Mass. marijuana industry is mostly corporate and white. Inside one Boston battle to change that

As dozens of black residents packed the Mildred Avenue Community Center one night in January, it looked like an ordinary — if conspicuously well-attended — neighborhood forum.

Except that there was nothing ordinary about it.

In attendance were three businessmen, each vying for the right to open a storefront in the heart of Mattapan Square, a place that doesn’t usually draw that kind of commercial competition.

All three were black, in a city where business ownership so emphatically tilts white on the racial fault line.

And then there was the product they hoped to sell, one for which the neighborhood has already paid a heavy price in both arrests and altered lives — marijuana.

Read more: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/04/13/entrepreneur/5CWvaqgcRPxzDbRysiHToL/story.html

Cross-posted in the Massachusetts Group.