"There's obviously going to be a shakeout," said John Washington, president of Doley Govan Securities, a small black-owned firm based in New Orleans.

Among the most outspoken executives of established black firms is Napolean Brandford 3d, vice chairman of Grigsby Brandford & Company, a black-owned firm in San Francisco.

"Certainly the black-owned firms have been very prominent, and the women-owned firms have, frankly, been not," he said.

Lazard, based in New York, is Wall Street's largest black-owned firm.

The first black-owned firm to be licensed by the National Association of Securities Dealers was McGhee & Company, whose Georgia-born founder, Norman McGhee, hung out his shingle in 1952.

He ended up as an investment banker on Wall Street and started one of the first black-owned firms, M. R. Beal & Company.

Under Jackson's leadership, a key goal was to encourage massive boycotts by black consumers as a means to pressure white-owned businesses to hire blacks and to purchase goods and services from black-owned firms.

"African American Architects in Current Practice" by Jack Travis (Princeton Architectural Press, 1991) notes that architectural scholarships for minorities have now waned and that black-owned firms rely on now-scarce public commissions.

Indeed, the other firms that received fees for this bond offering - including 11 other women- or black-owned firms - all sold bonds.

It continues to operate as the James M. Wilkerson Funeral Establishment, Inc. [1] and is one of the oldest black-owned firms in the United States.