Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (16 page)

In a perfect world, Lewis would have preferred simply to be a human being. Not an African-American or black man, just a man. That’s why he strongly resisted attempts to put him on a pedestal as a black role model. “I’m not going to carry my race on my shoulder,” he once told a close confidante. “If I can be helpful to others, that’s fine, but I’m not going to do my work because I am a role model for all African-Americans. That’s bunk. I’m not responsible for anybody’s life, I’m responsible for my life. And I’m responsible for realizing my own dreams.”

To write Lewis off as someone preoccupied solely with making money would be grossly inaccurate. He was far too multifaceted for that, as his dealings with Benjamin Chavis demonstrate. Chavis is currently the Executive Director of the NAACP, but when he and Lewis met in 1971, he was a young civil rights activist.

Chavis was on the staff of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, which had offices in Manhattan. The commission was looking for a legal counsel and someone had mentioned Lewis, even though he was a corporate lawyer. “We wanted a sharp, African-American lawyer who was fearless and Reginald Lewis was recommended to us on that criteria,” Chavis says.

He went over to 30 Broad Street to check out Lewis, who was equally curious about the commission and the range of civil rights activities it handled. The first thing Chavis noticed was that Lewis was sporting an Afro. Chavis was also pleasantly surprised to find that Lewis knew how to “dap,” as the intricate handshakes many black men greeted each other with during the 1970s were called.

“In our first encounter, he made me understand in no uncertain terms that he was from Baltimore, he was from the community and he knew what hard times were and he knew the plight of the African-American community,” Chavis remembers. “And even though he had become relatively successful, he had an undeniable urge in ensuring that the civil rights movement in the 1970s would be effective.”

Lewis and Chavis were instant friends. Lewis constantly admonished Chavis, who frequently traveled to the South to confront segregated school districts, to “Be careful. Watch your back. Who’s watching your back?”

In 1972, Chavis was one of the Wilmington 10, a well-known group of activists arrested while fighting school desegregation in Wilmington County, North Carolina. Their bond totaled $500,000. In New York, Lewis helped the Commission for Racial Justice raise the bond money for the defendants.

Lewis was not the trial attorney for the Commission for Racial Justice, but he was the backup attorney. On one occasion in December 1972 when the primary lawyer was occupied with another matter, Lewis unhesitatingly took a tour of the front lines in the fight for civil rights. Chavis’s presence was demanded in a Wilmington County courtroom for a bail hearing and Lewis volunteered to accompany him. Another black attorney, Irv Joiner, went with him.

They boarded a Piedmont Airlines jetliner from New York City to North Carolina and settled in for the flight. Not knowing what to expect, Lewis felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation, although outwardly he showed no emotion. The men were fully aware that their lives might be in danger once they reached North Carolina and there wasn’t much conversation among them on their way down South. As the plane glided in for a landing, Lewis looked out the window and saw scores of uniformed sheriff’s deputies standing on the tarmac, holding loaded shotguns. “These people don’t look too friendly,” he said to no one in particular.

Everyone else on the jet saw the armed posse, too, and sensing that the three young black men wearing the Afros might be the focus of all the attention, they scurried off the plane and down the jetway ladder as soon as the wheels on the Piedmont Airline jet stopped rolling. The flight crew wasn’t far behind, leaving Lewis, Chavis, and Joiner alone on a now deathly quiet aircraft.

Out the window, they saw a tall lawman about 6-foot-5 and wearing sunglasses emerge from the sea of uniforms outside the plane. From the way he carried himself, the deference displayed to him by the deputies and the slightly impatient pose he struck that contained a hint of malevolence, everyone on the plane knew he was the sheriff.

Lewis was very concerned by now, and his face showed it, but he wasn’t about to be cowed. Reginald Lewis had a knack for digging deep within and rising to occasions. If ever there was a time to conjure up that ability, this was it. He stood up and moved to the aisle of the jetliner.

“I’m your lawyer, follow me,” he instructed Chavis confidently. Lewis, Chavis, and Joiner slowly walked down the aisle of the plane, out the door and down the ladder, where the sheriff was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

Lewis took his time going down the stairs, as did Chavis. As soon as they got to the tarmac, the sheriff reached around Lewis in an attempt to grab Chavis, pushing Lewis aside slightly. “Wait a minute! Don’t touch him,” Lewis told the sheriff forcefully. “I’m his lawyer. . . . Who are you?”

A look of incredulity registered on the sheriff’s face. Dressed in full law-enforcement regalia, right down to his shiny silver badge and brimmed colored hat, he had expected Lewis to meekly step aside and surrender Chavis. The possibility that Lewis would resist and actually dare to challenge his authority hadn’t entered the lawman’s head. “I’m the sheriff,” he said, thrown off balance momentarily.

“Well, let me see your identification,” Lewis ordered. The sheriff compliantly did as he was told, reaching into his back pocket, fishing out his wallet and holding out his ID for Lewis. “I thought what Reggie did took a lot of guts,” Chavis says. “It just disoriented the sheriff. From that moment on, Reggie was sort of in control of the situation.”

Chavis was put into the back seat of a squad car accompanied by Lewis, who demanded that Chavis not be taken to jail but directly to a magistrate. His request was granted and Chavis was taken before a magistrate who posted a $100,000 bond that Chavis met, securing his release. Chavis told Lewis that he was going to stay in North Carolina and hold a rally that night.

“Hey man, come on now,” Lewis said. “We got you out on bond—you need to leave Wilmington.” But Chavis insisted on staying and asked two of his assistants to drive Lewis to the airport in Raleigh.

Lewis took out one of his business cards, scribbled something on the back and handed it to Chavis. “If you’re going to stay, here’s my phone number,” he said. “Make sure you call me no later than midnight to say everything is all right, okay? Watch your back, man.”

Lewis also challenged the state of North Carolina’s policy of investing bond money. He succeeded in forcing the state to pay the interest on the bond to the Wilmington 10 defendants. Some members of the predominantly white United Church of Christ who had been opposed to the church posting bond for the Wilmington 10 dropped their opposition when they learned the church stood to benefit.

Reginald Lewis may not have walked picket lines, but there was little doubt where he stood when it came to the civil rights movement and its quest to have all U.S. citizens treated fairly and with dignity.

“In order to get in a position of economic parity, you’ve got to fight abject discrimination and Reggie understood that,” Chavis says. He and Lewis remained close friends. In 1992, Lewis lobbied vigorously to have Chavis elected as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Chavis won election to the post in 1993, not long after Lewis’s death.

“He was a regular brother, he was unpretentious,” Chavis says. “A lot of times people surround themselves in their wealth and become pretentious. Reggie wasn’t like that. Reginald Lewis was the kind of friend where the friendship was not based on political expediency and it was not based on popularity, it was based on genuine respect.”

“He was very interested in ensuring that young people, particularly African-American youth, be given a fair chance at life itself,” Chavis says. In the final days before Lewis’s death, Chavis served as his spiritual adviser.

Away from his office, Lewis had begun to hang out with a select group of young, black businessmen involved in the world of high finance. It was inevitable that they would encounter each other at some point, since the number of influential black businessmen in Manhattan in the early 1970s could be counted on one hand. One was Cleveland Christophe, an executive at Citibank who Lewis had met in 1970 when he did some legal work for Soul-Stop, a Harlem fast-food restaurant that Christophe owned.

Another member of Lewis’s circle was Travis Bell, now deceased, whose Daniels & Bell investment house was the first minority-run
member of the New York Stock Exchange. There were other members of the elite group, including Thomas Bourelly, a University of Chicago graduate whom Lewis helped buy a food company in 1975.

They used to gather periodically at one of two uptown jazz clubs or at each other’s homes to discuss their hopes and dreams, as well as the horror stories that only young black men working in a white-dominated financial world could fully appreciate.

“We came to the scene when banks were talking about their urban divisions financing barber shops and barbecue pits, so it was important for us to get to another level,” Bourelly says. “We talked a lot about our future, the things we could do, our responsibilities to our society and to our people. We used to share each other’s contacts, which was quite important.”

Lewis, Bell, and Bourelly also had a professional relationship, because Lewis was the attorney for Daniels & Bell, and Bourelly ran the firm’s holding company. Lewis helped Daniels & Bell do a leveraged buyout for a chocolate company, one of the first LBOs ever pulled off by a black business.

Bourelly remembers that Lewis the lawyer was very smart, tough, and a stickler for details. “You didn’t have to worry about being blindsided once Lewis had gone over a business agreement. He’d usually catch potentially harmful loopholes and put in clauses protecting against contingencies most businesspeople never thought about.”

“Reginald Lewis was an open, generous friend who didn’t brook people wasting his time and who abhorred mediocrity,” Bourelly adds.

In any group made up of bright, aggressive individuals, disagreements are bound to occur and Lewis’s group was no exception. They gravitated to each other for their collective betterment, but their internecine clashes sometimes got in the way of what they could accomplish.

Lewis had his share of disagreements too, but no more or fewer than anybody else. “When you got into an argument with Reg, you came out of it pretty bruised. The guy knew what he stood for and fought for his views and positions,” Bourelly says. “When he became rich and powerful, he tended to be a little bit more self-righteous.”

However, even after Lewis captured Beatrice, he never forgot his friends from his early days in New York. And he always returned their phone calls promptly, whether he was at 40,000 feet in his corporate jet or in Paris.

In 1975, when Bourelly bought Chicago-based, Allfresh Foods with $ 1 million in MESBIC financing, he did so with Reginald Lewis acting as the lawyer in the transaction. Because Lewis had worked so hard to make the deal a reality, Bourelly paid him his fee and gave him a 10 percent interest in the company.

Later, in recounting to a friend that Bourelly had given him a 10 percent stake, Lewis said, “You know why the man did that? Because the man is smart.” Allfresh was later sold at a profit.

Christophe introduced Lewis to a young Chase Manhattan executive named Hughlyn Fierce. Christophe boasted to Lewis that Fierce had the authority on his own signature to make loans up to $500,000. Without batting an eyelash, Lewis asked for a $25,000 unsecured loan on the spot.

Fierce was taken aback and turned Lewis down. Not only could a bus run over Lewis five minutes later, Lewis had no proof he could repay a loan for $25,000. They were soon going at each other, oblivious to Christophe who stood by shaking his head and wondering why he had introduced them.

“What Reg had done was to fundamentally put me in the position of having to defend why I would not do it,” Fierce recalls. “Reg thought it was absolutely incredible that I would not be willing to make him a $25,000 unsecured loan. This from a guy who has the temerity and gonads to open a Wall Street law firm, when other brothers I know just want to join a law firm!”

As 1979 approached, Lewis was ready to move out of 30 Broad Street. He had outgrown his small offices and needed more space. At one point, part of the floor Lewis was on was unoccupied, so he asked the landlord if it was possible to use some adjoining empty offices for storing documents. What started as storage space was quietly turned into working offices for Lewis’s practice until the landlord caught on. Now, with his lease up, Lewis was looking to lease offices with a little more panache and class than his dowdy quarters at 30 Broad Street.

Lewis had grown immeasurably both as a lawyer and a businessman during his nine years there. Maintaining a viable law practice had been a real struggle the first six or so years. Each MESBIC only generated about three deals a year, so Lewis was constantly hustling to ensure a steady stream of business. When times had been hard, Lewis and his attorneys even resorted to handling home closings to keep money coming in. And Lewis alone brought in new business.

Lewis hadn’t forgotten all the nights he’d spent beating the brush for clients while the other attorneys were comfortably ensconced in their homes, eating dinner. Nor had he forgotten the times he was forced to use his savings so everyone else would have a paycheck.