(FORTUNE Magazine) – Regular readers of FORTUNE may well react with a classic double-take upon first spying this issue's triple-fold-out cover. To put it candidly, some may well ask: "What are all those black people doing on the cover of FORTUNE?" Truth is, in our 67-year history, very few blacks have appeared in our pages, much less on our covers. For most of that time, the omission was because the circles of power in business were themselves devoid of nonwhite minorities, as well as women.

This cover, which trumpets a special report on the new generation of African-American business leaders, is very much about challenging some lingering assumptions regarding blacks and business. The most important of these is that highly successful, intelligent, and respected black corporate executives and entrepreneurs are still a rarity. Wrong. As you will learn from the package of stories put together and supervised by editor-at-large Roy S. Johnson, there's a growing crowd of African-American men and women who are taking their seats at the tables of business power.

And it's no coincidence that this issue coincides with the National Urban League's upcoming annual conference, whose theme this year is "Economic Empowerment: The Next Civil Rights Frontier."

Don't misunderstand. Most of the subjects of our report make it clear that they regard themselves primarily as successful business people, not as civil rights pioneers. But as Johnson points out, this is the first generation of African-Americans who've lived most of their lives after 1964, when the passage of the Civil Rights Act legally guaranteed their right to participate in the system. "Because of that," he says, "we were the first group of blacks whose parents could look us in the eye and say without hesitation, 'You can be anything you want.' Of course, they didn't say it would be easy."

Roy, who was born in 1956, educated at Stanford, and was a sportswriter and columnist for the Atlanta Constitution, the New York Times, and Sports Illustrated before joining FORTUNE, says one of the most gratifying aspects of this project was the cover photo shoots, which turned into impromptu summits at which a lot of those new business leaders met one another for the first time. "These are all highly motivated people who absolutely refused to let the burden of race hinder them," he says. "But most of them still appreciate the role race plays in their everyday life, and they are appreciative of those who went before them and paved the way."