William Henry Lewis

William Henry Lewis was born on the twenty-eighth of November 1868 at Berkley, Virginia — across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk — the son of Asbury B. Lewis — a former enslaved Virginia carriage-maker and a Baptist minister of the Berkley Black Baptist Church — and Josephine Lewis, the daughter of free-Black-Virginia landowners.

He was placed at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute preparatory programme from 1883 to 1888 and at Amherst College from 1888 to 1892, completing the bachelor’s at Amherst in 1892 cum laude.

He took the LL.B. at the Harvard Law School in 1895 — at the time the third Black graduate of Harvard Law School after Macon Bolling Allen’s posthumous reputation and after the Cuban-born William Henry Lewis — and was admitted to the Massachusetts state bar in 1895.

He played football at both Amherst College (1889 to 1891) and at Harvard Law School (1892 to 1893) — at the Amherst-Harvard cross-affiliation arrangement of the period. He was named to Walter Camp’s 1892 All-America football team for the Amherst-Harvard 1892 season and was renamed to Camp’s 1893 All-America team — the first African American on a Walter Camp All-America football team.

He was admitted in 1895 to the bar of the United States Supreme Court and was hired in 1895 by the Boston law firm of Williams and Lewis as junior associate. He was a partner of the firm by 1898.

He was elected in November 1899 to the Cambridge City Council — the first African American on the Cambridge, Massachusetts city government — and to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in November 1902, where he served two terms 1903 and 1904.

He was named in March 1903 the United States Assistant Attorney of the District of Massachusetts under United States Attorney Henry P. Moulton — the first Black assistant United States attorney at any federal-district level.

He was nominated by President William Howard Taft on the second of March 1911 as Assistant Attorney General of the United States and was confirmed by the Senate on the fifth of March 1911. He served as Assistant Attorney General until the close of the Taft administration on the fourth of March 1913 — the first African American to attain the rank of Assistant United States Attorney General.

He was admitted in 1911 — during his Attorney General service — to the American Bar Association at its annual convention at Boston, on the recommendation of Attorney General George W. Wickersham. The American Bar Association moved to expel him within six months of his admission on the recognition by the Association of his race; Lewis retained his Association membership through the intervention of Wickersham and President Taft, but the Association passed a resolution at its 1912 convention permanently barring the admission of any further Black attorneys to the Association — a bar that remained in force until 1943.

He returned to private legal practice at Boston in 1913 and continued the Boston practice for the remaining thirty-six years of his life.

He died at Boston on the first of January 1949 of natural causes, at eighty.

He is honored here as the first Black Assistant Attorney General of the United States.