Chester I. Lewis, Jr. (1929-1990)

A state and national leader of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, Mr. Lewis was born and raised in Hutchinson, Kansas. His father was editor of the African American newspaper The Hutchinson Blade, which attacked local practices of racial segregation. His mother was a teacher and founder of the Delta chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority at the University of Kansas in 1916. After graduating from Hutchinson High School and serving in World War II, Mr. Lewis attended the University of Kansas where he received an undergraduate degree in 1951 and a law degree in 1953. By 1955, he was a lawyer for Sedgewick County and became an active member of the Wichita chapter of the NAACP. Having successfully chaired the local chapter’s Legal Redress Committee, Lewis became president of the organization in 1956. As leader of the Wichita NAACP, he volunteered his legal expertise to foster racial integration of the city’s police and fire departments and its public schools. He also lobbied for the passage of the Wichita Fair Housing Ordinance. For more than a decade, Lewis was an active leader of the local, state, and national NAACP. In 1962, he was among the leaders of the "Young Turks," a national movement within the NAACP that sought to shift the organization’s traditional focus of seeking change through court action and legislation to include strategies of non-violent protest and direct action. They also wanted the NAACP to place more emphasis on the issues of poverty experienced by African Americans in the urban north. When the "Young Turks" movement failed to reform the NAACP, Mr. Lewis resigned from the organization in 1968 and endorsed the rising Black Power Movement. However, he continued to lead the struggle for African American civil rights. In 1983, he was one of four lawyers who successfully led a class action lawsuit on behalf of African Americans who experienced past practices of racial discrimination as train porters.

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