A head for figures.

• Position: Conduct of life of accountant Nathan Garrett

Nathan Garrett says he was halfway through an accounting program at Wayne State University when a professor told him, "You're a great student, but there's no demand for blacks in accounting."

Now, at 61, he's been elected to a one-year term as president of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy Inc., which oversees state licensing of CPAs.

Garrett is the fourth child of Durham pharmacist York Garrett. "He's 97 and still practicing," Garrett says. In 1948, the elder Garrett saw his son become a member of what was then Yale's largest black class. "There were four of us," Garrett recalls.

After graduating in psychology in 1952, Garrett spent two years in the Army at Fort Jackson, S.C., then headed to his wife's hometown of Detroit, where he got an accounting degree from Wayne State. "The only private firm in Michigan that would hire me was a black firm, Richard Austin and Co."

When he moved back to North Carolina in 1962 -- the family of his wife, Wanda Jones Garrett, called it "going behind the Cotton Curtain" -- he was the second black CPA in the state. Today, North Carolina has 10,500 CPAs, about 200 of them black, Garrett estimates.

A year after he opened his own office in Durham, his gross revenue was about $5,000. "My secretary got more than...