Milestones in black business: 1970-1971.

BET Holdings Inc. CEO Bob Johnson became an entrepreneurial celebrity when he completed an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in his cable television and magazine publishing company in 1991, making his Washington, D.C.-based business the first blackowned company t trade on the prestigious New York Stock Exchange. But it was 24 years ago that the stock of black-owned companies were publicly traded for the first time. In 1970, Parks Sausage Co., led by founder and CEO Henry G. Parks Jr., and Johnson Products Co., led by founder and CEO George E. Johnson, debuted on the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation (NASDAQ) and American Stock Exchanges (AMEX).

Baltimore-based Parks Sausage became the first black-owned company to go public, completing a $1.5 million IPO in 1969. Later that year, Johnson Products, the Chicago-based ethnic hair-care products manufacturer, became the first black-owned company to trade on the American Stock Exchange by completing a $6.5 million IPO. Johnson Products traded on AMEX until last year, when it completed a $67 million stock swap in a merger with IVAX Corp., a white-owned cosmetics and pharmaceutical company based in Miami. Parks Sausage traded on the NASDAQ exchange until 1977, when the company was taken private by white investors. In 1980 the company, through the first leveraged buyout of a historically black-owned business, returned to black ownership, but has remained privately held. Parks Sausage, No. 71 on the BE INDUSTRIAL/SERVICE 100, has sales of $22.8 million. Henry Parks, an original be Advisory Board member, died in 1987.

* August 1970 - The first issue of black enterprise was published and distributed by limited circulation to a targeted group of influential black professionals in industry, academia and government. The cover subject was charles Evers, the Mayor of Fayetteville, Miss., and the owner of a shopping center named for his brother, slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers.

Charles Evers was also one of the original members of Be's Advisory Board, which was introduced in the magazine's first issue. In an editorial titled, "Why Black Enterprise?" the board summed up a credo that remains at the heart of Be's mission nearly a quarter century later: "We feel that the health - indeed the survival - of this nation will depend upon the extent to which our ethnic minorities will participate in and profit from its economic system."