A member of the Code Switch team — who shall remain nameless, but whose name rhymes with Tatt Mhompson — was recently winding his way through the recesses of Amazon when he stumbled across an ad for McDonald’s that appeared in Ebony back in 1972. (Don’t trouble yourself trying to figure out just what Ma … er, Tatt was searching for to come to this result. Your head will hurt.)

Here’s what that ad looked like.

McDonald’s has long marketed to consumers of color as aggressively as any big corporation. It was one of the first corporate customers of Burrell Communications, the longstanding, highly decorated multicultural advertising agency. While we take for granted that there are lots of people of color in mainstream commercials, the world was much different in those awkward early days of culturally targeted marketing. But a journey through this history offers a (hilarious) reminder of what has and has not changed in the art of selling burgers to brown people.

What we found when we started digging through the archives was that McDonald’s was deeply concerned with black folks getting down. (Excuse us: gettin’ down.)

For the full article, including links to McDonald’s ads and commercials, click here to visit NPR’s CodeSwitch article