Hutchins Lecture: Angela Jill Cooley on Fast Food and Civil Rights

Golden Arches and White Spaces: Race in Early Fast Food Places

By the late twentieth century, fast food restaurants became a common feature of American life. Although this innovation, which brought food production into the factory age, was not a product of the South, many of its key attributes complemented the southern environment. The region’s temperate weather, automobile culture, and suburban migration contributed to an atmosphere in which fast food thrived. Professor Angela Jill Cooley questions how early fast food places, which spread across the region during the final death throes of Jim Crow, treated issues of race and civil rights. In theory, fast food establishments epitomized democracy. They offered cheap, quick, standardized fare at walk-up windows. Customers took food back to their cars where they could eat with their windows rolled down as they enjoyed the moderate southern climate. In reality, however, early fast food restaurants in the South envisioned their customer base as white, middle-class, and Protestant. They cultivated this image through advertising, restaurant placement, and discriminatory practices. In this way, early fast food chains built white supremacy into their business model. Examining this little-known history helps us to better understand the tenacity of segregation culture and the intransigence of some white southerners who added segregated dining rooms to fast food places even as civil rights activists were sitting in at lunch counters. At the same time, the popularity of fast food in the region also helps us to better understand the larger socioeconomic and cultural environment that contributed to successful federal civil rights legislation.

Angela Jill Cooley is Assistant Professor of History at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where she teaches classes on civil rights and constitutional history. She received a JD from George Washington University Law School and a PhD from the University of Alabama, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Her most recent publication is an essay titled “Freedom’s Farms: Activism and Sustenance in Rural Mississippi” in Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama (University of Arkansas Press, 2015). This lecture will draw on Cooley’s recent book To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South (University of Georgia Press, 2015).