Life (now known as AXA) and General Foods. He also worked as counsel for the Commission for Racial Justice and successfully lobbied for North Carolina to pay interest on the bond for the Wilmington Ten, nine men and one woman who were wrongly convicted of arson and conspiracy in 1971 and served almost ten years in jail before an appeal granted them release.
The road to one billion d0llars started with Lewis’s TLC Group, L.P., established in 1983. The first acquisition he made under his new company was the McCall Pattern Company, which he bought for $22.5 million. Under his leadership, McCall’s had two of its most profitable years in its 113-year history, and in 1987, he sold McCalls for $65 million. He was also able to buy Beatrice Foods for $985 million, making his company the only US company to engage in the largest leverage buyout of overseas assets at the time. The newly restructured company, TLC Beatrice International, became the one billion dollar juggernaut that made Lewis a history-making Black businessman. Unfortunately, Lewis died unexpectedly in 1993 at the age of fifty due to a short illness. His legacy has certainly paved the way for others like rapper-turned Tidal mogul Jay-Z, who famously rapped, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”
Blackness in Business
What can we learn from these men and women? I think the best thing we can take away is how much Black history surrounds us, even when we aren’t thinking about it. When you look at a traffic light or a simple zigzag stitch on a piece of clothing, you’re looking at a Black American invention. When you buy hair products or set your alarm system, you’re looking at the impact of Black Americans on our everyday lives. There is no part of America that Black Americans haven’t impacted, and it shows how we are a much more integral part of society than the history books would lead you to think.
Little-Known Civil Rights Leaders
So far in this book, we have been traveling through earlier periods of American history. Even though the “civil rights movement” as we understand it isn’t linked to times like the 1700s, 1800s, and even the early 1900s, the movement’s core beliefs were alive in abolitionist and likeminded groups. However, the civil rights movement as we know it began in the 1940s and grew to its zenith in the 1960s.
Conventional wisdom would tell us that the movement ended in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s with the murders of several civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and several others, including regular, everyday citizens like Emmett Till who were killed for simply being Black. But that’s where conventional wisdom is wrong. The civil rights movement continues today with social media-turned-real world groups such as Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, and others.
But before we get into the present and future, we must understand the foremothers and forefathers who laid the groundwork. We must give thanks to those who put their lives on the line to create better opportunities for us today.
Unsung Heroes
We know the usual names: Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Congressman John Lewis. You have to wonder what the rest of the movement was like beyond these usual suspects. What are the stories we either haven’t heard or know very little about?
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