lawyer public official athlete
William Henry Lewis was born on November 28, 1868 in Berkeley, Virginia, (later part of Norfolk), United States, the first of four children of Ashley Henry Lewis, a Baptist minister, and Josephine (Baker) Lewis. Both parents had been slaves but had been manumitted several years before the Emancipation Proclamation.
William attended public schools in Portsmouth, Virginia and the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute for blacks in Petersburg. On the strength of his excellent academic record, he went on in 1888 to Amherst College in Massachusetts. At Amherst, Lewis excelled as both scholar and athlete. He was a prize-winning debater and a star football player. Widely popular with his fellow students, in his senior year he was chosen as class orator and was captain of the football team--the first black to be so honored in the Ivy League. He received the B. A. degree from Amherst in 1892 and entered Harvard Law School. As a law student, Lewis gained a reputation as a promising defense attorney, particularly on the basis of his showing in the law school's mock trials. He received his LL. B. in 1895.
While studying Lewis worked as a groom in the stables of Rev. Julius H. Seelye, president of Amherst College, who gave the youth both financial and moral support. He started his football career at Amherst College and continued at Harvard Law School. Although weighing only 170 pounds, he anchored, at the center position, a Harvard line that averaged 200 pounds, and during his second Harvard season he served as temporary captain. In both 1892 and 1893 he was named by Walter Camp to his All-American team--again the first black to win this distinction. Lewis retained a close association with football throughout his life. He wrote A Primer of College Football (1896), and although in 1898 he turned down an offer to become football coach at Cornell, he assisted in coaching at Harvard for a number of years.
In 1895 Lewis began practice in a Boston law office. He later became senior partner in the firm of Lewis, Fox, and Andrews. While at Harvard, he had shown an interest in civil rights. In 1893, when he was refused service in a local barber shop, he secured the aid of Burton R. Wilson, a talented black lawyer, and succeeded in getting the Massachusetts legislature to amend its 1865 equal rights statute. The earlier statute pertained to licensed inns, public amusement centers, public conveyances, and public meetings. The amended statute broadened its definition of public facilities to include theaters, skating rinks, barber shops, and any public place kept for hire, gain, or reward, whether it be required to be licensed or not and whether it have a license or not. Lewis gave up an active role in civil rights, however, after his marriage. One reason may have been that his wife, a fair-skinned mulatto, was uncomfortable in discussions about race and refused to allow them in their home. Even more important, perhaps, was Lewis' growing friendship with the moderate black leader Booker T. Washington.
In any event, Lewis pursued a career within the established political tradition. In 1899 he was elected to the first of three one-year terms on the Cambridge common council, and in 1902 he won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He was defeated in his bid for reelection the following year, at which point Booker Washington used his influence with President Theodore Roosevelt to secure Lewis an appointment as assistant United States attorney for Massachusetts (1903 - 1906). Lewis next served as assistant United States district attorney for the six New England states (1907 - 1911), with responsibilities for naturalization and other proceedings. In 1911 President William Howard Taft appointed him assistant attorney general of the United States. Soon after his appointment, Lewis, on the initiative of some of his Boston associates, was made a member of the American Bar Association. When his race became known, however, the national officers, citing a "settled practice" to confine the association to whites, rescinded his election and referred the matter to the next convention. In the ensuing public controversy, Lewis had the firm support of Attorney General George W. Wickersham, who threatened to resign his own membership if Lewis was refused. In 1912 the association confirmed the membership of Lewis and two other blacks but with the proviso that no "member of the colored race" should in future be proposed without being explicitly identified as such.
Leaving office with Taft in 1913, Lewis returned to Boston and formed a new law firm with Matthew L. McGarth, a jovial Irishman more noted for his ability to find clients than for his legal skill. Lewis' football fame had assisted his start in the law, but by now he had established a reputation for his dominating courtroom style. Lewis was successful in defending many clients, and when the evidence was overwhelmingly against them, he often secured less than the maximum penalty. His defense of a Providence, R. I, black accused of murdering a white physician earned Lewis praise for his "natural genius as an orator" and succeeded in obtaining a sentence of life imprisonment for his client at a time when the death penalty was common.
In the 1920's Lewis had a highly remunerative practice as counsel for accused bootleggers. His most celebrated case occurred in 1941, when he appeared as defense counsel in the impeachment trial of his old friend Daniel H. Coakley, who was a member of the executive council of the governor of Massachusetts and was found guilty of using the influence of his office to obtain paroles for criminals. In 1948, at the age of seventy-nine, Lewis defended several members of the Revere, Massachusetts, city council accused of corruption. Shortly afterward a series of heart attacks forced him to retire.
In later life Lewis made his home in Dedham, Massachusetts, but after his wife's death in 1943 he moved to Boston, where he died of a heart attack on New Year's Day, 1949. After a high requiem mass attended by Gov. Robert F. Bradford, former mayor of Boston James M. Curley, Charles Francis Adams, and other Boston notables, he was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
Lewis was likely the first African American football player to be recognized as an All-American. He was the author of one of the first books on football tactics. He was the first African American to be appointed as an Assistant United States Attorney and was the among the first African Americans to be admitted to the American Bar Association.
Lewis became a convert to Roman Catholicism.
Of medium complexion, with a face more rugged than handsome, dressed in fashionable and expensively tailored clothes, he made a strong impression.
On September 23, 1896, Lewis married Elizabeth Baker of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a student at Wellesley College. They had three children: Dorothy, Elizabeth, and William Henry. Mrs. Lewis took the children to France for a time so that they could be educated there. The first daughter married a Frenchman; the second committed suicide as a young adult. William H. Lewis, Jr. , became a lawyer and joined his father's firm.
