Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (11 page)

In Lewis’s class, 130 pairs of eyes would bore into the professor’s victim, waiting for the slightest misstep. Then scores of hands would fly into the air, their owners dying to show off a better grasp of the issue in question than the student who had faltered.

There was one way to escape the Socratic method—students who hadn’t plowed through the 100 or so pages of assigned reading material for each class could sit in the last row of seats. There was a tacit agreement that professors wouldn’t call on students seated in the rear, a practice known as back-benching.

Lewis sat on the front row, practically daring professors to call on him. A few went out of their way to pick black students in an attempt to humiliate or embarrass them. That strategy invariably backfired if one of them ran a finger over their seating chart and called out, “Reginald Lewis!” His preparation was invariably thorough and he was not shy about articulating his points of view in a room full of attentive Ivy Leaguers.

Lewis wasn’t a gunner, one of those students whose hands are always flailing in the air as they practically turn cartwheels to answer questions. But neither was Lewis a back-bencher—his self-pride would not
allow that. Lewis refused to give any professor or student the smug satisfaction of secretly ascribing a poor performance on his part to the fact that Reginald Lewis was black.

To Lewis’s roommates, Bill Robinson and John Hatch, he seemed to be cruising along with minimum exertion. So it was Lewis’s entire life. Those on the periphery were often convinced he led a charmed, strife-free existence, but practically everything Lewis achieved was extracted through hard work and titanic struggle.

Though Hatch and Robinson were fellow black students and ahead of Lewis in law school, he never asked them questions about the law. Robinson recalls that Lewis seemed to be focused on some distant horizon only he could see and was remarkably free of worry. And Lewis tended to keep late hours and operated without difficulty on only four or five hours of sleep, a lifelong trait.

His apparent nonchalance stemmed from something he picked up in the Fugett household, which was a custom of making the difficult appear easy. Repetition, endless practice and solitary preparation weren’t for public consumption. Never let ’em see you sweat, just let ’em see you excel with seeming ease.

Of the more than 500 freshman students in Lewis’s class, at least 17 were black, the largest number admitted to Harvard Law School in one class up to that point. Like Lewis, most of his black compatriots had poor or blue-collar upbringings and had attended black southern colleges. From those backgrounds, they found themselves thrust into an environment that easily intimidated even wealthy white graduates of the country’s most exclusive finishing schools and colleges.

The school itself was more than a little concerned about how the incoming black students of the Class of 1968 would hold up under the intellectual cut and thrust to which they would be subjected. In a well-meaning, if slightly patronizing gesture, the law school paired each new black student with a third-year student who would act as a mentor. The same precaution wasn’t taken for first-year white students, a fact not lost on many of the new black students.

The school arranged for its highest ranking black employee, George Strait, the assistant reference librarian, to meet with the fledgling black lawyers. In his talk, Strait told them to work hard and to consider themselves privileged for having earned a chance to attend Harvard Law School.

Some of Lewis’s fellow black law students were indeed awe-struck and terrified at the prospect of attending Harvard Law School and of competing with the best students in the country. Others in the group were feeling a tad cocky and even arrogant. They considered themselves a bright, elite subsection within an already elite segment of the scholastic universe. In public at least, Reginald Lewis fit into the latter category, says Richard Brown, one of the black students on campus.

As far as Lewis was concerned, he’d already proven to himself that he could excel in a law school setting by turning the special summer program on its ear. That all of the program participants were black and that most of his law school classmates were white made no difference to him.

Lewis conceded nothing to anyone. And he was moving beyond classifications based on race and ethnicity. Which is not to say Lewis wasn’t proud of his roots. He and the other black students were a close-knit group, surrounded as they were by a sea of white faces and subjected daily to cultural shock on a major scale. Not everyone, including some students and faculty members, jumped for joy on discovering that the black students’ ranks had grown to 17.

Most of them, including Lewis, often congregated at the “black” table in Harkness Commons, which housed the dining facility for graduate students. Lewis frequently socialized with Robinson and Hatch, his roommates, and with other black law students. They shared a common excitement, and sense of irony, about the challenge that lay ahead.

But Lewis was equally likely to be seen in the company of white friends he made at Harvard. He fell in with a study group made up of five white first-year law students. They spent hours reading, summarizing their conclusions, sharing notes, and discussing what had been taught in class. The same first-year curriculum was required of everyone: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Contracts, Property I, Torts, and Development of Law & Legal Institutions.

Lewis moved easily between both black and white worlds, because he didn’t view himself as constrained by artificial barriers founded on something as trite as pigmentation. If others chose to perceive him a certain way because of his skin, that was their problem.

Lewis and his classmates attended Harvard in the middle of the 1960s, a tumultuous time unprecedented in the country’s history. Values were being turned upside down, and, intent as everyone was on their studies, they were not immune from being touched by a rising social consciousness.

Among the black students in Lewis’s class, there was a pervasive sense that their unique status brought with it unique responsibilities. While most of their white counterparts had law firm ambitions, many of the black law students were interested in civil rights law or poverty law.

In one incident, black students confronted Harvard’s administration over the lack of black construction workers involved with a campus building project. Harvard students black and white also participated in a series of civil rights demonstrations on campus.

Lewis supported such activities in spirit, but skeptically drew the line at physical participation. For him, marching around on campus holding a civil rights placard wasn’t an effective way to wield influence. Philosophically, he believed in systemic change, rather than demonstrations and placard-bearing.

While he was at law school, Lewis’s sense of racial pride was burgeoning. He had never had any identity problems—he was no white man hiding in a black man’s skin. Black pride was on the rise around the country and the movement made an impression on Lewis, too.

During a break from classes one summer, Lewis returned to Baltimore with his hair puffed out in a luxuriant Afro, in keeping with the style among young blacks at the time. His uncle, James Cooper, had never seen an Afro before. In fact, he still wore the close-cropped haircut favored by most African-American males before the “Black is Beautiful” movement.

Cooper took a long look at Lewis’s haircut and asked, “Man, what kind of nigger are you with all that hair on your head?” Cooper called Lewis “nigger,” as a term of endearment, a practice common in the black community. This time, Lewis took umbrage.

“Don’t say nigger in my presence again,” he thundered at his dumbfounded uncle. “We are all black people!” As the two men sat on the curb in front of Lewis’s house on Mosher Street, Lewis then lectured his older relative for a good 15 minutes on the error of his ways.

Lewis was exposed to racist comments during his last year at Harvard. In his third year, he had taken an apartment by himself in a working-class, Italian-American neighborhood seldom frequented by college students. When walking through the streets to and from school, Lewis would invariably be the target of ugly racial epithets.

Bill Slattery, a white classmate of Lewis’s, remembers how Lewis would tell him about the incidents calmly and matter-of-factly, not showing any hint of the hurt and rage roiling away just below the surface.

In his first year at Harvard, Lewis lived at 1751 Massachusetts Avenue, in an upscale section of North Cambridge not far from Porter Square. John Hatch had rented the entire third floor.

When Hatch first met Lewis, he was struck by the fact that the newcomer had already taken to wearing twill pants, wide ties, and tweed jackets, an ersatz style favored by a segment of the student population that would now be called preppy. “Reg could be sort of like a chameleon sometimes. He was always sort of quietly watching for what was going on. He seemed to have sort of caught on to the tone of Harvard right away,” Hatch says.

Living off campus provided Lewis a respite from the frenetic, pressure cooker atmosphere of law school. He kept his room as neat as a military barracks, prompting his other roommate, Bill Robinson, to tease Lewis that he couldn’t be studying, because nothing in the room ever seemed to be disturbed.

The three bachelors took turns cooking and did their grocery shopping at Boston’s open-air markets. As a joke, they would often answer their phone, “Robinson, Lewis, and Hatch,” as though they were already a big-time law firm. Lewis spent an inordinate amount of time
on the telephone, generating the lion’s share of the phone bill, which he paid unhesitatingly.

Many of his conversations were with young ladies. As gutsy in his social relationships as he was in the classroom, Lewis would often pick up the phone and call a women’s dorm at nearby Boston University, blurting out, “I want to talk to a swinger.” In response, white coeds Lewis had never seen before would catch taxicabs to his apartment, share a lust-filled evening, then depart in the morning. They usually paid their own cab fare, too.

“Whatever he had, it was powerful,” marvels shy James McPherson, who first met Lewis at the summer law program and later moved into the Massachusetts Avenue apartment. “It was some kind of magnetism or power or something that I couldn’t comprehend.”

There was a constant stream of attractive young women going in and out of Lewis’s room, including a black coed from Simmons College who appeared without fail whenever Lewis summoned her.

For a brief period of time, Lewis saw an older black woman from the Roxbury section of Boston. She would cook for the young law student, bring him food, and spend the night. Lewis grew weary of her after a few months—she had limited potential in his eyes. She wasn’t able to float effortlessly between the worlds of rich and poor, black and white like he did, nor did she offer much in the way of intellectual stimulation. One day Lewis informed the woman that her services would no longer be needed and insensitively gave her the boot while McPherson watched.

During his second year, Lewis incurred the wrath of the handful of black women attending the law school. One day, he invited a first-year black student to his apartment, ostensibly to tutor her. He started off by discussing contracts and property but wound up attempting to seduce her. Realizing she was prey and not a protegé, she abruptly left. Lewis was hot on her heels, following her down three flights of stairs and out the door, talking a blue streak the entire way.

Word about the abortive interlude spread among the other black female law students and they indignantly declared a moratorium on all black, male law students, condemning all for the alleged sins of one. When a classmate of Lewis’s, Richard Brown, asked him about the episode, he smiled, weakly protesting his innocence.

One day at Harvard, Lewis was walking on campus when he encountered an old friend from his high school days. Overjoyed to see Lewis, his friend rushed to greet him. But instead of returning his warmth or even saying hello, an unsmiling Lewis posed a simple question, “What was your LSAT score?” An ironic query, considering that Lewis had never taken the Law School Aptitude Test himself. After making his LSAT demand, Lewis turned on his heel and strode away from his dumbfounded buddy. Proud and competitive, Lewis didn’t like the idea of anyone stealing his thunder.

Lewis did have a compassionate side, although he was careful about who got to see it. John Hatch moved out of the Massachusetts Avenue apartment before the lease was up, to live with a woman Hatch had gotten pregnant. In response, Lewis was very solicitous and concerned. He assured Hatch that the young father was relieved of any rent obligations, even though four months still remained in the spring semester. “I think he was a very humane person,” Hatch says of Lewis.

Contrast that with Lewis’s treatment of James McPherson, who lived in the Massachusetts Avenue apartment during Lewis’s second year of law school. McPherson had repeated run-ins with another roommate, Hiawatha Brown, and as a result had announced he was moving out with nine months still left on his lease.

“Well, by the way Jim, you’re still under lease,” Lewis tersely informed McPherson. “You can move but you’re going to have to pay.” Not surprisingly, McPherson—who worked three jobs to meet his commitment and pay another rent—has a different take on Lewis than Hatch. “I didn’t really like Reggie that much,” McPherson reflects.

Lewis perceived McPherson’s predicament much differently than Hatch’s. McPherson was running from an unpleasant situation, a mode of problem solving Lewis considered an anathema. So McPherson had to be forced to live up to his financial responsibilities.