Civil rights activist Chester Isaac Lewis Jr. was born on August 8, 1928, in Hutchinson, Kansas, to Chester Isaac, Sr., editor of the Hutchinson Blade, a local Black newspaper, and Edna L. Anderson Lewis, a schoolteacher. He had two brothers, Alfred and John, and a sister, Mary Ellen Lewis London.
Lewis graduated from Hutchinson High School in 1945, the only one of the state’s 12 largest schools not racially segregated. He then enlisted in the US Army where he served in post-war Occupied Japan. After his honorable discharge, he enrolled at the University of Kansas, one of forty Black students in a student body of ten thousand. While at KU he joined Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity and served in the student senate. Lewis earned an undergraduate degree in 1951 and a Bachelor of Law degree (essentially a J.D. degree) from its law school in 1953.
Later in 1953 Lewis moved to Wichita, began practicing law, and became active in the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch. That same year, he and his legal partner, John E. Pyles brought a successful civil rights suit against the City of Wichita over Black exclusion from the city’s swimming pools. The lawsuit was successful when the Kansas State Supreme Court ruled that municipal swimming pools across Kansas could not discriminate.
In 1954, while Assistant Sedgwick County Attorney, Lewis served on the legal team that argued the landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case and in 1957, he began serving as Branch President of the Wichita NAACP. In 1958, Lewis provided legal counsel to the successful student sit-ins at the Dockum Drug Store lunch counter.
In 1964, partly in response to a visit to Mississippi by NAACP officials following the death of the three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, Lewis began to question the organization’s national strategy. He led a four-year national campaign to get the NAACP to address the economic issues facing African Americans. In 1966 Lewis filed a complaint with the federal government in Washington, DC, showing that ten years after the Brown decision, Wichita continued to maintain a segregated school system. In response to that complaint, the federal government threatened to withhold $5 million in federal funds to Wichita. Faced with the denial of federal funds, the Wichita School Board reluctantly agreed to a busing plan that integrated the city’s schools. Lewis, however, opposed the plan, stating that the busing burden fell unfairly on Black families.
In 1968, Lewis resigned as Wichita NAACP Branch President and ended his quest to reform the national NAACP. He then endorsed and became active in the local and national Black Power Movements.
In 1983, Lewis was one of four lawyers who led a successful class action lawsuit on behalf of African Americans who had experienced racial discrimination as Santa Fe Railroad porters, thus winning $16.5 million for them.
Lewis was married twice, first to Jackie Rickman Gilbert and later to Vashti Crutcher. He was the father of two daughters, Brenda Kay Lewis Davis and Michelle Lewis.
Attorney Chester I. Lewis, who fought for racial justice locally and nationally for four decades, died on June 15, 1990, in Wichita, Kansas. He was 62.
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Kenneth Spencer Research Library Archival Collections, “Chester I. Lewis papers,” https://archives.lib.ku.edu/repositories/3/resources/2691; “Tearing down the walls of desegregation,” https://www.hutchnews.com/story/news/local/2019/01/21/our-civil-rights-heroes-chester-i-lewis-jr/6239368007/; Gretchen Cassel Eick, Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
