McQueen of the Golden Arches: Black Women and Black Capitalism in Fast Food America

In a 1987 feature article on African Americans and fast food franchising, Black Enterprise named Southern California businesswoman Lonear Heard, the “McQueen of the Golden Arches.” In an era in which black women’s representation as ‘welfare queens’ shaped public opinion and public policy, the coronation of a black woman as the queen of the franchise was a routine flourish in the way black business publications used the personal narratives and financial portfolios of successful blacks to contest negative representations of the race.

In this paper, I focus on Heard and the other black women in the late 1970s and 1980s who made their fortunes in the overwhelmingly male world of McDonald’s franchising. I argue that way that African American politicians, organizational leaders, and business publications celebrated black business was grounded in notions of racial uplift and progress, as well as a gendered framing of black social mobility. I highlight two common threads in the discourses on black women in the narrative of how they succeeded in franchising: including widow-turned-businesswoman and employee-to-millionaire. I historicize and interrogate the way narratives about black women facilitated McDonald’s expansion in communities of color, and I use this research to consider how black women’s labor in the fast food industry has shaped the sector at various levels. Drawing from newspaper accounts and oral histories of women franchisees, this paper unites a growing body of literature on black capitalism with feminist history.