A CONVERSATION WITH BOB JOHNSON

Sunday, September 16, 2007

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?

Well, I respond to it the same way any business person would. I didn't need Spike Lee's product to make money. So if he took it to MTV, that's fine, that's what an open market is. It allows you to sell your product to whoever you want to. You can call me cheap, you can call me what you want, but I'm doing what's in the best interest of my shareholders, which is to make profit, not in the best interest of Spike Lee.

On the question of unions, I hold my company's performance against any union in the country. First of all, during my tenure at BET, we had 100 percent health care for everybody, no contribution by the individuals, 100 percent health care. We provided emergency loans to people when they had problems. We gave African American executives and technical people a chance to work in fields where the unions wouldn't even let them join the unions. You go ask the people out in Hollywood how tough it is to get in some of the guilds, the unions. To me, unions exist to pay the union executives. And not necessarily to pay the employees. . . .

Now, how many top black union bosses are there? Go to the unions and ask them where's their Ken Chenault [black chairman and chief executive of American Express], their Dick Parsons [black chairman and chief executive of AOL Time Warner], their Stan O'Neal [black chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch]. Ask them where's the next black guy in the pipeline to become the next head of the UAW [United Auto Workers] or the Teamsters. They can't point to them.

At one point you said that on your tombstone it'll say, "Here lies Bob Johnson, America's first black billionaire, who was thoroughly criticized throughout his career for playing music videos."

It'll read like that because BET was the only one of its kind; it was a company that created a lot of expectations, and it's a company that's critiqued by two [types of] people, mainly: black journalists who worked for white newspapers and white journalists who believed that a business that was created to make money by a black person is not what black people should do.

Most white people who are journalists do not believe in black wealth creation. They don't believe in wealth creation anyway. They tend to be very liberal, they tend to be believing that the income from the wealthy should be dispersed from the rich to the poor. So when they see a black wealthy person, they say: "I don't understand how you can be accumulating all this wealth when you should be putting all this money back out to black people. Because that's what you're supposed to do, you're not supposed to be rich. You're supposed to be giving this money back."

And then the black reporters, many of them who wanted to prove that they could be tough to their white editors, would say, "Let me go out and beat up on Bob Johnson because then I'll make my bones by beating up on this black man who's running this business."

But I think you do have to acknowledge that there were a lot of social-activist types who complained about the booty-shaking videos.

The problem was I just happened to be one of a kind. If there were six other BETs at the same time I was there, then the social activists would go to the all-talk channel, and the religious people could go to the religious channel, and the liberal leftist could go to the liberal leftist black channel, and the non-booty-shaking people could go to that channel.

So the booty shakers would go to BET?

And the booty shakers would go to BET. That's the way it is with anything.

How would you define your political philosophy? Has it changed over the years and as you've acquired more wealth?

What's that old saying, "You become more conservative the more you have to conserve"? I don't buy that notion. I am absolutely the same that I've always been. Black America has been historically, systematically denied access to the wealth of this nation. And it's for that reason we are so far behind [in] just about every industry. And that was perpetuated by this society. And I think that there's a rational basis for making it up, for doing something that's far beyond affirmative action to make it up.

What would be something that goes far beyond affirmative action?

Mandated goals to say if you use the public airways, if the public airways belong to the public, we're going to mandate that 30 percent of the radio stations be owned by black people. If you're getting money from the government -- I'm buying 2 million cars a year from the top auto manufacturers -- I'm gonna mandate that you spend X billion dollars with minority suppliers. If you're getting oil mining rights, I'm gonna mandate that there be X number of black-owned gas stations. That's the only way you'll ever get there. It's like I say, if you think that there should be another African American owner of a sports team, how do you think there will ever be one?