whole Foods, they have the good produce, and I saw it here, but it didn't compute in my mind. My dad's like, oh, I got to get up and go to the store at 7:00 in the morning, but I have to drive all the way to Westchester. Looking back, I'm like he shouldn't have had to do that. We all should never have to do that, but not everybody understands that they live in a food desert or in a food swamp. It's not even in their awareness. They're just like, this is the food that I have. I only have $4 and I have to feed three mouths. How can I feed my children, and some people have those lives where they are working two, three jobs just so that they can get their food stamps, and what can you get on food stamps? Not much because I've been on them and I know you can't get much. How do we fix it so that people can have access to the food so that it doesn't have to be a strain?
Tonya Mosley:
What does it mean to decolonize our connection or maybe our food systems? What does that mean for you?
Adrienne Wilson:
That is a good question. To decolonize the food system, I see it in two prongs. First, to take back a little bit of the consumerism, really being conscious of where your dollars are going like supporting local farmers' markets or supporting local businesses, and I think it also has an unlearning with your habits and our connection with agriculture. I think that we have to not look at it as a bad thing that we do come from farmers. We farm these things that are now staples and necessities in our life, and I know that it is tied to such a hurtful history, but there is beauty in it as well.
Tonya Mosley:
Maybe this moment is such an important one because we are far enough away to be able to connect to those good things about our people who were enslaved, but we have the agency to take those beautiful things and make something even more.
Adrienne Wilson:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it is our duty for the future generations and how do we do that, especially in the food industry and the food space. It is taking it back and it's understanding that a tiny little plot of land can produce so much for you and your families and for your children. When I was a little girl, for a moment, we had a garden in the back and we had four or five cornstalks in the city of Detroit, but I was so proud of that thing.
Tonya Mosley:
Exactly. I was so proud of it.
Adrienne Wilson:
You're like, I don't know what I could bring, but I got corn and that's how it used to be. That's the whole idea of a potluck. That farmer brings corn, you bring tomatoes, you bring lettuce, you bring potatoes. Let's all bring all of our abundance together and we all can have a feast, but it takes that community of all of us working together, so that's why it's little steps, little seeds that you're planting all around and eventually, we will grow and become a beautiful tree.
Tonya Mosley:
Hey, look, Hudson, there are more strawberries growing over here.
Speaker 2:
Wow. That's cool.
Tonya Mosley:
If you were to grow anything out here that we don't have out here, what would you grow?
Speaker 2:
Corn.
Tonya Mosley:
How come?
Speaker 2:
So I can make popcorn.
Tonya Mosley:
We may not be growing much in our home garden, but we are trying to do that thing Adrienne is talking about. Growing your own food is not easy, and the truth is a home garden is not going to feed a community or solve the problem of food deserts and swamps, but maybe it'll build up for our children, a stronger connection to the foods they eat. Marcia Chatelain thinks about this too, especially in the context of her own son.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain:
I think for me, when we think about Black liberation, it's the ability to experience the fullness of what life has to offer without any hesitation, without fear, without anxiety, and with the knowledge that the choices we make and the things that we embrace won't be violently taken away from us.
Farai Chideya:
That was the Our Body Politic Presents series with The Source, an episode from the podcast Truth Be Told with Tonya Mosley.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chideya:
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I'm the executive producer and host, Farai Chideya. Our Co-executive producer is Nina Spensley. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Traci Caldwell is our booker and producer. Emily J. Daly and Steve Lack are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Producer Teresa Carey contributed to this episode.
Farai Chideya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced with the help of Lauren Schild and engineered by Mike Goehler and Archie Moore.
Farai Chideya:
This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.