Reginald Lewis grew up in Rosemont, a rugged, largely Black East Baltimore neighborhood, raised by a single mother who worked two jobs, one as a waitress and the other as a department store clerk.

Lewis went on to earn a scholarship to Harvard Law School and practice as a corporate attorney. He went further still, becoming the first Black businessman in the United States to leverage a billion-dollar deal. Ultimately, he rose to chairman and CEO of TLC Beatrice International, the first Black-owned business to surpass a billion dollars in annual sales.

In his heyday, Reginald Lewis served as a role model for all Black Americans in business, especially entrepreneurs like himself.

But none of his successes came easy. Race was a daily, all-consuming war he had to fight every time he walked out the door of his home. I know because I saw it with my own eyes while acting as one of his closest advisers at the height of his accomplishments from 1987 to 1993.

I would join Reg for lunch at fine restaurants, only for both of us to wind up seated at a table next to the men’s room. The service would prove suspiciously slow, typically prompting Lewis to object angrily. I saw him hail taxis in midtown Manhattan, only for empty cabs to pass him by.

“When you’re Black in this country,” I once overheard my boss tell his wife Loida, “they lead you to the water, but they won’t let you drink.”

Lewis would suddenly erupt into a rage at any perceived slight on the basis of race. Any time a white executive patted him on the back in a gesture he saw as patronizing, he would, in return, slap him on the back, too, but hard enough to leave him gasping for breath.

“What I have,” Lewis once told me, “I’ve had to fight for every inch of the way.”

Despite the racial barriers he faced, Lewis managed to get the last word. Harvard Law School named a campus building the Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center. He was the first Black person deemed qualified to buy a condominium in a “good” building on Fifth Avenue (for $12 million, then the highest price ever for a New York City apartment).

“They don’t let Blacks live on Fifth,” Lewis had told me beforehand. “The only Black people on Fifth Avenue come in through the servants’ entrance. They even turned down Bill Cosby. But I’m going to be the first.”

His legacy imparts an uplifting lesson in free enterprise for Black Americans this Black History Month. While Lewis was an associate at a blue-chip Wall Street law firm early in his legal career, for example, he was told he would never make partner. So he quit to start his own Wall Street law firm.

His mother, Carolyn Fugett, taught him the importance of saving money to kick-start his business career. He set up a route delivering a Black newspaper at the age of 10. Within two years he expanded his neighborhood clientele from 10 customers to more than a hundred and sold the route at a profit. While still at Dunbar High School, he worked at a local country club nights and weekends, saving enough to buy himself clothes and eventually his own car.

“Every Black guy worth his salt grows up with a sense of anger,” Lewis, former quarterback and captain of the high school football team, once told me. “Every day, I’m out there on the field, throwing passes or rushing for a touchdown. And every time I score, I kick the crap out of the lie that ignorant people believe — that Blacks aren’t good enough.”

Lewis died of a brain tumor at age 50. Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke and the Archbishop of Baltimore William Keeler spoke at his funeral in Baltimore. Condolence messages came in from then-President Bill Clinton, former President Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder and NAACP CEO Reverend Ben Chavis.

A long obituary appeared in The New York Times. Today, East Pratt Street is the site of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution designated to commemorate Black Marylanders.

The state of Black business in Baltimore is hardly perfect. According to a 2022 study from the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, 58% of Black borrowers in Baltimore reported “credit availability challenges,” almost double the 32% of white borrowers.

Yet evidence keeps mounting that Maryland in general and Baltimore in particular are models for Black entrepreneurship nationwide. In Baltimore, the Senate report found, 47% of the small businesses, or about 23,600, have Black owners. And across Maryland, according to the Senate committee, more than 200,000 small businesses are minority-owned, giving our state the highest rate of per-capita minority business ownership in the United States.

As Reginald Lewis would have readily acknowledged, it’s a start. “As a Black man, I don’t just want a seat at the table,” he once said. “I want to sit at the head of the table.”

Butch Meily was the public relations strategist for the Baltimore-born businessman Reginald Lewis. Meily is the author of the upcoming memoir “From Manila To Wall Street: An Immigrant’s Journey with America’s First Black Tycoon” (Heliotrope Books) and is president of the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation.