For 25 years, Robert Bonner was committed to working under McDonald’s iconic Golden Arches. But by the time the native Floridian had severed ties with the franchise founded in Des Plaines by Ray Kroc in 1955, he burned everything that was related to the restaurant chain — awards, shirts, valuable collectibles — in his backyard.
Bonner was the owner-operator of six McDonald’s stores in Illinois and the St. Louis region. But he left the chain after enduring numerous alleged racist actions from McDonald’s that he says impeded his opportunity for entrepreneurial growth and generational wealth.
“Those Golden Arches … you have the belief that at some point this is going to go the way you were promised it would go,” he said. “The day you get the keys, it becomes an us and them mentality, corporate versus the people who run the store.”
Bonner is among dozens of Black McDonald’s store owners around the nation demanding a jury trial in a racial discrimination and breach of contract lawsuit against McDonald’s Corp. and McDonald’s USA, LLC. This June, Bonner was among more than 40 plaintiffs who called for a boycott of the franchise. The Chicago-based civil rights law firm of Loevy + Loevy filed the federal suit in 2023, stating Black owner and operators were forced out of the company over internal practices and policies that include, among others, forcing Black owners into low-profit stores in areas with high crime rates and denying Black franchisees the ability to buy stores in white communities.
Bonner endured the alleged racist tactics from McDonald’s after becoming an owner-operator in 1990 with an East St. Louis location. Despite recognition for his leadership in the local communities where he operated for over two decades — including investing nearly $1 million into community programs — Bonner severed ties with McDonald’s in 2013.
According to the lawsuit, McDonald’s thwarted Bonner’s attempts to sell his stores at a worthy price and buy new locations on multiple occasions between 2005 and 2013. One such deal was approximately $800,000 for a store, but when the regional manager spoke to the potential buyer, he revealed he planned to buy Bonner’s store for much less, saying “I’ll be damned if I let a Black operator be much richer than me.”
Bonner said he had to sell the store for around 25% less than the deal he had lined up. Bonner even had plans to purchase McDonald’s stores in other states, but the same regional manager got in the way of that potential deal and encouraged the seller not to sell to Bonner.
“They didn’t want to see people of color pass them … we heard that so many times,” Bonner said. “McDonald’s did change my life, but they took so much in so many years. I won’t even go into one of the stores now.”
The lawsuit details the history of racial discrimination against Black franchisees — from its founding in 1955, when McDonald’s installed its restaurants only in white neighborhoods and barred Black individuals from becoming franchisees, to McDonald’s approving Black owner-operators to take over urban stores solely in scenarios where Black franchisees had to partner with a white owner-operator to purchase a location in the 1960s and ’70s. From 1998 to 2020, the number of Black franchisees fell from 377 to 186, while the number of total McDonald’s stores went from 15,086 to 38,999. Stores owned by Black franchisees earn about two-thirds of the average McDonald’s store.
The suit says equitable measures and initiatives to rectify the racial discrimination in the company were never followed through on, increasing the annual cash flow gap between Black and non-Black franchisees. Roughly half of Black franchisees were forced out of the McDonald’s system by 2020, compared with 10% of white owner-operators in the same time frame. Then, in January 2025, McDonald’s announced it was scaling back its commitment to diversity initiatives, which prompted the boycott by the People’s Union USA.
A statement from McDonald’s Corp. denied the allegations in the lawsuit and defended its history with Black franchisees, saying plaintiffs’ allegations are false, a deliberate distortion of facts and a desperate publicity stunt by the lawyers that stand to benefit. “The claims were previously dismissed, and make no sense given McDonald’s record of investment in its franchisees’ success. We look forward to the day these plaintiffs set aside their falsehoods and acknowledge McDonald’s steadfast commitment to the success of our Black franchisees and increasing access to opportunity for all.”
Loevy + Loevy attorney Quinn Rallins said most of the effort to sue in response to McDonald’s practices came about when two former Black vice presidents at McDonald’s — Vicki Guster-Hines and Domineca Neal — blew the whistle. That is when nearly 77 clients in total, approximately 40 he represents, “decided enough was enough,” he said.
The late Sherman Claypool invested in McDonald’s in 1971 and would go on to own five locations in Milwaukee. He was one of the founding members of the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association to advocate for Black franchisees — his work with the association was recognized in a May 2022 resolution passed by the Illinois House of Representatives for laying the foundation for “African American entrepreneurs in the United States today.” Claypool died in October 2020 from stress-induced Parkinson’s, according to his daughter Talyia. From downstate Grand Chain, Illinois, Claypool was a mechanic. He owned two service stations in Wisconsin before he segued to McDonald’s ownership. His widow, Glenda, a native of Milwaukee, is part of the lawsuit on behalf of her late husband.
“I remember he came home one day, he sat outside in the car, and he was like, ‘I can’t do it no more. I can’t do this anymore,’” recalled Glenda Claypool.
According to Talyia Claypool, before the family sold their properties in 2014, she and her sister, Mila, who had worked with her father in their stores since 2010, watched their dad suffer for a decade due to the alleged discrimination McDonald’s posed on his business. They said he was sick for that time, and given the stress, his condition progressively got worse over the last three years he owned the franchise. Sherman Claypool had managed to hang on to the business for 45 years.
“The last announced visit that we had (from corporate), he had a medical episode that morning, and he never had that … that was a routine thing for him, but it had gotten so bad at the end that he had to be seen by a medic before he went to work,” Mila Claypool said. She felt so traumatized by the McDonald’s experience that she left fast-food altogether. She said she wants this lawsuit to be taken seriously, in order to feel heard, seen and, to some extent, get the healing started.
“There were forcible price increases, and the neighborhoods that we were in were in low-income neighborhoods, and it wouldn’t be affordable to the community or to our customers,” Mila Claypool said.
Talyia Claypool remembers McDonald’s forcing her family down to one store, she said. A complete revamp of the computer system in their last store was the one thing the family couldn’t come back from.
“Finances had gotten so bad that we were robbing Peter to pay Paul at one point,” Talyia Claypool said. “We own a store and our lights are cut off, not because we mismanaged money. It’s that we can’t make any because (they) are taking more than we could survive on. There were some good years, but there was a lot of bad. We felt that they tried to hurt us,” she said.
Sherman Claypool faced a series of security issues at his stores with employees frequently being robbed. According to the lawsuit, around 2014 a reckless driver drove into Claypool’s store, which suspended operations for weeks, and another incident prevented customers access to the store for about eight months. Claypool sought financial assistance from McDonald’s for those incidents, but was denied.
When Claypool was offering scholarships to the Black community in Milwaukee from the 1970s to the early 2000s, McDonald’s allegedly forced them to stop the giving. The Claypools said a white McDonald’s field consultant didn’t want to go to that side of town anymore for such events because she was scared, so they think McDonald’s did what they could to stop the scholarship program, despite the hundreds of scholarships Sherman Claypool funded.
“Our experience with McDonald’s is what introduced us to hardcore racism — not where we lived, not the schools we went to,” she said. “If you put us all in a room together, we all have similar stories, and a lot of us don’t even know each other. I was crying going through the stories of the other Black owner-operators. McDonald’s knew what they were doing. They figured out a way to get money off Black people, put some Black faces behind these McDonald’s, and get their money, and at the same token, we’re going to make sure that these people don’t get more than us, don’t get what we have.”
drockett@chicagotribune.com
