American Entrepreneur by Willie Robertson

Author:Willie Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

One day in Baltimore in the late 1940s, a six-year-old black boy named Reginald F. Lewis stepped out of the bathtub and into a towel held by his grandma and grandpa.

During the bath, the boy had heard his grandparents talking about job discrimination against black Americans, and how unfair it was.

Toweling off their boy, his grandparents looked at him and said, “Well, maybe it will be different for him.” Then they asked him, “Well, is it going to be any different for you?”

“Yeah,” said Reginald, “’cause why should white guys have all the fun?”

That question set the tone for the rest of his life, and Reginald F. Lewis went on to become a Harvard-trained lawyer, venture capitalist, and corporate takeover artist, one of America’s greatest black entrepreneurs and philanthropists.

Lewis was also inspired by two simple pieces of advice his grandparents gave him: “Know your job and do it well,” said his grandfather, and his grandmother gave Lewis a tin can and told him to save everything he earned.

Young Reginald pursued both ideas with a passion. He kept his earnings in a tin can known as “Reggie’s Hidden Treasure.” Within two years he built up his paper route from ten customers to one hundred, and was saving eighteen out of every twenty dollars per week he made. He sold the business at a profit, his first coup in an entrepreneurial career that would eventually make business history. In high school, Reginald served as captain of the football, basketball, and baseball teams and was elected vice president of the student body. On weekends and nights, he worked jobs with his grandpa.

Like Madam C. J. Walker and countless other American entrepreneurs, Lewis was filled with a passion for self-improvement, and a vision for achieving it. Early on, he decided that his destiny was to have a career that combined the law and business. In 1961, almost as soon as he enrolled at historically black Virginia State University on a football scholarship, he fell in “love at first sight” with the subject of economics. “I quit football after my freshman year and decided to get serious about my studies. The college years were wild. I crammed a lot of living into those four years. After a rotten freshman year, I really started to study. I got straight A’s in economics and always went beyond the course. I started reading the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal every day.” One of his classmates recalled, “He always had a purpose. Where other guys were taking courses to get out of school, Reggie had a master plan in mind. When other guys were reading comics, he was reading The Wall Street Journal.” He graduated from Virginia State University on the dean’s list.

In 1965, Reginald Lewis’s career path intersected with the legacy of John D. Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Foundation, started decades earlier by the great entrepreneur, financed a summer school program at Harvard Law School to introduce promising African American students to the study of law. Lewis impressed the Harvard faculty so much that they invited him to attend Harvard Law that autumn.

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