The Lesson of the 1971 McDonald's Built in the Shadow of the Cabrini-Green Housing Projects in Chicago

PK NOTE -- Yr: Five starts tomorrow. Today marks the four-year anniversary of the start of SBPDL. This past year was to be the final year of this site, but SBPDL has grown into something beyond a parody Web site. In 2009, an experiment began on May 22 -- today, that experiment has birthed Second City Confidential: The Black Experience in Chicagoland. The fourth book in an ongoing series documenting the collapse of America's great cities, no work is more timely than the account of the black experience in Chicago. 

“Standing up and Standing Out: how I teamed with a few Black men, changed the face of McDonald’s, and shook up corporate America,” is Roland L. Jones account of the founding the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association (NBMOA) and his ascension up the corporate ladder at a company that eventually 100 percent 365Black.

The blueprint for how McDonald's - and all corporate America - went 365Black

His book offers a virtual timeline in how the ‘365Black’ marketing strategy came into place at McDonald’s – even in the 1960s, McDonald’s main corporate office in Chicago was spending more money to help keep afloat franchises owned by blacks – and a powerful lesson in why corporate America is firmly in the pocket of what we dubbed Black-Run America (BRA).

One lesson from Jones’ book reminds us of the story of the closed Wal-Mart in Tuskegee. As we approach the start of Year 5 (four-year anniversary of the site is today), allow us this one moment to highlight this great moment in black history:

An unforgettable illustration of the kind of difficulties we ran into was Cabrini-Green. In 1971, the company [McDonald’s] decided to build a new restaurant across the street from the massive cluster of government housing projects called Cabrini-Green, in the old “Little Italy” section of Chicago. The company had great hopes for the Cabrini-Green venture, which was the first new store constructed in a majority black area in Chicago. The potential market was huge: more than 15,000 people lived in the projects. Unemployment was extremely high, but our black McDonald’s owners in other low-income Chicago areas were already showing increased sales and earnings, so everyone thought it was do-able in the projects. I was convinced that the Cabrini-Green store would provide employment and the kind of job training that would translate into wider opportunities for project residents. 

 The new store seemed to me an ideal opportunity to act on Ray Kroc’s commitment to give back to the community. 

 The plan went forward in a real spirit of optimism. The flaw was that no one, myself included, dug deeply enough into the situation at Cabrini-Green to really grasp the inherent problems. We badly misjudged the economic viability of the location. Most of the people in the projects lived entirely or partly on welfare or Social Security, and they only had money to spend on the few days after their government checks arrived (or, for the fortunate few, when they received their pay checks). Also, Cabrini-Green was among the worst maintained and most dangerous housing projects in the whole country, and many of the residents didn’t feel safe leaving their apartments, much less visiting the restaurant or sending their kids there. Although situated near some of the city’s most affluent areas, Cabrini-Green was like an isolated island. Non-residents rarely came into the projects unless they had to, and they left as soon as they could, so there was very little pass-through traffic to sustain businesses when the locals stayed away. 

 The Cabrini-Green projects were often compared to a prison, and prisons breed lawlessness. The first trouble came almost immediately when a local black preacher and a so-called “activist,” backed up by young men from the projects, began pressuring the owner-operator, Andrew Davis, for jobs and favors in what was basically a shakedown scheme. 

 The situation was similar to what Sherman Claypool faced in Milwaukee, and there was always the potential that it could flare into a mini-version of the 1969 Cleveland boycott [PK NOTE: we wrote about that here]. I was Andy’s field consultant, and I supported him when he stood up to the pressure. Frustrated, the troublemakers went around us to corporate, and Pat Flynn, the area manager for McOpCo (the company owned stores), and Joe Brown… were drawn in to negotiate some kind of settlement, with help from those of us in the regional office. Both Pat and Joe got death threats, but they also refused to cave. Joe was adept at turning the activists’ demands back on themselves: They would call for a jobs program; Joe would ask them to present their plan for the program; then they would back off because, of course, they had no plan. Jobs weren’t what they were really after. Joe and Pat eventually did negotiate for landscaping work, and McDonald’s helped the group start a landscaping business. But the whole thing petered out when the would-be extortionists lost interest.

The Cabrini-Green McDonald's -- like the Wal-Mart in Tuskegee, a near 100 percent black community couldn't sustain a private business; nor could they sustain the Cabrini-Green projects...

 Andy Davis was an experienced operator and became a valued member of the BMOA [Black McDonald’s Operating Association]… but even he couldn’t make the Cabrini-Green restaurant successful. With so little money in the housing projects and no outside traffic, the store could not build volume and was frequently empty. It struggled on for several years but was eventually closed by McDonald’s. In financial terms, it was a failure. The company never gave up on any store without a fight, so I’m sure there were also some bruised egos inside the Ivory Tower when the Cabrini-Green store was shut down.  (p. 223-225)

Cabrini-Green, like Robert Taylor Homes, is no more.

In the absence of whiteness, you get a situation like that found at the former Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) Cabrini-Green or Robert Taylor Homes -- like a black hole, everything near it was sucked into the nothingness of the 365Black community.

Not even McDonald's was spared. 

The moral of the story? 

The era of 365Black - not just McDonald's marketing strategy, but Black-Run America as well - will pass. 

Our job is to survive.