The New York Times called African American attorney William Henry Lewis “one of the most eloquent pleaders before the Massachusetts Bar.” He was born in Berkley, Va., on Nov. 28, 1868, the son of former slaves Ashley Henry Lewis and Josephine Baker.
He received his early education in the public schools in Portsmouth. After sitting for days in the county courthouse in Berkley, impressed by the oratory of Southern lawyers, he wanted to become an attorney. At the age of 15, Lewis attended the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (VNCI) in Petersburg. He paid his tuition by working as an errand boy in the U.S. Congress and performing odd jobs at local hotels.
Abolitionist and attorney John Mercer Langston, president of the institute, introduced Lewis to U.S. Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, with whom his connection enabled him in the fall of 1888 to enroll at Amherst College with African Americans William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson, his VNCI classmate, and George Washington Forbes. Lewis distinguished himself as an exemplary scholar and, in his senior year, served as captain of the school’s football team. In fact, he and Jackson became the first two Black college football players at a predominantly white college or university.
In 1892, Lewis enrolled at Harvard Law School. At 5 feet 11 inches tall and just 175 pounds, he
played the center rush position on Harvard’s football team, becoming a two-time All-American and one of the best center rushes to ever play on the squad.
Lewis became the fourth African American to graduate from Harvard Law School. He gained admission to the Massachusetts bar in 1895 and set up a law practice at 804 Barristers Hall in Boston, associating with white attorneys John L. Dyer and Albert A. Bridgham. He was president of the Amherst Alumni Association, and a member of the Middlesex Club and the Young Men’s Republican Club of Cambridge.
Twice denied service at a Harvard Square barbershop because of his race, Lewis, assisted by Butler R. Wilson, persuaded the Massachusetts Legislature to amend the state’s public accommodations law. The 1885 law prohibited excluding people from public places of amusement on the basis of race or color. On May 26, 1893, House Speaker George von Lengerke Myer of Boston introduced to the State House a bill aimed at banning racial discrimination in barbershops and “other public places kept for hire, gain or reward.” It was signed into law by Governor William Eustis Russell, a Democrat.
In 1896, Lewis married Wellesley College graduate Miss Elizabeth Baker, a Cambridge beauty.
They made their home 226 Upland Road, and the couple had two children.
The William Lewis of the 1890s was a provocative orator who demanded civil and political rights for African Americans and disagreed with Black leader Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist philosophy. Welcoming the National Convention of Colored Men to the Ebenezer Baptist Church on West Springfield St. on Aug. 10, 1896, Lewis told the delegates, “The Negro unites today to ... demand that he be made in reality what he is in name — an American citizen, with all the rights, privileges and immunities appertaining thereto.”
In 1899, Lewis launched a successful bid from Ward 5 for a seat on the Cambridge Common Council. He served through 1901.
Booker T. Washington
After the turn of the century, the tone of Lewis’s rhetoric became more conciliatory, to the chagrin of radicals like Trotter. Instead of agitating for civil and political rights, Lewis expressed guarded optimism the future of Black people in the United States. “We have seen in our day individuals like Douglass, Bruce, Washington and Du Bois attain and partly enjoy perfect equality with the white man.
These examples show the possibilities of the masses,” he told a reporter in August, 1901.
In October 1901, the Ward 5 Committee nominated Lewis to fill a soon-to-be-vacated seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Albeit S. Apsey, the occupant of that seat, had announced his intention to run for state senator. Representing the 5th Middlesex District, Lewis in 1902 served in the State House and as a member of its Judiciary Committee; however, in his bid for re-election on Nov. 4, 1902, Democrat Frederick S. Dietrick defeated him by 134 votes.
During this period, Lewis’s political philosophy underwent a major transformation. “When I realized that there were many good men and women as sincerely devoted to the same cause of man as myself,” he recalled, “I began seriously to examine myself, to ask could they all be wrong and myself only right.”
In his words, Lewis “saw the light and became a friend and follower” of Booker T. Washington, relying on his political influence to secure high-level government employment Indeed, on Washington’s recommendation, President Theodore Roosevelt directed Henry R Moulton, U.S. Attorney of Boston, to appoint Lewis 3rd Assistant U.S. District Attorney in January 1903, making him the first African American to hold that position.
He was promoted to 2nd Assistant U.S. District Attorney in 1904 and served as head of the New England region of the Bureau of Naturalization from 1907 until 1909.
In Oct 1910, President William Howard Taft announced Lewis’s nomination as the first African American Assistant Attorney General of the United States, the highest office in the executive branch of government offered to any black man then. Despite strong opposition from southern senators, he won confirmation in June, 1911.
In 1913, shortly after Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated president of the United States, he segregated all federal employees by race and discharged Lewis. Although President Taft recommended him for a judgeship on the Massachusetts Superior Court, Governor Eugene N. Foss refused to appoint him. For Lewis, the political patronage ended. That year he resumed the private practice of law at 294 Washington St. in Boston.
After Washington died on Nov. 14, 1915, Lewis began to repair his damaged relationship with the more radical elements of Boston’s civil rights community. At a federal court hearing before U.S. Commissioner William B. Hayes, Lewis, Richard W. Hale, president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, and African American attorneys Buder R. Wilson and Charles Lyke Raysor successfully defended John L. Johnson, a Black man who fled Charleston, WVa., after being indicted for violating the White Slave Act. Pleased with the result of that case, Trotter called it “the greatest triumph of justice over lynching in the South ever won.”
About Lewis, The Berkshire Evening Eagle wrote, “Friend to the great and the insignificant, the lawyer devoted his life particularly to the service of defendants who, for lack of money or other reasons, were without legal help.” William Henry Lewis died on Jan. 1, 1949 of a heart attack at the age of 80, leaving a son, William H. Lewis Jr., Esq. of Dedham, and a daughter, Mrs. Pierre Vecken of Paris, France.
