In July 1964, Rochester, New York, exploded in one of the era’s first so-called race riots. More than anything else, this rebellion highlighted the urgent need for economic development in the nation’s ghettos. The events in Rochester, a mid-sized, financially successful, and predominantly white city, also signaled trouble for a broad cross-section of the nation’s urban centers. This uprising, combined with those in Harlem and Philadelphia, signaled a new form of protest in the Black liberation movement. If Rochester, indeed most cities, was to maintain its postwar prosperity and the peace it brought, the economic wellbeing of the Black community required greater attention. This point, indelibly made by the Rochester rising and others, was underscored in the national press, in government agencies, and in the corporate world, to which Rochester had long been a model.

In this new era, Rochester became a pioneer in the quest for Black economic development, which became something of a buzz phrase in the late 1960s. As urban uprisings swept the nation, the idea of Black economic development acquired wide appeal; it emerged as the latest effort by African Americans to enter the economic mainstream. But in practice it proved to be a contentious and contested concept. For many, economic development of the ghetto would come to mean employment training and nondiscriminatory hiring practices, leading to job placement in existing, predominantly white-owned businesses. For others, economic development was synonymous with Black ownership, of which two approaches predominated. The first revolved around individual entrepreneurship, usually involving small service or commercial-type businesses. The second approach to Black ownership presupposed a separate Black economy, an undertaking in which African Americans, cooperatively and collectively, would own and control the means of production in Black communities. Both approaches were capitalist, in that ownership would be vested in individuals or groups of individuals, although the collective approach also drew inspiration from various socialist economic systems. Proponents of the two approaches, the entrepreneurial and the cooperative, were well represented in Rochester, where myriad national stakeholders—activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, corporate chiefs, and not least, the federal government—closely watched and studied the various models emerging from that city.