A CONVERSATION WITH BOB JOHNSON

Bob Johnson is America's first black billionaire. He founded the Black Entertainment Television network in 1980 and sold it to Viacom for $3 billion in 2001, but remained BET's chief executive until 2005. He now runs a conglomerate, RLJ Cos., which includes more than 130 hotels (Hiltons and Marriotts), the National Basketball Association's Charlotte Bobcats and other companies.

He remains best known, however, for building the cable television network whose signature programming has been music videos. Many of the videos glorify the high-roller lifestyles of rappers while depicting women as scantily clad sex objects. Johnson himself predicts that criticism of BET's videos will be near the top of his obituary, despite his many other accomplishments.

Johnson talked with Joe Davidson, a Washington Post editor, in March 2007 at RLJ headquarters in Bethesda. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation. A fuller version is in "Being a Black Man: At the Crossroads of Progress and Peril," a recently released book based on a Washington Post series.

Do you still have to confront racism at this point in your career?

Sure. I mean, everybody that I know who's black confronts racism in some form or fashion. For example, when I parked my car next to the Four Seasons Hotel, I went out to get in my car and a white woman opened the back door because she thought I was a chauffeur.

When I owned a farm in Virginia, the white plumber came to fix the plumbing in the barn, where my daughter keeps her horses in the stable, and he saw me going for an early-morning ride with one of my horses. He looked at me and said to me, "If you're coming down here to mop, you better hurry up quick because I'm getting ready to turn the water off."

It's the racism that comes from the inability, in my opinion, of white America to process the fact that black Americans deserve at all times to be treated with respect. And sometimes they assume that we are undeserving because that would put us on equal footing with them.

What do you think the impact of your success has been on other black people?

I know a lot of people who seem very proud of what I've accomplished. On the other hand, the fact that there's only one of me points out that it's not having a ripple effect in terms of more opportunities for significant wealth creation happening.

How many black millionaires have you made?

If you discount the guys on the [Charlotte Bobcats] basketball team (laughter), I would say at least 14 or 15. I'll put it this way: I have personally made more African Americans multimillionaires than any other company in America, and that includes white corporations.

Yet, when he was asked why he took "The Original Kings of Comedy" [concert film] to MTV instead of BET, Spike Lee said, "We didn't want to be paid in sandwiches." And there was an NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] ruling that BET, while you were running it, illegally threatened to fire [technicians and engineers] because they were going to form a union. So while you've made a lot of black millionaires, on the other side of the spectrum are the working-class folks who feel that they've been treated unfairly by your company. How do you respond to that?