For Adjwoa “Adgy” Hogue, launching a cannabis wellness brand from Oak Cliff is about far more than entering a growing industry. It is about family, culture, entrepreneurship and building something new without losing sight of the community and legacy that shaped her.
Hogue officially launched Ash & Nectar, a hemp and cannabis wellness brand created at the intersection of wellness, culture and the complicated history Black communities have had with cannabis enforcement. Her launch campaign carries a phrase that captures that journey: “From Ledbetter to the Motherland.”
“I grew up in a bookstore called Pan-African, and we’ve always been in Oak Cliff,” Hogue told DW.
That bookstore is Pan-African Connection Bookstore, Art Gallery and Resource Center, the longtime Dallas cultural institution owned by Hogue’s mother, Akwete Tyehimba. For decades, Tyehimba and Pan-African Connection have been deeply woven into Dallas’ cultural fabric, creating a space centered on African history, literature, art, education and community.
For Hogue, however, Pan-African Connection was more than an institution she visited. It was home, a workplace and one of her earliest classrooms in entrepreneurship.
Growing up inside the bookstore also gave Hogue a unique perspective on Oak Cliff itself. She remembers experiencing both the Black and Latino communities that have shaped the area and hearing the stories of people who came through the store. Some of those stories involved cannabis, but they looked very different from the multimillion-dollar legal industry that exists today. Adgy remembers hearing about relatives and members of her community facing serious consequences for drug offenses. She remembers the anti-drug messaging of her childhood and the stereotypes surrounding cannabis use. As a result, she wanted little to do with the plant herself.
“I didn’t want anything to do with cannabis,” Hogue said.
Her perspective began to shift after a visit to Seattle, where she walked into a legal dispensary and encountered something she had not associated with cannabis growing up: normalcy.
“White, Black, old, tech guys, nurses, everybody,” she recalled. “It was a good sense of community inside that dispensary.”
The experience challenged her perception of who used cannabis and what a legitimate cannabis business could look like. When she returned to Texas, the contrast was difficult to ignore. Eventually, Adgy began asking how someone with her background could participate legally in the emerging industry while also creating something that reflected the communities disproportionately affected by decades of drug enforcement.
“I wanted to make sure that not only women and Black women were represented, but people who were affected by the War on Drugs,” she said.
Hogue’s entrance into the industry also comes against a stark historical disparity between cannabis enforcement and cannabis ownership. A 2020 ACLU analysis of FBI data found that Black Americans were 3.64 times more likely than white Americans to be arrested for marijuana possession between 2010 and 2018, despite comparable rates of use. In Texas, more recent data show that at least 24,000 arrests were made for marijuana possession or use in 2022, while Black Texans were arrested for drug offenses overall at more than twice the rate of white Texans. Yet Black participation on the ownership side of the legal cannabis economy has remained comparatively small: a 2017 industry survey found that 81% of U.S. cannabis business owners were white compared with just 4.3% who were Black, while a later 2021 analysis estimated Black ownership at only 1.2% to 1.7%. For Hogue, those disparities add another layer to what it means to build Ash & Nectar legally, intentionally and from the community where her understanding of the War on Drugs first took shape.
For Adjwoa Hogue, Ash & Nectar became part of that answer. The company is designed around incorporating hemp and cannabis-derived products into broader wellness routines, but Hogue also wants the brand to challenge some of the stereotypes that continue to surround cannabis consumers. “You can have a cannabis business and look a certain way. You can consume cannabis and look a certain way,” she said. “You don’t have to fit different stereotypes.” Adgy points to mothers, professionals and people from a wide range of backgrounds who use cannabis products but may not openly discuss it because of the stigma surrounding the plant.
At the same time, entering the industry as a Black woman without significant outside investment has presented another challenge. Hogue said she largely financed Ash & Nectar herself.
“I had to bootstrap this whole thing on my savings and just working hard,” she said.
For Adgy, building the company correctly has meant being intentional about compliance, product development, quality and accessibility. It has also meant navigating a Texas hemp regulatory environment that has continued to shift as lawmakers, regulators and courts debate which products can legally be manufactured and sold.
“I was very intentional when it came to selecting what type of cannabis product I wanted to make,” Hogue said.
Those regulatory questions have influenced everything from the products she considered developing to the costs associated with legally operating the business. Hogue said permitting and compliance expenses can become significant barriers for smaller entrepreneurs trying to enter the industry, particularly those attempting to finance businesses themselves. That is one reason she views the cannabis policy debate as larger than whether someone personally chooses to consume cannabis. For Hogue, it is also about entrepreneurship, employment, wellness and who gets the opportunity to participate in an industry built around a plant that once carried very different consequences in communities like hers.
Built From a Dallas Legacy
If Ash & Nectar represents Hogue’s next chapter, Pan-African Connection represents the foundation underneath it. Watching her mother, Akwete Tyehimba, sustain a business and cultural institution taught Hogue lessons about entrepreneurship long before she considered launching a company of her own.
“How do you sustain a business for 38 years without social media and things like that that we have now? It’s just treating people how they desire to be treated.”
She remembers watching her parents endure difficult periods while continuing to protect the larger vision they had for their family and community. “You can’t get thrown off course because you hit a rock,” Hogue said. Those lessons extended throughout the family. Hogue credits her parents and the community surrounding Pan-African Connection with helping shape the entrepreneurial mindset she and her brothers carry today.
“If it wasn’t for our parents and the bookstore and our customers, we wouldn’t be who we are today,” she said.
That made the location of Ash & Nectar’s founder campaign especially significant. Adgy intentionally returned to Pan-African Connection for the shoot, placing the company she is building directly against the backdrop of the institution that helped build her.
“I wanted to do it in Oak Cliff. I wanted to do it in front of the bookstore because that’s my pillar,” Hogue said. “That’s where I ground.”
Even the imagery was carefully selected. A horse featured prominently in the campaign, connecting Hogue’s personal love of horseback riding with Texas culture and a deeper symbol of freedom. “When you think of Texas, you think cowboys, Longhorns, horses,” she said. But as Adgy developed the concept, the horse came to represent something larger. In a story connected to cannabis criminalization, freedom carries particular significance.
“Once I realized horses do symbolize freedom, I thought it would be perfect for the shoot,” Hogue said.
That symbolism becomes even more powerful through a phrase Hogue carries from her late father: “Forward forever, backwards never.” What began as a lesson from her father now feels almost prophetic as she builds a business in an industry she once feared and that has historically carried significant consequences for families like hers. The horse, chosen to represent freedom and forward movement, visually connects that family mantra to a new generation of entrepreneurship rooted in Oak Cliff. For Hogue, moving forward does not mean leaving the past behind; it means carrying the lessons, sacrifices and people who came before her into places they may not have had the opportunity to enter. In that sense, Ash & Nectar is not simply about where she is going—it is about making sure her history moves forward with her.
Her father’s presence runs throughout the Ash & Nectar story, even if there is some humor in the fact that his daughter ultimately entered the cannabis business. Adgy remembers returning home after college and her father checking her when she came back from a night out, even smelling her breath to see whether she had been drinking or using marijuana.
That memory makes her current career particularly amusing.
“He would probably just be rolling, laughing that I’m out here doing it legally,” Hogue said.
But there is another piece of her father’s philosophy that she believes he would remind her of today: “Always make a way out of no way.” It is a lesson Hogue has already had to put into practice. Ash & Nectar took approximately two years to bring to launch, a process Adgy said included regulatory hurdles and difficult moments behind the scenes that consumers may never see.
“I feel like I’m already—this is gonna sound so cocky—but I feel like I’m killing it,” she said.
There were moments when the complexity of operating legally became frustrating enough that she questioned whether she wanted to continue. But Hogue said she kept returning to the same thought: someone else might be watching. “I have to remember who I’m doing it for and the role model that I’m trying to be for others,” she said. That responsibility is particularly important to Adgy because she wants Ash & Nectar to demonstrate that Black entrepreneurs and people from neighborhoods like Oak Cliff can participate in an evolving industry without abandoning where they come from. Her long-term vision is to make Ash & Nectar part of consumers’ everyday wellness routines, whether someone is decompressing after work, recovering after a workout, coming home after taking the kids to a game or simply trying to slow down.
“Ultimately, I want Ash & Nectar to just become a part of people’s wellness routines,” Hogue said.
Future growth could include additional flavors, formulations and eventually a larger retail presence, although Hogue acknowledges that some of those decisions will depend on what happens next with state and federal hemp regulations. For now, however, reaching launch day is its own milestone. Ash & Nectar begins in Oak Cliff, in front of Pan-African Connection, surrounded by the legacy of a mother who built and sustained a respected Dallas cultural institution and a late father whose words continue to guide his daughter forward.
“From Ledbetter to the Motherland” is therefore more than a marketing campaign. It is Hogue’s attempt to connect where she comes from with where she intends to go—the neighborhood that raised her, the family that taught her entrepreneurship, the communities that experienced the consequences of cannabis criminalization and the cultural institution that remains her foundation.
“I don’t want to forget where I came from when I go to that next level,” Hogue said. “And I don’t want to forget who I’m doing it for.”
For Hogue, the path forward is already embedded in the words her father left behind:
Forward forever, backwards never.
