Matthew Nathaniel Lewis (19 August 1858–5 December 1926), founder and editor of the Newport News Star, was born free in Savannah, Georgia, and was the son of John N. Lewis and a free seamstress, Sarah Anne Black. After the Civil War, he attended public schools in Savannah, and worked for several years before attending Howard University in Washington, D.C. From 1879 to 1882, Lewis worked in New York, where he met Lillian Friend, who was attending school there. They married on 2 April 1882 and settled in his wife's hometown of Petersburg, where he operated a dining room and boarding house. They had a daughter and another child who died young.
Matt Lewis, as he was generally known, entered journalism in the summer of 1883 as a subscription agent and assistant local editor of the Petersburg Lancet. In 1886, he was a founding member of the board as well as secretary of the Colored Agricultural and Industrial Association of Virginia. While in Petersburg, Lewis studied law with John Mercer Langston, then president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (later Virginia State University), and qualified to practice law in 1887. When Langston ran for the United States House of Representatives in 1888, Lewis was secretary of the campaign committee in Petersburg and a voter registrar; and when a Democrat later challenged Langston's election, Lewis served as one of Langston's attorneys. In September 1888, a local correspondent for a Washington, D.C., newspaper referred to Lewis as the "brightest and most successful colored man" in the congressional district and as "a colored lawyer in fairly good practice."
The Republican Party being bitterly divided at that time, Lewis started the Petersburg Herald as a rival to the Lancet about 1888. He published it for more than two years and remained its co-editor at least until 1892. So few copies of any of the several newspapers that Lewis edited and published survive that it is not possible to date with precision when he became editor or ceased editing them. His political activity is better documented. Lewis was a delegate to the Republican Party's national convention in 1888, and in the summer of 1889 he received a patronage appointment as deputy collector of revenue in Petersburg. He lost his job after a Democrat won the presidential election in 1892.
In 1894 or 1895, Lewis moved to Norfolk, where he edited the Norfolk Recorder. He remained active in politics and did not hesitate to admonish publicly white Republicans for shutting out Black party members. He was a member of a delegation of Virginia Republicans who met with President William McKinley in the White House in June 1897; and he led an African American delegation to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt in December 1902 and again in March 1904. About 1898 when Lewis became an inspector of customs in Newport News, another patronage appointment, he moved to that city. He founded the weekly Newport News Star in 1901 and edited it until his death. Lewis made it into an influential regional paper, with a circulation of 3,500 by 1920.
Lewis may have sought the Republican nomination for the House of Representatives in 1908. He served on the board of directors of the Chesapeake Beach Hotel Company that operated a resort for African Americans at Buckroe Beach in Hampton, and his wife became proprietor and manager of the We Us Hotel in Newport News which, with its elegant café and banquet hall, she advertised as "the swellest colored house" in the city. Lewis remained inspector of customs in Newport News until the autumn of 1918, when, as planned, he retired on reaching age sixty.
Lewis did not retire from editing or from leadership of the African American community in southeastern Virginia or as a spokesman for members of the community. "No matter how kind and considerate the Negro has been toward the fortunes of the average white person," he wrote in an editorial in the Star in April 1918, "it is only in rare instances that the Negro gets anything like the gratitude that ought to come to him." In a companion editorial the same day, he speculated about the futures of service members who were going off to war in Europe and what, if anything, "this democracy, for which they go to fight, will extend to them." He worried about what would happen if, "after they have suffered, bled and died, those who survive must come back to a country which makes the most insidious discriminations against him, and which hampers and retards his efforts in all walks of life?"
In July 1921, the Republican Party's state convention refused to seat most of the African Americans elected to it and nominated what at the time was referred to as a "Lily White" ticket for statewide offices. African American Republicans nominated a slate of candidates—known as the "Lily Black" ticket—in opposition to the "Lily White" Republicans and the Democratic Party candidates. As a prominent leader, Lewis was considered as the candidate for governor in 1921, but John Mitchell Jr., editor of the Richmond Planet, received the nomination, instead. The following year, Lewis ran as an independent Republican candidate for the United States Senate and received 7,627 votes out of almost 167,000 cast statewide. He received at least one vote in all but four of the state's one hundred counties and all but one of its twenty-three cities. He received his largest number of votes in the cities of Richmond and Newport News and in some western counties with strong Republican Parties and where larger proportions of African American men and women had registered to vote than in most of the eastern counties and cities.
Lewis's wife died on 23 February 1921 following a stroke, and he published a long obituary and editorial tribute to her in the Star. As Matthew Nathaniel Lewis was preparing to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Star, he died at his home in Newport News on 5 December 1926. He was buried in Holly Grove Cemetery, also known as Pleasant Shade Cemetery, in Hampton. Joseph Thomas Newsome took over editorial duties at the Star and in December 1931 published a special issue commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the newspaper, with tributes to Lewis and several editorials reprinted on issues such as the need for young men to take advantage of educational opportunities in numbers equal to young women, the lack of white support for issues important to Blacks, and spurring African Americans to have confidence in achieving their success and supporting each other along the way. In one poignant editorial originally published in April 1925 relating to equitable funding for parks and other recreational spaces for Black residents, Lewis wrote, "As long as we will lay supinely idle and see all these discriminations made against us without the slightest protest, these people, who can always find money to make improvements and do whatever they choose for the benefit of their people, will never grow large enough to think that the colored people are human enough to want some of the same kind of considerations." The Norfolk Journal and Guide acquired the Star and continued to publish it until the 1940s, when it in effect merged into the Journal and Guide.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in A. B. Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, Vol. 5, Virginia Edition (1921), 185–187, with birth and marriage dates; feature articles in Washington, D.C., Colored American, 27 Oct. (with portrait), 29 Dec. 1900, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, 16 Jan., 10 July 1926; United States Census Schedules, Chatham Co., Ga., 1860 (age two), Newport News, Va., 1900 (born May 1859), 1910 (age fifty), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; a few letters in John Mercer Langston Papers, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Special Collections and Archives Library, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn.; Petersburg Hustings Court Minute Book, 1887–1889, 135; Lewis's testimony in election challenge in John M. Langston vs. E. C. Venable, 51st Cong., 1st sess., House of Representatives Report No. 2462, esp. 10–14, 52–57; William D. Henderson, Gilded Age City: Politics, Life and Labor in Petersburg, Virginia, 1874–1889 (1980), 190, 219, 324–326; New York Freeman, 20 Aug. 1887; Washington, D.C., Evening Star, 2 Oct. 1888 (first quotation); Newport News Daily Press, 24 Mar. 1907 (second quotation); Newport News Star, 5 Apr. 1918 (third and fourth quotations); Secretary of the Commonwealth, Election Records, 1776–1941, No. 201, State Government Records Collection, Record Group 13, Library of Virginia (LVA); Death Certificate, Newport News, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, LVA, with death date and age sixty-eight; death notice in Richmond Planet, 11 Dec. 1926; obituary in Norfolk Journal and Guide (with portrait), 11 Dec. 192; obituary and funeral notices in Newport News Daily Press, 7, 9, 10 Dec. 1926; tributes and reprint of several editorials in anniversary edition of Newport News Star, 3 Dec. 1931 (fifth quotation).
Engraving in Washington, D.C. Colored American, 27 Oct. 1900.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.
How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter, "Matthew Nathaniel Lewis (1858–1926)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Lewis_Matthew_N, accessed [today's date]).
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