Professional smiles, proud faces, and business-clad Black activists sporting perfectly coiffed naturals dot the pages of the Hough Area Development Corporation’s 1974–75 Annual Report, titled Building a Community That Reflects the Soul of Its People. The community activists of Hough Area Development Corporation (HADC) had reason to be proud. Cleveland’s Black activists built an organization whose work ranked among the most unique and innovative of efforts for economic growth in the Black power era. Founded in 1967, several years before this 1974 Annual Report, HADC boasted significant achievements in banking, job training, housing, employment, and individual business ownership. By 1973, HADC had also purchased its own companies—among them two franchise restaurants of the McDonald’s Corporation—which proved to be HADC’s leading businesses in community economic development.

HADC’s acquisition of the two McDonald’s restaurants changed the terrain of Black power in Cleveland in the late 1960s and early 1970s through its embrace of a Black economic development model that both broadened Black access to wealth and challenged narrow definitions of Black capitalism. The McDonald’s restaurants became experiments in a form of community capitalism that eschewed the usual business model of individual franchise ownership and low-wage labor and offered alternative opportunities to build collective wealth over time. In doing so, HADC attempted to strike at the heart of mass poverty and address the realities of financial inequality for the greater Black community. This approach to Black economic power was far more dynamic and potentially transformative than the more recognized and accepted “Black capitalism” that embraced free market ideas and effectively limited wealth to a few.

Two conflicts, however, hampered the success of HADC’s community capitalism project. The first was internal dissension within the Cleveland-based Black nationalist organization Operation Black Unity (OBU), over who should own the McDonald’s restaurants, which ultimately led HADC away from its activist beginnings. The second dispute concerned the transfer of power from executive director DeForest Brown to his successor Frank Anderson. Both developments derailed HADC from its initial mission and eventually hampered the organization’s use of a community capitalism prototype to remedy Black poverty. These conflicts illustrated both the external pressures and the ideological disagreements that foreclosed collective strategies of building Black wealth and economic independence, and contributed to the eventual demise of HADC.