Back in June, I blogged about the Mahalia Jackson Chicken System after I had seen one of their old buildings in Tallahassee. The African-American franchise venture was started in 1968 by Dr. Benjamin Hooks and State Representative A. W. Willis Jr in Memphis as an experiment in Black entrepreneurship. Mahalia Jackson had always been a supporter of Black business as well and had her own recipe for fried chicken. Besides that, it was the late 1960’s, and thanks to Colonel Sanders, franchising was the hottest thing going. Some research in old newspapers at the University of Memphis led to these photos and advertisements from the Dallas, Texas store, which was on Forest Avenue in South Dallas. While the logo and graphics are the same, the building architecture is slightly different from the standard ones seen in Orange Mound on Park Avenue, in Milwaukee, in South Memphis or in Tallahassee. Now if I could only find their chicken recipe…