Filed under: News
From the Root:
Don Barden, the first African American to own a Las Vegas casino and the first to own a major cable TV franchise, has died.
Barden built homes in Detroit and a business in Namibia. Ebony magazine, the TBS cable network, Black Entertainment Television and Black Enterprise magazine have all honored him as a top national business leader. He most recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Michigan Chronicle newspaper and an Award of Excellence from the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund in 2006.
He started Barden Cablevision and 1979 and transformed it into one of the nation's biggest black-owned businesses, selling it in 1994 to Comcast. Then, in 2001, he became the first black person to own a Las Vegas casino.
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