*BLACK HISTORY MONTH* BOB JOHNSON

(born April 8, 1946, Hickory, Miss., U.S.) American businessman, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), and the first African American majority owner of a major professional sports team in the United States.

Johnson grew up in Freeport, Ill., as the 9th of 10 children. He majored in history at the University of Illinois (B.A., 1968) and, after studying public affairs at Princeton University (M.A., 1972), moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Urban League. He began cultivating valuable political and business connections that later helped him bankroll his vision of creating a black-owned cable television company. As a lobbyist for the nascent cable industry from 1976 to 1979, he noticed that the large African American TV audience was going unrecognized and untapped. Johnson built BET from a tiny cable outlet, airing only two hours of programming a week in 1980, to a broadcasting giant that claimed an audience of more than 70 million households.READ FULL ARTICLE