Reginald F. Lewis

Lawyer, entrepreneur, philanthropist , Chairman, CEO, husband, father, son, brother, nephew, cousin, friend — Reginald F. Lewis lived his life according to the words he often quoted to audiences around the country: “Keep going, no matter what.”

                             The Reginald F. Lewis Story

Reginald F. Lewis was born on December 7, 1942 in an East Baltimore neighborhood he once described as “semi-tough.” Lewis was strongly influenced by his family. His parents, grandparents. uncles, and aunts always encouraged Lewis to “be the best that you can be.” Reginald’s grandmother would teach him the importance of saving, even cutting and peeling strips from the bottom of a tin can and nailing it to the floor of a closet to protect his savings.

At the age of ten, Lewis set up a delivery route to sell the Afro American newspaper. After building the business from ten customers to more than a hundred in two years, he sold the route at a profit.

Lewis’ grandfather was headwaiter and maitre d’ at a private country club. It was while working there as a teenager that Lewis says his grandfather advised him. - “Know your job and do it well.” He also told Reginald stories about Paris during World War I, cultivating in him a lifelong love of French Language, food, and culture.

Reginald’s family stressed the value of education at an early age. Lewis received early schooling from the Oblate Sisters of Providence, established by women of African descent whose mission was teaching and caring for African American children. Later at Dunbar high School, he distinguished himself as an athlete on the playing field and a hard working student in the class room. He was quarterback of the football team shortstop for varsity baseball, a forward on the basketball team and was team captain of all three. Lewis was also elected vice president of the student body.

Reginald F. Lewis entered Virginia State University in 1961 on a football scholarship. An injury cut short his football career and he focused on school and work. One of the jobs was as a photographer’s sales assistant. He generated so much business that he was offered a partnership. Reginald declined because he had bigger things in mind for the future. A handwritten schedule that he kept says: “To be a good lawyer, one must study HARD.” And he did, graduating on the dean’s list his senior year.

In 1965, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a summer school program at Harvard Law School to introduce a select number of black students to legal studies. Reginald lobbied for his acceptance and got in. He made such an impression that Lewis was invited to attend Harvard Law School that fall — the only person in the 148-year history of the school to be admitted before applying. During his third year at Harvard Law, Lewis discovered the direction his career would take as the result of a course on securities law. His senior year thesis on mergers and acquisitions received an honors grade.

After graduation (HLS ‘68), Lewis landed a job practicing corporate law with a prestigious New York law firm . Two years later he—along with a few others—set up Wall Street’s first African American law firm. Lewis focused on corporate law, structuring investments in minority owned businesses and became special counsel to major corporations like General Foods and Equitable Life (now AXA).

RFL was of counsel to the New York-based Commission for Racial Justice and represented The Wilmington Ten. He was successful in forcing North Carolina to pay interest on the Wilmington Ten bond.

A desire to "do the deals myself" led Lewis to establish TLC Group, L.P. in 1983. His first successful venture was the S22.5—million dollar leveraged buyout of McCall Pattern Company. It was a struggling business in a declining industry. Lewis streamlined operations, increased marketing, and led the company to two of the most profitable years in McCall’s 113-year history. In the summer of 1987, he sold the company for $65 million, making a 90 to 1 return on his investment.

Fresh on the heels of the McCall deal, Lewis purchased the international division of Beatrice Foods (64 companies in 31 countries) in August 1987. The deal was supported by the most powerful investment banker then, Drexel Burnham Lambert, and led by high yield bond king Michael Robert Milken. Lewis, after closing the deal in December 1987, re-branded the corporation as TLC Beatrice International, Inc. At S985 million, the deal was the largest offshore leveraged buyout ever by an American company. As Chairman and CEO, Lewis moved quickly to reposition the company, pay down the debt, and vastly increase the company’s worth. With revenues of $1.5 billion, TLC Beatrice made it to Fortune’s 500 and was first on the Black Enterprise List of Top 100 African American owned businesses.

In January 1993, at age 50, Reginald F. Lewis died after a short illness. A letter at his funeral from longtime friend David N. Dinkins, former mayor of New York, said, “Reginald Lewis accomplished more in half a century than most of us could e ver deem imaginable. And his brilliant career was matched always by a warm and generous heart.” Dinkins added, “It is said that service to others is the rent we pay on earth. Reg Lewis departed us paid in full.”

              Vision and Mission of The Lewis College

              VSU Reginald F. Lewis School of Business


                         Reginald F. Lewis and the Making of a Billion Dollar Empire

Robert Sengstacke Abbott

by Pablo J. Davis & Wikipedia

 Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded, edited, and published the Chicago Defender, for decades the country's dominant African American newspaper. The Chicago Defender newspaper, which grew to have the highest circulation of any black-owned newspaper in the country. Through the pages of the Defender, Abbott exercised enormous influence on the rise of the black community in Chicago, Illinois, and on national African American culture.

     Robert S. Abbott - Millionair​e Newspaper Publisher


Abbot was born on November 24, 1870 in St. Simons Island, Georgia (although some sources state Savannah, Georgia) to freedman parents, who had been enslaved before the American Civil War. The Sea Islands were a place of the Gullah people, an African-descended ethnic group who continued stronger aspects of African cultures than among African Americans in other areas of the South. His father Thomas Abbott died when Robert was a baby.

His widowed mother Flora Abbott (née Butler) met and married John Sengstacke, an American mixed-race man of unusual background who had recently come to the US from Germany. His parents were Tama, a freed slave woman of African descent, and her husband Herman Sengstacke, a German sea captain who had a regular route from Hamburg to Savannah. In the Georgia port city in 1847, Herman saw a slave sale. He was so distressed he bought the freedom of Tama, a young woman from West Africa. They married in Charleston, South Carolina, before returning to Georgia, where their interracial marriage was prohibited. Their mixed-race son John was born the next year and a daughter in 1848. Tama died soon after their daughter was born, and Herman took the children back to Germany to be raised by family.

John met the young black widow Flora, who had a year-old son Robert. He cared for Robert as if he were his own. Together the couple had seven children together; their family crossed rigid racial boundaries. Robert was given the middle name Sengstacke to mark his belonging in the family. John Sengstacke had become a Congregationalist missionary as an adult; he wrote, "There is but one church, and all who are born of God are members of it. God made a church, man made denominations. God gave us a Holy Bible, disputing men made different kinds of disciples." Sengstacke became a teacher, determined to improve the education of black children. He also became a publisher, founding the Woodville Times, based in what was then a town named Woodville; it was later annexed by the city of Savannah, Georgia.

After briefly attending Savannah's Beach Institute and Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Abbott studied printing at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically black college in Hampton, Virginia from 1892 to 1896,. At Hampton, he sang with the "Hampton Choir and Quartet," which toured nationally.  (A loyal alumnus, he later was the alumni association's president.) He then left for Chicago, Illinois, where he earned a law degree from Kent College of Law.

Abbott tried to set up a law practice, working for a few years in Gary, Indiana; and Topeka, Kansas. He returned home to Georgia for a period, then went back to Chicago, where he could see changes arriving with thousands of new migrants from the rural South.

After settling in Chicago, in 1905 Abbott founded The Chicago Defender newspaper with an initial investment of ¢25 (around $600 in 2010 terms). He started printing in a room at his boardinghouse; his landlady encouraged him, and he later bought her an 8-room house.

He wanted to push for job opportunities and social justice, and was eager to persuade blacks to leave the segregated, Jim Crow South for Chicago. A key part of his distribution network was made up of African-American railroad porters, who were highly respected among blacks. (By 1925 they organized a union as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters). They often sold or distributed the paper on trains. Defender circulation reached 50,000 by 1916; 125,000 by 1918; and more than 200,000 by the early 1920s. Credited with contributing to the Great Migration of rural southern blacks to Chicago, the Defender became the most widely circulated black newspaper in the country. It was known as "America's Black Newspaper." Its success resulted in Abbott becoming one of the first self-made millionaires of African-American descent; his business expanded as African Americans moved to the cities and became an urbanized, northern population. From the early 20th century through 1940, 1.5 million blacks moved to major cities in the North and Midwest.

They were eager to know about conditions, to find housing, and to learn more about their new lives in cities. Most were from rural areas of the South. From 1890 to 1908 all the southern states had passed constitutions or laws that raised barriers to voter registration and effectively disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. They were utterly closed out of the political systems. Schools and other public facilities reserved for blacks were typically underfunded and ill-maintained. Legislatures imposed Jim Crow conditions, producing facilities for blacks that were "separate" but never "equal" (referring to the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities, such as railroad cars providing "separate but equal" conditions, were constitutional).

The northern and midwestern industrial centers, where blacks could vote and send children to school, were recruiting workers based on expansion of manufacturing and infrastructure to supply the US's expanding population as well as the war in Europe, which started in 1914. The Pennsylvania Railroad and others were expanding at a rapid rate across the North, needing workers for construction and later to serve the train passengers.

The Defender told stories of earlier migrants to the North, giving hope to disenfranchised and oppressed people in the South of other ways to live. Abbott, through his writings in the Chicago Defender, expressed those stories and encouraged people to leave the South for the North. He even set a date of May 15, 1917, for what he called 'The Great Northern Drive' to occur. In his weekly, he showed pictures of Chicago and had numerous classifieds for housing. In addition, Abbott wrote about how awful a place the South was to live in comparison to the idealistic North. Abbott's words described the North as a place of prosperity and justice. This persuasive writing, “thereby made this journal probably the greatest stimulus that the migration had,”.

Newsstand sales and subscriptions were the newspaper's lifeblood. Advertising was secondary, though it grew as white-owned businesses awakened to opportunities for access to the black public. Satisfying black readers' desire for aggressive racial advocacy while not alienating white advertisers proved difficult. More broadly Abbott sought a synthesis, not always easy, of racial militancy and a self-help ethos.

The newspaper's success made Abbott an important figure locally and nationally. In the wake of racial violence in 1919, the Illinois governor named Abbott to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which later authored a landmark report in 1922 on African American urban conditions. Through publishing he became one of the earliest African American millionaires and a black folk hero, embodying self-help and entrepreneurship in the mold of fellow Hamptonian Booker T. Washington.

The Defender also contributed broadly to the development of a national African American culture. longtime contributor , Langston Hughes, developed the beloved character Simple in his columns.

Abbott died in Chicago on February 29, 1940, of Bright's disease, having designated his Savannah-born nephew John H. Sengstacke his successor. The soft-spoken "country boy" who became a major shaper of African American culture would have relished Hughes's later characterization of his newspaper as "the journalistic voice of a largely voiceless people." He is buried at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago.
   
John H. Sengstacke ,a Savannah native and nephew of Robert S. Abbott, assumed management of the Chicago Defender in 1940 upon the death of Abbott, who founded the newspaper in 1905.
   
     Abbott & Sengstacke Family Papers


       The Sengstacke Eye


Black Pullman Porters, who were prosperous and well respected in the African American communities, became the Defender's national "delivery  men," distributing the newspapers to many southern towns. The newspaper became an important communication tool between Black Chicagoans and their relatives in the southern states.

Junius G. Groves

Junius G. Groves(1859-1925), a successful, self-educated farmer, landowner, and entrepreneur, became one of the most prosperous African American men in the early twentieth century. He was born enslaved on April 12, 1859 in Green County, Kentucky.  His parents were Martin Groves and Mary Anderson Groves. Two decades later, as a freedman possessing ninety cents, Groves made his way to eastern Kansas during the time of the Exoduster Movement of ex-slaves from the South.  Junius George Groves came to Kansas at the age of 19 as an Exoduster. He worked at the meat packing houses in Armourdale and later moved to Edwardsville. Groves began farming by sharecropping near Edwardsville, Kansas.

        Junius G. Groves: Gilded Age Business Magnate


In 1880 he married Matilda Emily Stewart from Kansas City, Missouri, and she worked by his side in the field. After his second year, Groves had twenty acres, and in his third year Groves landed ten more acres and a cabin across from Lake of the Forest. That same year he bought 80 acres from a Native American for $500. Subsequent acquisitions included a sawmill, and five adjoining farms, making for total holdings of more than 760 acres. Beside potatoes, he had apple, peach and pear orchards and a vineyard. In 1902, Groves was named by the US Dept of Agriculture the Potato King of the World for beating his closest competitor on the planet by 11,500 bushels.

Much of Groves' success was due to his forty-six years of devotion to the science of agriculture. He earned the title “Potato King of the World” in 1902 for growing the most bushels of potatoes per acre than anyone else in the world up to that point in time. The couple's twelve surviving children (out of fourteen births) helped with the farm and family holdings.

Besides producing potatoes on his own farms, Groves, by 1900, bought and shipped potatoes, fruits and vegetables extensively throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The family also owned and operated a general merchandise store in Edwardsville, possessed stock in mines in Indian Territory and Mexico, stock in Kansas banks, and majority interest in the Kansas City Casket and Embalming Company. Junius Groves co-founded the State Negro Business League and later served as its President.  He also founded the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Society in 1886.  He was also elected secretary of the Kaw Valley Potato Association in 1890 and Vice President of the Sunflower State Agricultural Association in 1910 as well as a cofounder of both organizations in those years.

Junius Groves surpassed financial parity with most whites in contemporary Kansas and in the process combated racism by example and by providing economic opportunities to blacks and whites with a particular emphasis on uplifting his race. During the busy farming season, for example, Groves employed up to fifty mostly black laborers. He founded Groves Center, an African American community near Edwardsville in the early 1900s.  He also established a golf course for African Americans, perhaps the first in the United States.

Junius Groves was one of the wealthiest African Americans in the nation by the first decade of the 20th Century.  His holdings were estimated to be worth $80,000 in 1904 and $300,000 by 1915.  The Groves family mansion, a 22-room brick home, complete with electric lights, two telephones, and hot and cold running water in all of the bedrooms, was the largest in the area and had its own railroad spur.  Junius Groves died in Edwardsville in 1925.  In 2007, Groves was honored by his descendants, the Votaw Colony Museum, an organization honoring the Exodusters and their descendants, and the city of Edwardsville.  He was also inducted into the Bruce W. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center Hall of Fame in nearby Kansas City, Missouri.