Reginald Lewis
On this date in 1942, Reginald F. Lewis was born. He was a Black business executive.
He was born in Baltimore, MD. He received his A.B. from Virginia State College in 1965 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1968. He married Loida Nicholas in 1969; the couple had two daughters. Lewis worked as an attorney with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison until 1970. He was then a partner in Murphy, Thorpe & Lewis, the first Black law firm on Wall Street. Between 1973 and 1989, Lewis was in private practice as a corporate lawyer.
In 1989, he became president and CEO of TLC Beatrice International Food Co., the largest African-American-owned business in the United States. In 1992, TLC Beatrice had revenues of $1.54 billion. Lewis was a member of the American and National Bar Associations and the National Conference of Black Lawyers. He was on the New York City Off-Track Betting Corp. board of directors, the Central Park Conservancy, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and WNET, Channel 13, the public television station in New York.
He received the Distinguished Service Award from the American Association of MESBIC (1974) and the Black Enterprise Achievement Award for Professions. Reginald Lewis died unexpectedly on January 19, 1993, in New York.
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African
and African American Experience
Editors: Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Copyright 1999
ISBN 0-465-0071-1
