David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis – Life, Scholarship, and Famous Quotes

Explore the life, scholarship, and enduring legacy of David Levering Lewis (born May 25, 1936), the distinguished American historian celebrated for his Pulitzer Prize–winning biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois, his comparative approach to history, and his insights on race, culture, and politics.

Introduction

David Levering Lewis is one of America’s foremost historians, noted especially for his biographical mastery and his contributions to the understanding of race, identity, and comparative history. His two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois earned him the Pulitzer Prize twice, making him the first author to win back-to-back Pulitzers for successive volumes on the same subject.

Beyond Du Bois, Lewis’s scholarship touches on the social history of the United States, colonial and postcolonial Africa, France, and medieval Islamic and Christian interactions in Europe. His career spans decades, institutions, and continents.

In this article, we trace his life, intellectual trajectory, key works, famous quotes, and the lessons his career offers to scholars, readers, and anyone interested in the layered history of race and identity.

Early Life and Family

David Levering Lewis was born on May 25, 1936, in Little Rock, Arkansas, into a middle-class, intellectually grounded African American family.

His father, John Henry Lewis Sr., was a notable figure: he graduated from Morris Brown College and Yale Divinity School (becoming its first African American graduate), then earned an M.A. in sociology from the University of Chicago. He served as principal of Dunbar Junior and Senior High School and Junior College in Little Rock, and later became president of Morris Brown College.

His mother, Alice U. Bell Lewis, was a high school mathematics teacher.

During his early years, Lewis attended parochial school in Little Rock. Later, his father’s career moves led the family to Ohio and Georgia, where Lewis continued his schooling at Wilberforce Preparatory School, Xenia High School, and Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta.

Remarkably, at just 15, he gained early admission to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.

Education and Formative Intellectual Path

After Fisk, Lewis briefly attended University of Michigan Law School but ultimately chose history. He moved to Columbia University, where he earned an M.A. in history in 1959.

He then proceeded to the London School of Economics (LSE), where he completed his Ph.D. in 1962 in modern European and French history.

Between 1961 and 1962, Lewis served in the U.S. Army as a psychiatric technician (private first class) at Landstuhl, Germany.

His early training—rooted in European history—would later expand into a comparative framework combining American, African, and European themes.

Academic Career & Major Contributions

Teaching and Institutional Affiliations

After completing his Ph.D., Lewis held academic positions across African and American institutions:

• In 1963, he lectured at the University of Ghana on medieval African history.

• In the U.S., he taught at Morgan State University, Howard University, University of Notre Dame, and University of the District of Columbia (1970–1980).

• From 1980 to 1984, he was a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

• In 1985, he joined Rutgers University as the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History, during which time he wrote his acclaimed Du Bois biography volumes.

• In 2003, he became Julius Silver University Professor and professor of history at New York University (NYU), where he remains professor emeritus.

Over the years, he received fellowships from prestigious institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, National Humanities Center, American Philosophical Society, and MacArthur Foundation.

He also served in leadership roles — for example, he was president of the Society of American Historians in 2002 and held a trusteeship at the National Humanities Center.

In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in recognition of his longstanding contributions to historical scholarship.

Major Works & Themes

Lewis is the author or editor of numerous influential works. Among his most significant:

• King: A Critical Biography (1970) — one of the early serious biographies of Martin Luther King Jr.

• Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair (1974) — exploring issues of justice, identity, and anti-Semitism

• The Bicentennial History of the District of Columbia (1976) — a civic history of Washington, D.C.

• When Harlem Was in Vogue (1980) — a cultural and social history of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s

• W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (1993) — first volume of his Du Bois biography, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1994

• W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (2000) — second volume, which also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001

• God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215 (2008) — a sweeping treatment of early medieval interactions between Islamic and European civilization.

• The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790–1958 — a more personal work tracing his family’s history in the context of larger racial and social dynamics (a more recent project).

Through his work, Lewis often adopts a comparative historical lens, weaving together African, European, and American threads. His interests include 20th-century U.S. social and civil rights history, 19th-century African history, 20th-century France, and medieval Islam–Christian Europe.

He is particularly respected for balancing rigorous archival detail with readable narrative, and for letting the facts drive the theory rather than forcing theory onto the facts.

Personality, Philosophy & Style

Lewis has often displayed humility toward the craft of biography. He has said he is reluctant to overtheorize — instead, he allows evidence and narrative to guide interpretation.

He also engages with the moral and political dimensions of history, especially regarding race, identity, and power structures. His scholarship is marked by depth, empathy, and intellectual courage, grappling with complexity rather than seeking simplification.

Lewis once remarked wryly:

“History is a pretty good trade. It’s indoor work and you can go to interesting places.”

He often reflects on how oblivious many Americans (Black and white alike) were of their own collective histories, and how uncovering those histories is vital to understanding identity, injustice, and change.

Famous Quotes of David Levering Lewis

Here are several representative quotes that reflect his thinking on history, race, and narrative:

• “I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing.”

• “The education business is a little murky because by 1900, it has been pretty well decided that a certain amount of education was required to make the system of repression work. You had to have people who showed up punctually. You had to have people who took their orders obediently and understand them fully.”

• “I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. … I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.”

• “Most of history is indisputably written by the winners, yet ‘winning’ at Poitiers actually meant that the economic, scientific, and cultural levels that Europeans attained in the thirteenth century could almost certainly have been achieved more than three centuries