Creativity Quote by Solomon Burke

It lands like street-level economic theory sung in plain clothes: not a complaint about fast food, but a blueprint for power. Solomon Burke frames franchises as “properties,” not guilty pleasures - assets you can purchase, leverage, and pass on. The casual name-check of McDonald’s and KFC does a lot of work. These are the most recognizable symbols of American capitalism, the places where Black labor and Black dollars have long circulated while ownership and profit too often exit the neighborhood. Burke’s intent is corrective, almost impatient: stop treating commerce as something that happens to the Black community and start treating it as something built by it.

The subtext is a critique of integration-as-consumption. Being welcomed as customers isn’t the same as being welcomed as stakeholders. His phrase “our own” doesn’t read as separatism so much as self-determination: ownership that answers to local needs, hires locally, sponsors local institutions, keeps money moving on the same streets where it’s spent. “Invest in the Black community” is the moral clause; the franchises are the mechanism. He’s talking about circulation and control, not branding.

Context matters: Burke came up in an era when Black artists watched wealth siphoned off by labels, promoters, and gatekeepers. That lived experience makes the line feel less like abstract uplift and more like a musician’s version of a contract renegotiation - except the contract is with America itself. The optimism (“it was gonna be a great move”) is deliberate: hope as strategy, not sentiment.