Being the ultimate master of presenting the complexity and significance of Black identity to the world is what makes Dr. David Levering Lewis the foremost scholar of the African American experience.
Young, Black, gay in Akron, Ohio: what a lifeline — learning from Lewis’s brilliant book, “When Harlem Was in Vogue” (1981) that Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Bayard Rustin, and James Baldwin were gay, too.
In 1995, the Amsterdam News’s award-winning historian Herb Boyd analyzed Lewis’s effective methodology by examining his acclaimed Du Bois biography, “believing he had caricatured the leader in his book ‘When Harlem Was in Vogue,’ Lewis completed [correcting] this task with typical verve and balance, and Garvey and his cohorts are deftly discussed in human terms. Moreover, he offers a compelling contrast between the Pan-Africanism espoused by Garvey and Du Bois … in … a study in the historian’s craft and Lewis’ remarkable ability to bring so much substance and ancillary material to his main theme. It’s a matter of diligently combing through mounds of data and carefully considering hundreds of interviews and impressions …”
Michael Henry Adams photos
On Memorial Day, when Lewis turned 90, there was a celebratory dinner at Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too Restaurant for 60 of Lewis’s family and friends. It was an auspicious occasion, with delightful festivities, perfect weather, and 14 speakers — a resounding tribute for a stupendous man.
“When Harlem was in Vogue” focused attention on the extent of the extraordinary esthetic contribution African Americans made to our country. Last year, to confront and refute lies posited as “freedom of speech,” just in time for the country’s resurgent racism, Lewis was ready with his book “The Stained Glass Window.” The newest of Lewis’s 12 thoughtful studies, it offered a crowning flourish to an illustrious career.
Enrolling in Fisk University at 15 years old, to become in time an NYU professor emeritus, Lewis was the first biographer of Martin Luther King, Jr. For his two-volume life of W.E.B. Du Bois, Lewis became the first and second Black recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He received an early MacArthur Genius Fellowship. In 2009, President Obama bestowed the National Humanities Medal on him.
Some might mock and scorn diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as “reverse racism” for supposedly favoring race over qualifications, or sexuality and disability over talent and character. Like so many African American athletes, artists, and professionals with meritorious distinction beyond question, Lewis’s record shows otherwise.
In doubt about the consistent efficacy of Lewis’s achievement? If “The Stained Glass Window” encapsulates America’s original sin of slaughter and enslavement, his “Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair” (1973), an account of the infamous French scandal involving the wrongful conviction of a Jewish army officer for treason, was an exposé of deep-seated and enduring anti-semitism. It relates how white America holds no monopoly on either perversity or contradiction, but it also offers hope that with determined effort, evil and injustice can always lead to redemptive majesty.
In 2008, with “God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215,” Lewis similarly refuted the hypocrisy of the West’s anti-Arab stereotypes. Lewis showed just how much Eastern exposure was responsible for transforming a fractured, impoverished Europe of the Dark Ages, despite being castigated still for fanatical barbarism. It took a combination of all the East’s highly advanced mathematics, science, art, and cosmopolitan cuisine to bring forth the Renaissance and even the Enlightenment.
In short, over a long life, Lewis has offered books as cautioning guideposts all along our troubled pursuit of human progress.
Lewis’s daughter, Allison Lillian Lewis, executive director of the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research; prize-winning Baldwin biographer Nicholas Boggs; Khalil Muhammad, author of “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America”; Oren Root, Lewis’s brother-in-law; and David Nasaw, Kendra Field, David Mayers, Adele Alexander, Matthew Guterl, Japhet Aryiku, Kai Bird, Stacy Patton, Jacob Morris, and I all had something to say about what makes David Lewis such a great man.
Leading off, the historian’s daughter recalled the impact of his profound but elusive sympathy as a young woman whose famous father was frequently preoccupied. Boggs spoke of Lewis’s generosity in presenting City College with a $1 million gift toward a $2 million David Levering Lewis award for the best new book concerning the African diaspora. Describing himself as like a “wayward child,” Muhammad regretted ignoring Lewis’s advice not to desert his direction of the Schomburg for Harvard. Root told of being admonished as a fraud on their initial meeting because he was not his father.
Alexander recounted nostalgia for her Sugar Hill girlhood at 555 Edgecombe that “When Harlem Was in Vogue” inspired. Aryiku said that thanks to Lewis’s efforts, not only was the Ghanaian government opening a study center dedicated to Du Bois; they are also restoring the house where he lived as a museum. Stacey Patton, seemingly seeking to placate Lewis, whom she and a couple other students described as an encouraging, but stern, taskmaster-teacher, presented him with an advance copy of her book, “Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children.” Lastly, Morris explained how by suing the New York Public Library (NYPL), Lewis kept it from destroying the stacks of their venerable building at 42nd Street.
In response, Lewis spoke eloquently about the urgency of the moment. Noting that the number of billionaires has more than doubled during six short months under what columnist Jamelle Bouie calls the “Pecuniary Presidency of Donald Trump,” he next quoted Vice President J. D. Vance, who said, “If you make people feel less healthy, they apparently become more politically liberal …” and said, “My friends, I am 90 years old today … if Vice President Vance’s diagnosis is correct, I expect I ought to be joined by a titanic number of my fellow citizens to vote this November midterm for a republic committed to the diversity, inclusion, and equality cruelly mocked by this pecuniary interregnum!”
With that, the room erupted. Then and now, I say, let the people say amen, Dr. David Levering Lewis. We salute you!
