Reginald Lewis was born Dec. 7, 1942, to a working-class Baltimore family. He worked his first job at age 10, delivering the black community newspaper in Baltimore.
One summer, Lewis was away at camp and his mother delivered the route for him. When he returned, his mother refused to give him the profits, saying she had done all the work. Lewis threatened to sue her, and she finally gave him the money, along with a business lesson: Set your terms up front.
Lewis earned a football scholarship at what is now Virginia State University, but after a shoulder injury, he pushed football aside and earned a degree in economics. During a summer minority program at Harvard Law School, he impressed professors there and was granted admission without taking the entrance exam.
After working at several law firms, Lewis opened TLC Group, a venture capital firm. In 1987, he engineered the largest leveraged buyout ever of an international company when he acquired Beatrice, a France-based food company, for $985 million. At its peak in 1996, TLC Beatrice had sales of $2.2 billion, was No. 512 on Fortune magazine’s list of 1,000 largest companies and was the largest black-owned American company.
With a personal fortune estimated at $400 million, Lewis was also a distinguished philanthropist. His 1992 gift to Harvard Law School was at the time the largest single donation the school had received.
Lewis died of brain cancer in January 1993.

— Jessica Richelderfer