Per Wikipedia. Much of this is news to me, I always thought Freedom was the original company, and that Black Lion somehow just picked up the rights in the early CD era. This was fostered by the change in album covers, where I grew up with the Freedom covers, and the Black Lion CD's had all those (to me) inferior-looking black and white covers.
"Freedom Records was a jazz record label headed by Shel Safran[1] and founded by Alan Bates as a division of Black Lion Records.[2]
Individual recordings were distributed via Polydor Records and Transatlantic Records during the early 1970s before the company was bought by Arista Records with the imprint dubbed Arista/Freedom in 1975.[3]"
Here is an example of the covers:
And it actually looks like maybe neither of those was the original cover?: