Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?

by Reginald Lewis

  His whole future hung by a thread. As far as further academic pursuits were concerned, it was Harvard or bust. One of the first things he did after arriving at Mosher Street was to put in a call to Toepfler’s office.

  At a farewell banquet for all the participants in the summer program, Associate Dean Louis Toepfler told me that he would like me to call him at midweek. When I did, Toepfler’s secretary asked if I would speak to her, since the Dean was not in. She had before her a letter she was in the process of typing to me. I said of course. The opening line was, “There will be a place for you in this fall’s class, if you want it.” Great news! Plus the school was making loans available and gave me a one-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

  With glistening eyes, Lewis hung up the phone and informed the Fugett household of his good fortune, triggering an instant celebration. “We were just screaming and hollering and carrying on,” his mother recalls. “Here it is my son—MY SON—is going to Harvard.”

  After the euphoria abated somewhat, the economic reality of the situation began to set in. The family members started asking each other: How would Lewis pay day-to-day expenses like meals, books, and clothing? Members of the Fugett and Cooper families chipped in what they could, but it didn’t go terribly far toward defraying Lewis’s expenses.

  But Lewis was nonchalant. As far as he was concerned, the big problem had already been solved. Harvard Law School had offered him a place in the Class of 1968. Things like expenses were just minor details to be ironed out later.

  Being admitted to Harvard reaffirmed Lewis’s sense of destiny and further solidified his view of his own uniqueness. By refusing to entertain thoughts of failure, or to even consider the outrageousness of his quest, Lewis had leapfrogged sizable obstacles blocking his path to Harvard Law School.

  First he’d pushed his way onto the list of Virginia State students earmarked for the summer law program, then lobbied hard to get himself admitted to the law school. Now he was going to attend world-renowned Harvard Law School, one of the premier training grounds for the country’s power elite. The established routine of taking the Law School Aptitude Test or filling out a law school application were for ordinary mortals who lacked the boldness to craft their own set of rules. Yes indeed, he wanted a place in the fall class! And money was the least of his worries as he left Baltimore for Cambridge.

  SETTLING IN AT HARVARD

  I arrived in Cambridge in September 1965 as a member of the Harvard Law School class of 1968. The first thing I had to do was go to the school and complete an application. That’s right, an application. I’m told that I am the only person in the 148-year-history of Harvard Law who was ever admitted before he applied.

  Lewis came to Harvard’s campus unsure of how he would pay for his room and board. He walked into the law school dean’s office with $50 in his pocket. Dean Toepfler met him and extended a hearty welcome.

  “How was Lewis set for money?” Toepfler wanted to know. Proud to a fault and fiercely independent, Lewis responded, “I’m in good shape, I’m in good shape.” Pressed by Toepfler to describe exactly what that meant, Lewis allowed that he had a few loose bills in his wallet that came to $50.

  A bemused Toepfler told Lewis, “Now that you’re at Harvard, we take care of our own.” Toepfler informed Lewis that paperwork for an educational loan had already been processed and a check for living expenses had been drawn in Lewis’s name. All that was needed was Lewis’s signature.

  With that simple gesture, Lewis was freed of having to juggle school and work, as he had done at Virginia State and at Dunbar High School. For the first time in his life, he enjoyed the luxury of being able to focus on only one job—that of being a full-time law student.

  Harvard’s generosity made a lasting impact on Lewis. He would later repay Harvard manyfold. In 1992, he gave Harvard Law School a $3 million gift—at the time the largest individual gift in the school’s history. In gratitude, the Law School named its international law building The Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center, the first building on campus to be named after an African-American.

  Because of the 11th-hour nature of Lewis’s admission to Harvard Law School, all the dorms were full, so Lewis was unable to live on campus. He had no qualms about that, having lived off-campus two of the years he was at Virginia State. In fact, living off campus was preferable to Lewis, given his private, independent nature.

  I found a room in a local rooming house for a few days while I looked for a place to live. Then I had a bit of luck—two students, John Hatch, a third-year law student, and Bill Robinson, a second-year student, had an apartment at 1751 Massachusetts Avenue that was a short walk from the school and they offered me the third bedroom. I was set.

  THE LAW SCHOOL GRIND

  I will never forget that first year of law school, or the other two for that matter. It was a brand new ballgame. Dean Griswold, who I later had for taxation, greeted the class of 1968 with the line, “I am the head of this menagerie of prima donnas.”

  Harvard really knows how to make its students feel they are truly the elite. Fortunately, I never got carried away with their attitude, which by and large was constructive because the students really worked hard and were an incredibly gifted group.

  The place had the smell of competition all around, but there was also a fair amount of humor in a lot of the classes. Wit was greatly admired. My civil procedure class with Professor Chadborne was probably the funniest, yet most instructive educational experience I have ever had. Chad really made the class come alive.

  For the most part, my section had some great teachers. The entire class of 535 students was broken into four sections of about 130 or so students. All the first-year classes were required and you really got to know the people in your section. I also made lasting friendships with some of the faculty members.

  As Lewis noted, competition at the law school was fierce, so much so that some students went to the trouble of attending less prestigious law schools for a year to get a feel for the legal education routine. They then dropped out and enrolled in Harvard’s first-year class, writing off an entire year of law school in the process. It was deemed worth the trouble just to get a leg up on the competition at Harvard Law School.

  Law school is unique in that students are assessed almost completely on the basis of exam results. But only one exam is given in most courses—after classes are over. For first-year Harvard Law School students of Lewis’s era, the one exam came at the end of a full year of course work. By the time you realized you had fared poorly in the cut-throat, sink-or-swim environment, you had already drowned.

  Lewis was secretly terrified of not doing well at Harvard. He was studying diligently and was beginning to incorporate terms such as res judicata and res ipsa loquitor into his everyday speech.

  All in all, I was really scared to death that first year and never really got my legs, so to speak. But I hung in there, passed all of my courses and at the end of the year received so-called Gentlemen’s C’s. My second and third years were much better and when I left, I had moved into the B category and wrote my third-year paper for Professor Louis Loss’s securities regulation course and got an honors grade. My paper was titled “Defenses to Takeover Bids.” I remember the first sentence especially well: “The corporate acquisition has become a useful vehicle by which corporations can grow and prosper.”

  Years later, Lewis would often refer to this paper as spurring his interest in corporate takeovers.

  While Lewis was scared, he did not let his terror get the better of him. In the classroom, for example, his technique was straightforward and simple. Professors at Harvard generally utilized a teaching technique known as the Socratic method. They would randomly pick students and quiz them on legal issues, without any clear indication as to what was the correct answer or if there even was one.

  In Lewis’s class, 130 pairs of eyes would bore into the professor’s victim, waiting for the slightest misstep. Then scores of hands would fly into
the air, their owners dying to show off a better grasp of the issue in question than the student who had faltered.

  There was one way to escape the Socratic method—students who hadn’t plowed through the 100 or so pages of assigned reading material for each class could sit in the last row of seats. There was a tacit agreement that professors wouldn’t call on students seated in the rear, a practice known as back-benching.

  Lewis sat on the front row, practically daring professors to call on him. A few went out of their way to pick black students in an attempt to humiliate or embarrass them. That strategy invariably backfired if one of them ran a finger over their seating chart and called out, “Reginald Lewis!” His preparation was invariably thorough and he was not shy about articulating his points of view in a room full of attentive Ivy Leaguers.

  Lewis wasn’t a gunner, one of those students whose hands are always flailing in the air as they practically turn cartwheels to answer questions. But neither was Lewis a back-bencher—his self-pride would not allow that. Lewis refused to give any professor or student the smug satisfaction of secretly ascribing a poor performance on his part to the fact that Reginald Lewis was black.

  To Lewis’s roommates, Bill Robinson and John Hatch, he seemed to be cruising along with minimum exertion. So it was Lewis’s entire life. Those on the periphery were often convinced he led a charmed, strife-free existence, but practically everything Lewis achieved was extracted through hard work and titanic struggle.

  Though Hatch and Robinson were fellow black students and ahead of Lewis in law school, he never asked them questions about the law. Robinson recalls that Lewis seemed to be focused on some distant horizon only he could see and was remarkably free of worry. And Lewis tended to keep late hours and operated without difficulty on only four or five hours of sleep, a lifelong trait.

  His apparent nonchalance stemmed from something he picked up in the Fugett household, which was a custom of making the difficult appear easy. Repetition, endless practice and solitary preparation weren’t for public consumption. Never let ’em see you sweat, just let ’em see you excel with seeming ease.

  A BLACK STUDENT AT HARVARD

  Of the more than 500 freshman students in Lewis’s class, at least 17 were black, the largest number admitted to Harvard Law School in one class up to that point. Like Lewis, most of his black compatriots had poor or blue-collar upbringings and had attended black southern colleges. From those backgrounds, they found themselves thrust into an environment that easily intimidated even wealthy white graduates of the country’s most exclusive finishing schools and colleges.

  The school itself was more than a little concerned about how the incoming black students of the Class of 1968 would hold up under the intellectual cut and thrust to which they would be subjected. In a well-meaning, if slightly patronizing gesture, the law school paired each new black student with a third-year student who would act as a mentor. The same precaution wasn’t taken for first-year white students, a fact not lost on many of the new black students.

  The school arranged for its highest ranking black employee, George Strait, the assistant reference librarian, to meet with the fledgling black lawyers. In his talk, Strait told them to work hard and to consider themselves privileged for having earned a chance to attend Harvard Law School.

  Some of Lewis’s fellow black law students were indeed awe-struck and terrified at the prospect of attending Harvard Law School and of competing with the best students in the country. Others in the group were feeling a tad cocky and even arrogant. They considered themselves a bright, elite subsection within an already elite segment of the scholastic universe. In public at least, Reginald Lewis fit into the latter category, says Richard Brown, one of the black students on campus.

  As far as Lewis was concerned, he’d already proven to himself that he could excel in a law school setting by turning the special summer program on its ear. That all of the program participants were black and that most of his law school classmates were white made no difference to him.

  Lewis conceded nothing to anyone. And he was moving beyond classifications based on race and ethnicity. Which is not to say Lewis wasn’t proud of his roots. He and the other black students were a close-knit group, surrounded as they were by a sea of white faces and subjected daily to cultural shock on a major scale. Not everyone, including some students and faculty members, jumped for joy on discovering that the black students’ ranks had grown to 17.

  Most of them, including Lewis, often congregated at the “black” table in Harkness Commons, which housed the dining facility for graduate students. Lewis frequently socialized with Robinson and Hatch, his roommates, and with other black law students. They shared a common excitement, and sense of irony, about the challenge that lay ahead.

  But Lewis was equally likely to be seen in the company of white friends he made at Harvard. He fell in with a study group made up of five white first-year law students. They spent hours reading, summarizing their conclusions, sharing notes, and discussing what had been taught in class. The same first-year curriculum was required of everyone: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Contracts, Property I, Torts, and Development of Law & Legal Institutions.

  Lewis moved easily between both black and white worlds, because he didn’t view himself as constrained by artificial barriers founded on something as trite as pigmentation. If others chose to perceive him a certain way because of his skin, that was their problem.

  Lewis and his classmates attended Harvard in the middle of the 1960s, a tumultuous time unprecedented in the country’s history. Values were being turned upside down, and, intent as everyone was on their studies, they were not immune from being touched by a rising social consciousness.

  Among the black students in Lewis’s class, there was a pervasive sense that their unique status brought with it unique responsibilities. While most of their white counterparts had law firm ambitions, many of the black law students were interested in civil rights law or poverty law.

  In one incident, black students confronted Harvard’s administration over the lack of black construction workers involved with a campus building project. Harvard students black and white also participated in a series of civil rights demonstrations on campus.

  Lewis supported such activities in spirit, but skeptically drew the line at physical participation. For him, marching around on campus holding a civil rights placard wasn’t an effective way to wield influence. Philosophically, he believed in systemic change, rather than demonstrations and placard-bearing.

  While he was at law school, Lewis’s sense of racial pride was burgeoning. He had never had any identity problems—he was no white man hiding in a black man’s skin. Black pride was on the rise around the country and the movement made an impression on Lewis, too.

  During a break from classes one summer, Lewis returned to Baltimore with his hair puffed out in a luxuriant Afro, in keeping with the style among young blacks at the time. His uncle, James Cooper, had never seen an Afro before. In fact, he still wore the close-cropped haircut favored by most African-American males before the “Black is Beautiful” movement.

  Cooper took a long look at Lewis’s haircut and asked, “Man, what kind of nigger are you with all that hair on your head?” Cooper called Lewis “nigger,” as a term of endearment, a practice common in the black community. This time, Lewis took umbrage.

  “Don’t say nigger in my presence again,” he thundered at his dumbfounded uncle. “We are all black people!” As the two men sat on the curb in front of Lewis’s house on Mosher Street, Lewis then lectured his older relative for a good 15 minutes on the error of his ways.

  Lewis was exposed to racist comments during his last year at Harvard. In his third year, he had taken an apartment by himself in a working-class, Italian-American neighborhood seldom frequented by college students. When walking through the streets to and from school, Lewis would invariably be the target of ugly racial epithets.

  Bill Slattery, a white classmate of Lewis’s, remem
bers how Lewis would tell him about the incidents calmly and matter-of-factly, not showing any hint of the hurt and rage roiling away just below the surface.

  “ROBINSON, LEWIS, AND HATCH”

  In his first year at Harvard, Lewis lived at 1751 Massachusetts Avenue, in an upscale section of North Cambridge not far from Porter Square. John Hatch had rented the entire third floor.

  When Hatch first met Lewis, he was struck by the fact that the newcomer had already taken to wearing twill pants, wide ties, and tweed jackets, an ersatz style favored by a segment of the student population that would now be called preppy. “Reg could be sort of like a chameleon sometimes. He was always sort of quietly watching for what was going on. He seemed to have sort of caught on to the tone of Harvard right away,” Hatch says.

  Living off campus provided Lewis a respite from the frenetic, pressure cooker atmosphere of law school. He kept his room as neat as a military barracks, prompting his other roommate, Bill Robinson, to tease Lewis that he couldn’t be studying, because nothing in the room ever seemed to be disturbed.

  The three bachelors took turns cooking and did their grocery shopping at Boston’s open-air markets. As a joke, they would often answer their phone, “Robinson, Lewis, and Hatch,” as though they were already a big-time law firm. Lewis spent an inordinate amount of time on the telephone, generating the lion’s share of the phone bill, which he paid unhesitatingly.

  Many of his conversations were with young ladies. As gutsy in his social relationships as he was in the classroom, Lewis would often pick up the phone and call a women’s dorm at nearby Boston University, blurting out, “I want to talk to a swinger.” In response, white coeds Lewis had never seen before would catch taxicabs to his apartment, share a lust-filled evening, then depart in the morning. They usually paid their own cab fare, too.

  “Whatever he had, it was powerful,” marvels shy James McPherson, who first met Lewis at the summer law program and later moved into the Massachusetts Avenue apartment. “It was some kind of magnetism or power or something that I couldn’t comprehend.”