For some reason after I imported an auto rig into my character the character turned black. I can get yellow wireframe over the black but can't seem to un-blacken the dude (see pic) Thanks!

Hard to say what's causing it without the .hip file (with your file sop locked). But offhand, that looks like pretty bad geometry to work with for character animation in the first place.

Do you have a light in the scene? If so, does it point to a funny direction?

To the right of your 3D viewport there is a button with a yellow arrow pointing at a light called “Use headlight instead of object lights”. Try that one and see if it makes any difference.

you *could* also need to place a reverse node down at the geometry level to flip the normals.

Got the same problem sometimes when importing from Realsoft3D. I use an Extract node but for the whole object, turn the original invisible an work on the extract.

Two issues: One with handedness and the other the lack of vertex normal display support in Houdini10.

Houdini being Left Handed and the geometry coming from a right handed world, yes you need a Reverse SOP.

Second the vertex normals are promoted to point normals giving you the black shading.
Add a Point SOP and either blow away the normals or build new ones. I choose to blow them away.
Mantra does support vertex normals at render time but not handled very cleanly in SOPs at the moment.