It was Dec. 16, 1968, and Muhammad Ali was headed to jail. Ali had been pulled over the previous year and subsequently convicted of driving without a license. He paid his $270 fine, but skipped out on the 10-day jail sentence until then.
He didn’t seem too upset about it. “Going to jail may be good for me,” Ali told the press before entering prison. “I’ve never suffered. I’ve never been confined or experienced the loneliness and suffering of some of my fellow blacks. This will give me an understanding of how they feel. Also, I might have to do time for that Army thing, and this might be good conditioning.”
But it was more than just “that Army thing”—a five-year sentence for draft evasion, which Ali was appealing—that led him to begin serving his sentence on this particular day. Ali's stint in a Miami jail was also part of a promotion for his new hamburger joint, Champburger, which was set to open its first location at the end of the the month. “To his credit,” the Miami Herald’s Ray Crawford wrote, “he didn’t try to snow the press. He admitted he was looking for publicity.” Indeed, Ali was quite direct: “My main reason for coming here is to open our new Champburger headquarters here.”
The fast food joint would serve “the biggest burger anywhere”—a quarter-pound hamburger that sold for 49 cents, per advertisements. The prospectus for the restaurant also said it would serve “cheeseburgers, hotdogs, fried chicken, fried fish, boiled fish balls, other food products and soft drinks,” specifically Champ Cola, another Ali-sponsored product. “Under the terms of its Agreement with Muhammad Ali,” the company’s prospectus continued, “neither the company nor any of its franchises may sell any food products containing pork or shellfish.” The endeavor was looking to open 200 locations.
Ali, who’d been stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to be drafted, signed autographs and joked around with the press as he prepared to enter jail. The previous day, he’d held a press conference announcing both Champburger's launch and the start of his stint in jail. “There are a lot of heavyweight champions around, but only one real heavyweight champion,” he said. “There are a lot of hamburgers around, but only one champ.” He handed out a copy of an ad with a Champburger graphic and the slogan “We Are The Greatest.”
Ali was released on Dec. 23 as part of a Christmas amnesty for selected prisoners. He wasn’t sure he’d be on the list. In his 1975 autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story, Ali recalled a debate on the radio about whether he should be part of release. “Everyone should get out for Christmas except that draft-dodger,” one woman said. A man called in: “Muslims don’t celebrate Christmas. Keep him there!” He didn’t know if he’d be getting out until a guard opened the cell the day of the amnesty. Ali wrote:
“Does it cover me?” I ask.
He looks down the sheet and finally grins. “You on it too, Champ. The judge had a hard time getting you off. Threats on his life, threats against his family because they wanted you to stay in jail.”
He opens my cell, takes me to a room where the little red-faced man pulls out a cashbox and hands me two dollar bills. “You’re free now,” the man says. I’m halfway down the hall and out of the building when a prisoner rushes up: “You dropped your money.” I tell him to keep it.
I never knew the smell of fresh air was so good. I start walking and somehow I don’t want to stop. I look at the faces of people on the streets and I can’t get enough of seeing them. I look at the cars passing by, the grass, the trees, the birds. I see children and I hear their voices come up to me: “Hey! Champ!” … “That’s Muhammad Ali.” They run over, ask for autographs, and I sign. When I get to the hotel, I strip down and lay on the bed. I prop my head up on a pillow for the first time in a week. I want to sleep.
Ali rested up. Champburger opened on Dec. 28, with Ali in attendance alongside the comedian Flip Wilson. The Miami Times said hundreds attended the opening, adding that “WAME disc jockey Butterball and a rock ’n’ roll band added to the festivities.”
“In 1916,” Adam Chandler wrote in the book Drive-Thru Dreams, “Walt Anderson first performed the magical, calculated act of crafting tiny ground beef patties and then smashing them flat onto a steaming, onion-laced griddle.” To reassure customers scared of the meat industry after reading works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Anderson had his employees cook the burgers on a griddle right in front of patrons. The sliders made Anderson $3.75 in profit on his first day. The motto of his restaurant, White Castle, was “Buy ’em by the sack.”
“White Castle made this big effort to provide this place that looked really clean,” Chandler told Defector. “They would grind the meat in front of the customers and they’d made a big show of everything being choreographed down to the second. Every bit of the experience was just really, really managed. And all the stores look the same, too, and that was meant to convey comfort and familiarity in a sense that you’ll be safe in any of these places wherever you go. Now we think of that as kind of being soulless and corporate, but back then that was a big deal.”
White Castle was an instant and smashing success. Knockoffs with names like Blue Castle and White Tower failed to capture the same magic, but by the 1960s, the country was dotted with chains like A&W, Tastee-Freez, and Dairy Queen. By the time places like Champburger were opening, McDonald’s was well on its way to becoming the largest chain in the country. Franchisee Ray Kroc bought out its founders, the McDonald brothers, and pushed through an ambitious program of expansion that continues more or less to this day. That globe-bestriding empire, and many only slightly smaller ones, was built through franchising.
The franchise system was a boon to company owners. In exchange for a percentage of profits and a franchise fee, franchisees received the rights to operate their restaurants under a set of guidelines laid out by the companies whose recognizable brands gave those franchises value. Those guidelines were generally quite strict; chains still strived for comfort and familiarity even after The Jungle was well out of customers’ minds. From a business perspective, the franchisee took on most of the material risk. Eventually companies would turn to making money from the land under their own restaurants, which they leased to franchisees.
Many of those franchises were start-ups from people in the industry. Kroc was a milkshake machine salesman; McDonald’s was one of his customers before he made his start as a franchisee. The company spread under Kroc; competing fast food franchises like Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken also found success. It was not long until celebrities started getting in on the action—not as franchisees, but as the faces of brands that wanted to expand in the same ways, if not on the same scale, as White Castle or McDonald’s.
The week before Ali reported to prison, Joe Namath was in Miami to open a Broadway Joe’s restaurant. Miami News sports editor John Crittenden described the scene: “When Joe Namath opened his restaurant here last weekend, it was done at great expense—extensive advertising, houseboat cocktail parties, the employment of buxom damsels wearing football jerseys to serve hero sandwiches.”
The celebrity fast-food craze can primarily be traced to the success of Gino’s Hamburgers, a restaurant founded by Joe Campanella, Louis Fischer, Alan Ameche, and Gino Marchetti in the late 1950s. All four had played for the Baltimore Colts, and the first location was in the city’s suburbs. In a city that loved its Colts, a restaurant owned by four of them predictably became a hit.
After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the Blue Castle/White Tower types to arrive. Those knockoffs came in varying forms, but they all had a celebrity attached. Namath had Broadway Joe’s. Johnny Carson had Here’s Johnny’s! Ron Santo had his own pizzas at Wrigley Field. Bart Starr owned drive-ins. Plans were in the works for something called Mickey Mantle’s Country Kitchen. While still with the Steelers, Brady Keys opened All-Pro Chicken. At one point his restaurants were so successful that they partnered with KFC to open Brady Keys’ Kentucky Fried Chicken locations in black neighborhoods. The colonel was pushed aside by a Pro Bowl cornerback.
Other companies attempted similar ideas. Minnie Pearl’s Chicken operated in white neighborhoods. It served the same food as gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken, a name that feels almost but not quite sacrilegious. Glori-Fried Chicken locations were either attached to Gulf gas stations or standalone properties designed by black architectural firm McKissack and McKissack and made to look like a church. (This part feels notably more sacrilegious.)
“It’s getting ridiculous,” an anonymous stockbroker told the Detroit Free Press in January of 1969. “A celebrity sticks his name on a chicken shack and suddenly it's $50 a share.”
Champburger was the brainchild of three white Miamians: Edward Gale, Leonard Lurie, and Philip Brooks. They worked with the Ali associate and Southern Christian Leadership Conference lawyer Chauncey Eskridge to put together a prospectus for the business and looked for investors.
The Champburger prospectus was not promising. The three founders had no prior experience in the restaurant business, which did not augur well for a business that they planned to franchise around the country. The spot’s sole gimmick was that Ali would allegedly show up to the opening of every single Champburger in order to promote that new location. This would become a problem if Ali was in fact imprisoned for draft evasion. “During any period of incarceration, Ali will not be able to personally perform under his Agreement with the company and this fact could have material adverse affect on the company’s business,” the prospectus noted. In its coverage of the new business, the Philadelphia Tribune did not mince words: “The necessary cautious phrasing makes the company sound as if it had a death wish.”
And yet even that ominous prospectus did not deter investors. Champburger stock launched with 200,000 shares at $5 each; the prospectus said directors, including Ali, got 45.2 percent of those. Public shareholders had the remaining 54.8. Founders paid around 25 cents a share. The prospectus said Ali would have 13.1 percent of the company; it seems he actually ended up with about 6 percent. He also got paid $900,000 when the stock launched, with an agreement of 1 percent of gross sales. Ali bought a $10,000 limo.
“Shoot! I ain’t worked for two years and I ain’t been Tommin’ to nobody and here I’m buying limousines—the President of the United States ain’t got no better one,” Ali said, as quoted in Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight. “Just look at it! Ain’t it purty? Y’all go and tell everybody that Muhammad Ali ain’t licked yet. I don’t care if I never get another fight. I say, damn the fights and damn all the money. A man’s got to stand up for what he believes, and I’m standin’ up for my people, even if I have to go to jail.”
Ali’s quote there hinted at another angle on the launch of his burger chain: that it represented a step forward for civil rights. “I’ve entered into this enterprise,” Muhammad Ali told reporters, “because I think it offers a real opportunity for people to share in and own their own businesses in their own neighborhood. Freedom, after all, is when a man can go on his own. Champburger is one way of helping some of us achieve that possibility.”
Ali, who’d adopted his new name and joined the Nation of Islam after his first heavyweight title win, committed to the NOI’s dietary restrictions. But his comments on Champburger were also following Elijah Muhammad’s stated desire for independent black entrepreneurship and capitalism—even if the founders of the company were white. “It is anticipated that the locations of the company's restaurants and franchises will be in areas predominately populated by black persons,” the prospectus read. “Where ever possible, the franchisees of the company and vendors to the company and its franchisees will be black persons.”
That concept was not new. In her book Franchise, Marcia Chatelain explores black capitalism through the lens of McDonald’s. In 1968, Time estimated that just one percent of businesses in the country were black-owned. McDonald’s faced pressure from numerous sources. In Cleveland in 1969, House of Israel leader and black nationalist David Hill organized a boycott of McDonald’s franchises alongside other black organizations. Hill’s initial goal was to land a franchise for Ernest Hillard, a “prophet” who said he got the idea in a dream. The company spurned Hillard, and Hill retaliated by organizing the boycott. It was wildly successful. “Monday, July 14, the Euclid 82nd St. McDonald’s, one of the highest earning McDonald’s in the country, took in only $36.15,” Cleveland’s Call and Post reported. “The St. Clair Store took in $14.70.”
Hill reached a deal to end the boycott in August. McDonald’s did not give a franchise to Hillard, who did not have the capital for a franchise and was shot dead on July 4. But McDonald’s did begin recruiting black franchisees even before it reached a deal to end the boycott in August. Chatelain writes that the move proved to be good for business. Herman Petty opened the first black-owned McDonald’s location in 1968; sales at his Chicago store increased by 75 percent over its first year. NBA Hall of Famer Wayne Embry’s franchise in Milwaukee, where he played the last season of his career, did $450,000 more in sales than projected. (Hill was convicted of blackmail as part of the boycott, and fled to Guyana while out on bail. He led a religious sect there that became affiliated with the government, returned to the U.S. at some point, and died in New Jersey in 2001.)
“Black franchisees’ presence alone did not mean that they would automatically attract black customers, although it did make a difference,” Chatelain wrote. “McDonald’s was popular because it was cheap and it was among the few choices left in black neighborhoods eviscerated after civil insurrections.”
Where grocery stores and neighborhood restaurants had left, McDonald’s moved in. Kroc and other McDonald’s execs understood the value they could get—real estate prices in black neighborhoods declined by 30 percent between 1968 and 1973. “By installing black franchisees, McDonald’s was able to tap into a consumer base that was watching the exodus of big and small business in their communities,” Chatelain wrote. “They were also able to buy up land in the inner city at cheaper prices than in the suburbs. The uprisings had cleared commercial lots, and most business owners preferred to collect an insurance settlement rather than invest in a grand reopening.”
This was not just a matter of real estate arbitrage, either. The idea of a black franchisee owning your local McDonald’s was a selling point, and good for business. “When I used to present on the book when it was a work in progress,” Chatelain told Defector, “I would have a lot of white people be like, ‘Why would I know who franchised my McDonald's? That’s just the weirdest thing to conceptualize.’ And every black person would be like, ‘Yes, I totally know what you're talking about.’”
As Chatelain wrote, McDonald’s basically became a community center for many people in black neighborhoods. The franchise owner would appear on television. Black newspapers and radio would be involved in events. Champburger made that narrative of uplift part of their marketing. Company exec S.H. Latimore told the Fort Lauderdale News: “One of our sole reasons for establishing our restaurants is to boost the black economy—provide jobs and bring business to the area.”
Brady Keys’s All-Pro Chicken was often held up as a model in this space. Keys was named to Richard Nixon’s Advisory Council on Minority Business Enterprise. His company got a $5.5 million loan from the Economic Development Administration and opened the first Burger King in Harlem.
The question of how much anyone involved believed in this narrative of uplift is, predictably, a complicated one. “There’s reason to believe that they actually thought, because they were seeing what McDonald's and Burger King were doing, that this could actually work,” Chatelain said. “It was cynical in the sense that they did not actually own these brands. And this idea that this was an authentic black owned business is not accurate.
“The idea that people thought that this model could ultimately help raise communities and bring a lot of wealth in and create jobs, I think people legitimately believed that there was reason to think that this could actually be something of value.” But exaggerations abounded. The celebrity namesakes were never involved in the daily operations of these restaurants. “James Brown gives a press conference in 1969 saying that he’s no longer going to do music so he can focus on called Golden Platter Restaurant and Convenience Store,” Chatelain said. “These things are not happening.”
Ali, too, said his boxing career was over. In May 1970 he wrote a story in Esquire about what he’d do if he were president, headlined “I’m sorry, but I’m through fighting now.” He wrote that he’d only box again in a series of exhibitions against Joe Frazier, with profits going to charity. “I’m getting together a dope-addict program, rehabilitating addicts,” Ali wrote. “And there are some black welfare women in Los Angeles who want my help because they don’t have clothes for their children. They’re trying to buy a shop where they can make their own clothes, but they can’t get the money. All they’ve got is the seven dollars the government gives them to live on. Me and Joe could put on one boxing exhibition and get them more sewing machines than they could use in a life-time.”
That retirement lasted just a few months. By summer, Ali held a press conference where he renounced his retirement and was seeking a title fight against Frazier in Michigan, where it seemed he might get a boxing license. This was not unusual in boxing; before Ali and Frazier fought for the title in March 1971 in New York, Frazier said he’d retire after the fight no matter the result. Ali would “retire” other times in his career, sometimes announcing a return to the ring within just a few days. In 1976, he “retired” after retaining the title against Ken Norton; his manager said a week later that Ali was simply taking a year off to make a movie about himself.
There were skeptics in the black press both of Ali’s retirements and the idea that these franchises were a valid way to uplift neighborhoods. “I doubt seriously that, in those cases like Muhammad Ali and Mahalia Jackson, where there is nothing but name lending, that these celebrities are going to realize a fortune out of them,” William Walker wrote in the Cleveland Call and Post. “Most of these ventures are really being promoted by whites who are trying to make a quick profit via the sale of stock and get out.”
Five months in, the Champburger directors reported that the initial Miami location, at 17th Avenue and 62nd Street, grossed north of $20,000 a month. Atlanta Community Franchise Inc. bought the Atlanta franchise rights for $170,000, with an agreement to open 10 locations in the next four years.
“My restaurants are booming,” Ali said. “They’re bringing in about $1,000 a day. These 500 Champburgers we're building will take care of me.” He had residual perks, too. “The nice thing about it,” Ali told the Miami Hurricanes football team, “is that I can go into one of those places anytime I want and sit down and order five burgers free.” Ali even had a Champburger basketball team that played before ABA games.
Ali may have continued to get his free burgers, but he never did get those hundreds of locations. Champburgers opened in Atlanta, Baltimore, Harlem, and Washington, D.C. Three more launched in Miami. The stock got as high as $8 a share. But by 1972 it was down to just five cents a share. The restaurants had been outcompeted by chains with bigger pockets: Burger King, KFC, and McDonald’s took the largest share of the market. Champburger became an afterthought, even with its famous spokesman. The value of Ali’s 22,000 shares plummeted to $1,110.
Other celebrity restaurants shared the same fate. Jerry Lucas, then of the San Francisco Warriors, saw his eponymous Beef ’N Shakes go bankrupt, and re-emerge as All-American Beef ’N Shakes instead. Glori-Fried Chicken went out of business; Mahalia Jackson had no involvement in the firm—she had simply received $100,000 for the rights to her name. Brady Keys eventually moved from franchisor to franchisee, owning and operating KFC and Burger King locations before exiting the business in the 1980s. “Inexperienced, unscrupulous managers, poor business strategy, and a generous portion of misfortune were listed as contributing factors,” the Call and Post wrote in its story about the end of Brady Keys’ All-Pro Chicken. “Their locations contributed to their eventual abandonment. Every store is on the black East Side and virtually are all neighbors to McDonald’s.”
Chatelain echoed this sentiment. McDonald’s simply had more money, and the economic shakiness of the 1970s was too much for competitors less equipped to weather that uncertainty. “There was all of this experimentation that is at the intersection of athletics, community groups, and then trying to own a franchise,” she told me. “All of it collapses because there’s not enough capital to support this model.”
As befits its larger than life namesake, Champburger somehow ended with both a bang and a whimper. The corporation dissolved in May 1973 when it merged with Charles Courshon’s Transglobe Films, which was going to use the company’s remaining cash to finance and distribute movies. "There was one called Love Italian Style,” a confidant of Courshon’s told the Miami Herald. “I saw it; it was awful.” Champburger’s lease payments used up all the cash; two men kidnapped Courshon in Miami in 1974. He escaped a half hour later and called police. The kidnappers were caught.
There were no Champburgers by this point. Ali would regain the heavyweight title by knocking out George Foreman later that year. He’d box until 1981.
