Black Owned Business

He makes his 6-foot-3 presence quietly felt. You'd never guess Jean S. Fugett Jr. was a lawyer, broadcaster, former newspaperman, Super Bowl veteran, Amherst scholar. Nor would he likely volunteer that he is the younger brother and successor of the late Reginald F. Lewis, one of America's boldest entrepreneurs who engineered the success of TLC Beatrice International Holdings Inc., by far the nation's biggest black-owned company. "Those things have to be forced out of him," said Lee A. Archer Jr.

Alleging discrimination against blacks, three African American contractors have filed an $800-million civil rights lawsuit against the city of Lynwood and three Latino council members, according to the plaintiffs' lawyers. The suit, filed Monday, alleges that Mayor Armando Rea, Mayor Pro Tem Arturo Reyes and Councilman Ricardo Sanchez ended city contracts with black-run organizations and sought to fire, demote or transfer black employees in city management.

Seeking to bring badly needed jobs to their area's residents, religious leaders and black-owned contractors from southern Los Angeles have banded together to pressure damaged businesses to award the contractors post-riot construction work. More than two dozen black-owned contractors have formed a corporation, called United Minority Contractors, seeking to boost their chances to receive potentially lucrative post-riot construction work.

Just days ago, one of America's most beloved pop singers offered to team up with Motown Records chief Jheryl Busby in a pitched legal battle against MCA Records, Motown's minority-owner and former distributor. An angry Stevie Wonder said he would personally take Motown's case to top executives at Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., MCA's Japanese parent. "Stevie told me, 'This can't happen to Motown,' " Busby recalled. " 'It has gone beyond pure business . . .

Since its opening in 1981, the Baldwin Hills Theater in Los Angeles has stood as a symbol of pride to its mostly black patrons and a reminder to the nearby Hollywood entertainment community that black neighborhoods, traditionally under-served by major chains, will support top quality theaters showing first-run films.

Robert Johnson, owner and founder of the Black Entertainment Television cable network, said Friday that he expects to launch the nation's first African American-owned movie studio by the end of the year. Johnson, whose BET Holdings is one of the most successful black-owned enterprises in the country, plans to produce black-themed movies for release in theaters as well as made-for-TV films for his cable network.

Many of the nation's largest cities--Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Atlanta--have a well-established black business community where residents shop and dine. Like other ethnic groups, blacks historically have gravitated to their own neighborhoods, where they take their laundry to the black-owned dry cleaner down the street and buy milk at the corner market. But the racial mosaic of Orange County is much different from other metropolitan areas.

Although the weak economy is playing havoc with many small- and medium-sized businesses, some of Southern California's black entrepreneurs say they are riding out the recession well. Several of the 250 business owners signed up for the third annual Los Angeles Black Business Expo said in interviews that adversity forces them to be more creative, but overall, they are doing fine.

In the 12 years that Gregory B. Boyd spent working in corporate lending departments at banks in California and Texas, his employers helped finance only one minority business. Now, as a principal of a new Los Angeles venture capital fund, Boyd hopes to improve the odds for cash-strapped minority entrepreneurs. Backed with $500,000 in seed money from Lynwood-based Economic Resources Corp.

Oliver A. Trigg Jr. was on the Hawaiian island of Maui on Aug. 4, savoring the greatest coup of his short career: his $1.24-million takeover of Family Savings & Loan, the nation's fourth-largest black-owned thrift. As Trigg celebrated his success, events 2,675 miles away in Los Angeles cast a shadow over his day in the sun.