(FORTUNE Magazine) – Pro basketball star Julius Erving has been doing Coca-Cola commercials for about three years. Now he owns a franchise. Dr. J and other investors paid an undisclosed sum for the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Philadelphia, making it the first Coke bottler to be controlled by blacks and only the second in the soft drink industry. Last June three black investors bought the Seven-Up bottling plant in Flint, Michigan, for $5 million. Erving and J. Bruce Llewellyn, a black New York businessman, bought a majority interest in the franchise; Coca-Cola owns the rest. In 1984 the bottler's revenues exceeded $100 million, which would place it near the top of Black Enterprise magazine's list of the 100 largest black-owned businesses. Back in 1981, Coca-Cola and Seven-Up signed agreements with Operation PUSH, the Reverend Jesse Jackson's Chicago-based self-help organization, acknowledging a ''moral commitment'' to provide greater opportunities to minorities. The agreements first bore fruit in 1983, when Erving, Llewellyn, and comedian Bill Cosby bought shares in Coke's New York bottler, which owned the Philadelphia company. Erving and Llewellyn traded their New York stock for a majority stake in the newly independent Philadelphia franchise. In Llewellyn's view, ''the deal is a breakthrough for minorities, but there are a lot of other things we need to participate in.''