Aubrey Lewis
*The birth of Aubrey Lewis is celebrated on this date in c. 1935. He was a Black athlete and government investigator.
Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Lewis grew up in nearby Montclair and attended Montclair High School, from which he graduated in 1954. During his high school career at Montclair, Lewis played basketball and won two state football championships with the football team, scoring 49 touchdowns and running for nearly 4,500 rushing yards. Lewis chose the University of Notre Dame from a list of 200 schools that had offered him scholarships.
The Chicago Bears chose him in the tenth round of the 1958 NFL draft, the 113th pick overall, but an ankle injury prevented him from playing professionally. He failed to make the United States team competing at the 1956 Summer Olympics after he stumbled over the last hurdle in his heat at the Olympic trials. In 1961, Lewis was chosen as player-coach of a team representing Newark in the Metropolitan Indoor Football League, which planned to play seven-on-seven games indoors during the winter.
In 1962, he was the first Black member of the first Federal Bureau of Investigation agent training program to include Black people in its 14-week-long training program. In a September 1962 article in Ebony magazine, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the expanded recruiting effort as justified "based on his feeling that Negroes 'need more heroes' to encourage their youngsters." Lewis left the FBI in 1967 to work at Woolworth's before his retirement in 1995.
He was appointed to serve on the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority and the New Jersey Highway Authority. Governor Christine Todd Whitman appointed Lewis in 1997 as a commissioner of the bi-state Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a position he filled until 1999. Aubrey Lewis died on December 10, 2001, at 66. He was survived by his wife, Ann, two daughters, and three sons.
