Reginald F. Lewis

Reginald Francis Lewis was born on the seventh of December 1942 at Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest of six children of Carolyn Cooper Lewis — a Saint Edward’s School maintenance worker who had divorced his father when Lewis was six — and Clinton Lewis, a printer at the Baltimore Sun. He was raised by his maternal grandparents Sam and Selena Cooper at the Cherry Hill housing project at the South Baltimore working-class Black district.

He was placed at the Dunbar High School at the East Baltimore Black neighbourhood and was the quarterback of the Dunbar football team and the catcher of the Dunbar baseball team. He took the bachelor’s in political science at the Virginia State University at Petersburg in 1965 on a football scholarship.

He was admitted in 1965 to the Harvard Law School — having attended in the summer of 1965 the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Harvard Law School preparatory programme for prospective Black law students, and on the strength of the programme was invited to apply to Harvard for the regular degree. He was the only student in the history of the Harvard Law School admitted to the school without having formally applied. He completed the LL.B. at Harvard in 1968.

He took employment from 1968 to 1970 at the New York Manhattan corporate law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and from 1970 to 1973 at the Manhattan corporate law firm of Wallace, Murphy, Thorpe & Lukas, and opened in 1973 his own corporate law practice at 30 Broad Street, Manhattan, in partnership with the white attorney George Murphy under the name Murphy, Thorpe & Lewis.

He restructured in 1983 the law practice as the corporate-acquisitions vehicle TLC Group at New York — the principal Black-owned leveraged-buyout firm of the period — and conducted in 1984 the first TLC acquisition, the McCall Pattern Company at New York at a purchase price of twenty-two and a half million dollars.

He sold the McCall Pattern Company at the close of June 1987 to the Hong Kong investor John Crowther at a sale price of sixty-three million dollars — a return on the original equity investment of fifty-three times the original capital — and used the McCall proceeds as the seed capital of the larger TLC Beatrice International acquisition of November 1987.

The TLC Beatrice International acquisition of the first of December 1987 — the leveraged buyout of the international food-and-grocery operations of the Beatrice Foods Company of Chicago at a purchase price of nine hundred and eighty-five million dollars — was the largest acquisition by a Black American principal in the history of the period. TLC Beatrice International recorded fiscal-year-1987 revenues of one billion eight hundred million dollars — the first Black-owned American company in history to surpass the billion-dollar revenue mark.

He pledged in 1992 a single contribution of three million dollars to the Harvard Law School for the construction of the Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center — at the time the largest single gift in the school’s history.

He died at Manhattan on the nineteenth of January 1993 of complications of brain cancer, at fifty.

He is honored here as the principal of the first Black billion-dollar American company.