Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes

3. The Strange Career of William Henry Lewis

This photograph of William Henry Lewis originally appeared in his 1896 instructional book, Primer of College Football. 1WIGGINS_pages_i-132.qxd 9/12/06 11:46 AM Page 38 3 The Strange Career of William Henry Lewis G R E G O R Y B O N D Today, William Henry Lewis is most famous as the answer to trivia questions about numerous African American “firsts,” but in the early twentieth century he was one of the most well known and newsworthy blacks in the country. Lewis was a true Renaissance man who achieved remarkable success in each of his chosen avocations, and his career demonstrated both the integrationist possibilities for successful and respectable blacks and the very real limitations that these members of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” faced in an increasingly segregated United States. A native of Virginia, Lewis lived most of his life in Massachusetts, and he came to embrace his adopted state for its relatively liberal racial atmosphere that afforded him uncommon—and at times unparalleled—opportunities in intercollegiate football, the legal profession, and the political arena. The son of former slaves, Lewis rose through the American educational system from the all-black campus of the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute to the integrated halls of Amherst College and Harvard University. Lewis first garnered national attention for his athletic accomplishments, impressing the Eastern sports establishment with his powerful, quick, and agile play at the centre rush position. On the field, he earned considerable respect and numerous accolades that culminated with positions on two of Casper Whitney’s prestigious All-American squads. After his playing days, he continued to find opportunities in the Ivory Tower and moved to the sidelines to help coach the Harvard football team for more than a decade. Lewis’s achievements as a public figure were also impressive. An able politician, he represented his mostly white neighbors on the Cambridge 1WIGGINS_pages_i-132.qxd 9/12/06 11:46 AM Page 39 City Council and in the Massachusetts Statehouse. Drawing on his positive experiences at integrated colleges, he also became a strong advocate for civil rights and fought hard for African American equal opportunity. Early in his career, he used his considerable legal and oratorical skills to confront segregationists, but Lewis slowly abandoned his radical agenda in the face of increased white resistance and rapidly deteriorating race relations. When his electoral success ended, he relied on patronage positions from influential friends like Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington for the continuance of his political career. He received numerous powerful federal appointments in the years before World War I, but, in return, he had to forsake the confrontational politics of his youth. To the chagrin of some black leaders, Lewis adopted Washington’s accommodationist strategy and harnessed the power of the Tuskegee machine to rise through the federal bureaucracy to the rank of United States assistant attorney general. Despite his success, Lewis was forcefully reminded of the limitations of Jim Crow when the American Bar Association tried to draw the color line and expel him from the organization. William Henry Lewis was born on November 28, 1868, in Berkeley, Virginia, a small town near the city of Norfolk. His parents, Ashley Henry Lewis and the former Josephine Baker, were ex-slaves who had received their freedom prior to the Civil War. Lewis’s father fought briefly with the Union army and received his first education in an army camp. He would become a prominent Baptist minister in the Norfolk area, but the 1870 census found the twenty-six-year-old Ashley listed as a laborer supporting his wife and one-year-old William. Fifteen years later, the elder Lewis had received his pulpit, and his family had welcomed two daughters and two more sons.1 From an early age, William showed an interest in learning, and, years later, Booker T. Washington related the genesis of his friend’s intellectual curiosity: “Mr. Lewis has told me that he received many a good thrashing for running away at night to attend the trial of some of the cases that were once famous in the annals of Portsmouth courts.” Washington accurately surmised that “a murder trial is not, perhaps, the best sort of amusement for a boy,” but, he just as rightly observed, “the excitement of these murder trials, in which some of the keenest minds in the state were pitted against each other...