(FORTUNE Small Business) – In 1943 Mary T. Washington became the first African-American woman to earn a CPA credential. But her greatest achievement came when she launched Chicago's Washington Pittman & McKeever, which hired and trained generations of black CPAs. "She was the pipeline," says Lester McKeever, the firm's managing principal. Washington died July 2 at age 99.

Dick Sabot, who died of a heart attack on July 6 at age 61, was one of the first dot-com millionaires. In 1992, Sabot, an economics professor at Williams College, joined two sophomores in founding Tripod, which offered free web pages to its users. In 1997, Tripod was sold to web-search giant Lycos for $58 million in stock.