Reginald Lewis

Reginald Lewis was born in 1942 in Baltimore, Maryland, into a working class Black family living under the segregation laws still enforced across much of the United States. He worked from a young age, including running a small newspaper delivery route he expanded by hiring other boys to work for him, an early sign of an instinct for organising businesses rather than simply doing the work himself.

He excelled academically and won a scholarship to Virginia State University, then talked his way into Harvard Law School through a special summer programme despite not having formally applied through the normal process, going on to graduate and build a successful corporate law career on Wall Street at a time when Black lawyers were rare in elite finance and law firms. He grew frustrated advising other people's deals and moved into structuring and financing acquisitions himself, founding his own investment firm, TLC Group.

In 1987 he engineered the eight hundred and fifty million dollar leveraged buyout of Beatrice International Foods, a company with operations across dozens of countries, financing the deal through a combination of debt and complex structuring that was itself a considerable feat of negotiation. It was, at the time, the largest offshore leveraged buyout completed by an American company, and made Lewis the first Black American to build a billion dollar company.

He died of brain cancer in 1993 at just fifty, and is remembered as a pioneer who broke into an overwhelmingly white world of high finance through sheer technical skill and persistence rather than family connections or inherited capital.