Cullen was the only African-American swimmer on the 43-member Olympic team; and John Cruzat, national diversity specialist for USA Swimming, the national body governing competitive swimming in the United States, hopes Jones’s gold will make a big splash in minority communities.

By relocating their luxury and exotic-car dealership from a Long Island suburb to Harlem, New York City’s historical center of Black culture, Macky Dancy and Tyrone Hill are betting that the alignment with the highly recognized, culturally evocative name of Harlem will prove a winning formula.

As the financial crisis that erupted in the United States deepened and spread to Europe and Asia, bank executives, bloggers and newspaper opinion writers throughout Africa hastened to comment on what went wrong in the system that the United States and its allies put in place in 1944 in Bretton Woods, N.H., and why African banks so far have been able to withstand the rout.

You want success so bad that you can taste, drink and see it.  But are you really ready for success? Is your team in place? Here are a few tips to help you prepare for success:

Sixty-four years after the meeting at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, N.H., that remade the global financial system, we are witnessing a financial crisis whose magnitude calls into question the very system put in place in Bretton Woods.

Do everything you can to get your costs down to rock bottom — fire your employees and hire your kids and teenage nephews and nieces. Not only are they inexpensive labor, but you actually get tax breaks for that.

As consumer confidence in big banks larded with distressed mortgage assets weakens, smaller community banks and credit unions are trying to win the hearts and minds — and deposits — of consumers.

The real estate industry is reeling from the collapsed subprime mortgage market and the broader economic downturn, with more than 3.9 million unsold homes on the market, according to a recent report by the National Association of Realtors.

Concern for U.S. small businesses has taken on a stronger voice amid the hand-wringing over the country’s economic and financial turmoil.

As the financial turmoil that erupted in the United States spreads around the globe, the already depressed U.S. auto industry and its counterparts in Europe, China and India are bracing for the worst.

Despite today’s economic hard times, Americans are still buying cars. Here’s our preview of 2009 models from brands that African-Americans favor most.

Gabrielle Austin, Denise D. Campbell, Joy A. Collins, Pamela Browner Crawley, Marvin Ellison, Paul Hagan, William (Bill) Whitman Jr.

For years, Flash software has added pop and sizzle to Web pages, making possible animations, slide shows and interactive games. Now the graphic interface technology is coming to the mobile-phone screen.

Film producer Percy Hall says that he came to the food fest because two years ago, the first time he attended, he simply “fell in love with seeing so many brothers and sisters serving so much wonderful food… I just had to come back.”

Each patch on the intricate quilts helped take slaves one step closer to the freedom they’d only dreamed about.

January is National Glaucoma Awareness Month and, as the month approaches, people should give thought to scheduling an eye exam to guard against this “sneak thief of sight.”

Mention the movie titles Barbershop, Johnson Family Vacation, Street Kings, Madagascar and Talk to Me, plus the television shows The Steve Harvey Show, Def Comedy Jam and It’s Showtime at the Apollo and ask which African-American actor and comedian has been in the entertainment business for 21 years and has been part of all these movies and TV shows.

My Biggest Mistake…And How I Fixed It: Lessons from the Entrepreneurial Front Lines by Marcia Pledger. A Mercy by Toni Morrison. In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Mystery by Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes