hrm, The way I usually do it would be something like this...
<table border=0 bgcolor="black" width="60%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2">
<tr bgcolor="white"><Td>Testing testing testing</td></tr>
</table>
Makes a white table, with blackline, although there is another way in CSS to do it, I can't remember though, check out www.webmonkey.com for that 🙂