Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (7 page)

       
“I’m Going to Be a Millionaire”: Lewis at Virginia State

Established in 1883 and situated close to the banks of the Appomattox River, Virginia State is the country’s oldest publicly funded black university. Once known as the Virginia Normal & Industrial Institute, the school’s rolling, tree-dotted campus sits atop a former plantation in Ettrick, Virginia, just outside Petersburg.

The capital of the Confederacy—Richmond—is about 18 miles to the north. Back in 1883, most of Ettrick’s residents were poor white laborers who toiled at water-powered mills that fed one of five rail lines converging on the Petersburg area. News that a black college had been set up in the middle of town triggered tremendous resentment among the locals, many of whom had little or no formal education. In addition, many residents were still smoldering from having lost the bloody, divisive Civil War that was ostensibly fought over slavery 18 years earlier.

Residual animosity toward Virginia State students was still percolating 78 years later when Reginald Lewis started attending college. Chesterfield Avenue, which runs past Virginia State’s campus, served as a demarcation line of sorts. Students seeking to avoid trouble prudently skirted the residential areas on the other side of Chesterfield.

College campuses tend to be insular communities and Virginia State was no exception. The growing civil rights movement barely
registered a blip on the radar screen of student consciousness. That would change somewhat before Lewis graduated, though.

Lewis stepped onto this stage in the fall of 1961. “He wanted to leave home and go out of town. We were in an atmosphere where you had to be extraordinarily accomplished for a white school to give you anything. So, Virginia State made him an offer,” his mother, Carolyn, recalls.

Except for his stint at summer camp when his mother delivered his newspapers for him, Lewis had never really been away from Baltimore for any extended period of time. Parting was difficult for mother and son.

“I won’t say I cried. I’m not a crying person, really. It was tough, it was tough because you were sending your best friend. He served so many positions in my life. We always disagreed but we were never disagreeable, because we were so much alike. His views and my views sometimes didn’t intersect very well, but on the basic things we never had a problem,” Carolyn Fugett says.

When his goodbyes to friends and family had been said, Lewis crammed his belongings into his tiny sports car and headed south down Interstate 95.

Before coming to college, Lewis had had a room to himself. That wouldn’t be the case at Virginia State, because freshmen were required to stay on campus and have a freshman roommate.

“He had a hard time with roommates,” Lewis’s mother recalls. “He had his own way of doing things and they had their way. Eventually, he moved off campus and got his own place. See, he was an exacting person and everybody didn’t like him.”

Lewis’s first roommate was Lynwood Hart, a homeboy who lived about four blocks from Lewis in Baltimore and played football with opposing Edmondson High School. They knew each other well enough to have developed a nodding acquaintance, although Hart today vividly remembers knocking quarterback Lewis out of a high school football match.

That Lewis and Hart wound up being Virginia State roommates may seem an unlikely coincidence. But as Hart recounts it, their being
roommates resulted from Lewis’s gift for controlling situations and using that skill to his advantage.

Virginia State had a policy of pairing football players in dormitory rooms. Lewis, Hart, and the rest of the team were lined up so the coaches could decide which players would room together. A coach stood in front counting off “One and two, you’re roommates, one and two, you’re roommates.”

Lewis saw how the sequence was unfolding in terms of which boys ahead of him were getting the same room. He then moved up a few places, positioning himself in a way that he and Hart would become roommates. “Reggie denies this happened, but he did it—I saw it,” Hart says.

“Reggie was the kind of guy that was always thinking ahead of everybody else. And that caused him a lot of problems with people. There’s people who if they are honest will tell you that Reggie was not the easiest person in the world to deal with. He was always ahead of most people relative to what he thought about life and what he was planning to do. He realized it was kind of good to have a receiver as a roommate,” Hart recalls.

Lewis and Hart grew very close during their time at Virginia State, but only after Hart got beyond his roommate’s prickly persona. Even though they were both black kids from the same neighborhood and fellow athletes and graduates of Baltimore City public schools, they couldn’t have been more dissimilar in temperament and personality.

Hart found out for himself that Lewis could be difficult to live with. “Reggie sometimes could make you very angry. He had a way of talking about things that if you didn’t know him, you would view as a personal put down. But it was more of a kind of shock treatment,” Hart recalls.

Lewis was self-assured, articulate, and dogmatic when expressing his views. Whenever he and Hart debated some issue—which was often—Hart’s logic would come under vigorous attack, “Don’t you understand? Don’t you see the shortcoming of that philosophy, of that belief that you’re holding? Don’t you think you need to rethink that?” Lewis would insist.

There were many times, Hart recalls, when he wanted to tell Lewis in exasperation, “Who the hell are you?” However, Hart adds, “But it
was never an exchange on an emotional level, where we got into great disputes and stuff. He was constantly shocking you into thinking about things in a way that kids coming from where we came from didn’t normally think.

“Reggie, there’s no question that he could be a very difficult person. And he could be, uh, very hard on people if he felt that they weren’t giving 110 percent. If you said, here’s 100 percent of mankind, I think Reggie probably felt that maybe anywhere from 20 to 25 percent of those people needed to be kicked in the ass,” Hart remembers.

Also on a football scholarship, Hart came to Virginia State with the intention of majoring in general trade, then becoming an industrial arts teacher. However, his conversations with Lewis led him to change his major to business administration. He now directs international systems engineering for AT&T.

“A lot of thought processes were engaged after having a discussion with Reggie. I mean, he pissed you off, quite frankly. But if you took time to think about what he was really saying, you began to see some benefit, some value, and some substance. The shock treatment that I got as a steady diet as his roommate helped focus me,” Hart says today.

Lewis loved to deal in the currency of ideas. He was a well-informed, versatile conversationalist and a voracious reader.

“Reggie believed that you should spend some time trying to figure out what was going on around you,” Hart says. “I kind of felt like—‘Who cares?’ I mean, I can’t influence anything! Why is it important for me to read a newspaper, or try to figure out what this author was saying in this book? I mean, it’s a waste of time, because I was never going to use it.

“I think if there was stuff that annoyed me about him, he was always pressing those kinds of things. Like, ‘Hey, did you see what was in the (Washington)
Post,
or the
Richmond Times Dispatch?’
Or, ‘Check this article out!’” Hart recalls.

Lewis even proselytized when it came to his tastes in music. “He had a tape recorder, a Webcor tape recorder. I’ll never forget that darn thing. And he would play music by MJQ (Modern Jazz Quartet), Ahmad Jamal, and other jazz greats. And I would say, ‘I want to hear some hip-hop.’ He would say, ‘Well you know, hey man, get your head together. Listen to something that’s got some value and some quality
to it.’ Now I have an appreciation for music in a way that I didn’t have back then,” Hart says.

Even as a college freshman, Lewis refused to view race as an impediment or a handicap. Equally important, he wanted to bring others around to his point of view. One day Lewis was in the room reading and Hart, who had a habit of walking around their dormitory room pretending to be a radio DJ and newscaster, was puttering around reading an imaginary news script. Lewis looked up in bafflement. “Why do you do that?” he asked.

“Because one day I want to be a newscaster. That’s what I want to do,” Hart responded.

“Well, if you want to be a newscaster, why don’t you do it?”

“They don’t have black newscasters around—there’s nobody doing this,” Hart replied in a tone that implied what he’d just said was common knowledge.

To Lewis’s way of thinking, Hart’s attitude was a harmful, self-defeating fallacy. Lewis’s grandparents had programmed and schooled him extensively in that regard: “No skill or vocation is the white man’s exclusive province.” And here in his dormitory room, without a white person in sight, Hart was already placing limits on his potential, based on his color. “Look dammit, if you want to do something, you can do it,” Lewis passionately informed Hart.

A couple of days later, around 2 o’clock in the morning, Hart was lying in bed when he heard a knock on the door. It was Lewis, with a young black man he’d met while working at a nearby bowling alley after classes. Lewis’s acquaintance was Max Robinson, who later joined ABC News as the country’s first full-time black anchorman on a national evening news program. At the time, Robinson was working for a radio station in Richmond.

Lewis walked over to his desk, pulled the chair out, placed it in front of Hart’s bed and offered Robinson a seat. “Now, talk to this guy about being in radio,” Lewis said. And that’s what they did, staying up all night engrossed in conversation.

Thirty-three years later, Hart still marvels at Lewis’s conviction and his willingness to act as a catalyst for another young black man’s dream. “Here’s a guy who’s saying to me, ‘Hey, you can do this,’” Hart says. “‘And not only can you do it, but I’m going to show you somebody who’s doing it.’ That was the kind of guy that Reggie was.”

Virginia State’s football season was rapidly approaching; it was time for Lewis and Hart to start earning their keep. The Trojans, as Virginia State’s teams are called, began holding football drills not long after Lewis and Hart arrived on campus.

Team pictures from 1961 show Lewis wearing his No. 17 jersey and a stern game face. Freshman football players, or “white shirters” as they were called, had the unenviable task of playing on the scout team. Basically, they simulated the plays used by Virginia State’s upcoming opponent, while the veteran Trojans practiced against them.

“It was brutal, believe me,” Al Banks, another football player from Baltimore, recalls. “First of all, we were all freshmen and less skilled people. And for quarterbacks, that was very intimidating, because those guys would blow in there and they would take cheap shots. It was kind of dangerous—they would come blasting through there and take out the freshmen quarterbacks and anybody else they could. It was not a pleasant situation. Me and Reggie were definitely practice quarterbacks that got killed.”

The pounding was taking its toll on Lewis’s throwing shoulder, which was injured repeatedly during his freshman year. He wasn’t able to throw the football with the velocity he’d had at Dunbar.

Hart saw that Lewis wasn’t keen on enduring pain and didn’t like to be hit hard. “On the scout team, they just beat the living crap out of you. We would come back to the dormitory and he would just sit there and he was in a great deal of pain—emotional pain, too—because we came there to be stars. I had a lot of compassion for him, a lot of empathy too, because I knew what this guy was capable of doing. I kept waiting for the day when he would break loose, but it dawned on me that it wasn’t going to happen,” Hart remembers.

Once the season started, Lewis had to endure the ignominy of being a third-string quarterback, at the very bottom of the depth chart. Lewis wasn’t helped by the fact that he was only 5-foot-10; his field of vision was often obscured by hulking defensive linemen boring in on him.

“In terms of football, I always thought that I was much better than Reggie,” says Hart, who is 6-foot-1. “He was short and didn’t have the mobility and all those kinds of things. I never looked at Reggie as my competition.”

Melvin Smith, a 6-foot-4 junior who was a starting tackle, recalls that Lewis was rarely inserted into games unless it was during the closing minutes. “I think he was good, he was just too short,” Smith says of Lewis. “He did fine, but normally it was over when he got in.”

Hart was a starting receiver by the time Lewis made his quarterback debut. Given to exhorting his teammates at Dunbar, Lewis saw no reason to alter his approach on the college level. “Reggie got in the game and we were winning it, but we weren’t winning by a lot of points. He came running in and we had these grizzly seniors and juniors in there and Reggie pops in with his collegiate look and collegiate attitude. ‘Okay, gang, this is what we’re going to do.’ We had this big ol’ grizzly guy who weighed about 240 pounds, Ernest “Money” Turner, who was playing fullback. Money listened to this for about 15 seconds and he said, ‘Hey, man, this ain’t no gang you got out here, this is a football team. Let’s get that straight,’” Hart recalls.

“And I looked at Reggie’s eyes and, boy, it was like somebody had rolled a shade across his face. It was that barrier between the seasoned vets and the rookie,” Hart says.