He broke into the entertainment business as a teenager, playing comedy clubs in Los Angeles and making his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” at age 18. He gained fame as a host of the 1980s NBC hit “Real People” before founding Entertainment Studios in 1993. That company has grown into an empire, with a film division and nearly two dozen television properties, including the Weather Channel, which it acquired last year for $300 million.
Byron Allen offers his story as a model of African-American economic success. In recent years, he has also fashioned himself a civil rights crusader, battling what he says is the racism in corporate America with lawsuits and incendiary rhetoric.
In his $20 billion lawsuit against Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, Mr. Allen has risked alienating would-be allies like Al Sharpton and the N.A.A.C.P. while drawing the Trump administration as one of his opponents.
“There’s nothing polite about this situation,” Mr. Allen, 58, said in an interview. “I’m going to be loud, proud and I’m going to make a change.”
He filed the lawsuit in 2015, contending that Comcast, after discussing a deal to carry six of his company’s channels, had turned it down in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The nation’s oldest federal civil rights law, it gives “all persons” the same right “enjoyed by white citizens” to “make and enforce contracts” and “to sue.”
The case was thrown out three times before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled last year that the district court had “improperly dismissed” it.
