Aubrey Lewis

Aubrey Lewis

Aubrey Lewis (1935-2001) was one of New Jersey’s greatest high school athletes and a track and football star at Notre Dame. After his career in sports, he went on to forge careers in law enforcement, business and public administration.

Lewis became the first black to be captain of an athletic team at Notre Dame while starring with the track squad in 1957-58. In 1962, he joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of its first training class to include blacks. After spending five years in the F.B.I., he became an executive with F. W. Woolworth.

A native of Glen Ridge, N.J., Lewis was an all-American halfback at Montclair High School in the early 1950’s, running for 49 touchdowns and close to 4,500 yards in leading the school to two state championships. He set state records in the 100-yard dash, the 220 and the discus, and he played on undefeated basketball teams.

After receiving some 200 scholarship offers, he went to Notre Dame, setting numerous school records in track and winning the collegiate 400-meter hurdles championship in 1956. He narrowly missed an Olympic berth, stumbling over the last hurdle while leading in the trials at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

Lewis was a halfback at Notre Dame from 1955 to 1957 and as a senior played on the team that snapped Oklahoma’s 47-game winning streak. He was drafted by the Chicago Bears, but an ankle injury incurred at Notre Dame kept him from a pro football career.

That Lewis even played sports was remarkable.

He had a heart murmur since childhood, and when he went out for the Montclair High football team, the doctor giving the physicals saw that his heart was beating too quickly.

As Lewis remembered it: ”The doctor puts a stethoscope on my heart, looks at me rather strangely, and I said, ‘Oh, I ran here all the way from my house.’ He said, ‘O.K.’ ”

Since that story worked, Lewis tried it again in college.

”When I got to Notre Dame, they checked me,” Lewis recalled. ”The doctor looked at me strangely and I said, ‘I ran here from the dorm.’ ”

After his football career ended, Lewis returned to New Jersey to teach in Newark and Montclair and at Central High School in Paterson, where he coached football and track. He was recruited by the F.B.I. in 1962 as one of the first two blacks to go through the bureau’s training academy. The F.B.I. had some blacks before then, but they were mostly drivers or held ceremonial positions.

In 1967, Lewis was offered a position by Woolworth as an executive recruiter. Seven years earlier, a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., was a signature moment of the civil rights movement.

”By then the bureau had moved to the point where I didn’t have to pioneer anymore,” Lewis once recalled, so he took the Woolworth post. He worked in personnel, security, and governmental and community relations, retiring as a senior vice president in 1995.

Lewis was a commissioner of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority when it developed the Meadowlands Sports Complex in the 1970’s, then rejoined the agency as a commissioner in 1999. He was vice chairman of the New Jersey Highway Authority and a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in the late 1990’s.

Lewis died at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center on December 10, 2001, at the age of 66. He was survived by his wife, Ann, of Montclair; three sons, two daughters, two sisters, and 11 grandchildren.

Lewis once said, ”I wanted to do a lot of things, to challenge life…I came along at a time when there were many doors to be opened by the black man, and that was a challenge to me.”

Source:

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/13/sports/aubrey-lewis-66-athlete-who-was-an-fbi-pioneer.html