Reginald F. Lewis

Reginald Francis Lewis was born in Baltimore on December 7, 1942, to Clinton Lewis and Carolyn Cooper Fugett. His parents divorced when he was five, and he was raised primarily by his mother and his maternal grandparents in a middle-class Black neighborhood in Baltimore. He grew up surrounded by Black professionals, which his biographers later cited as one of the determinative facts of his life: he never doubted that Black professionals could build serious institutions because he had seen them do it.

He attended Dunbar High School in Baltimore, where he played quarterback on the football team. He went to Virginia State University on a football scholarship, suffered a shoulder injury that ended his playing career, and turned his focus to academics. In the summer between his junior and senior years, he was admitted to the Harvard Law School Summer Program for Minority Students. By the end of the summer, he had been admitted to Harvard Law School itself, becoming the only person ever admitted to Harvard Law before actually applying.

He graduated from Harvard Law in 1968 and joined the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, which had been one of the few major Wall Street firms to hire Black attorneys at any level. In 1970, he left Paul Weiss to open his own firm, Lewis and Clarkson, specializing in corporate law. He worked with Black entrepreneurs and civil rights organizations. But he wanted to be on the deal side, not the legal side.

In 1983, he founded TLC Group, a private equity firm. His first successful acquisition came in 1984, when he purchased McCall Pattern Company, a 114-year-old home-sewing-pattern business, for $22.5 million. McCall was a declining category. Most acquirers would have seen a dying company. Lewis saw one with international licensing opportunities, a strong brand, and significant cost reductions available.

He cut costs, expanded the international licensing, and improved operations. Three years later, in 1987, he sold McCall Pattern Company for $65 million. His personal return on the initial equity was roughly ninety to one. It was one of the best returns on any private-equity transaction of the 1980s. It established his reputation as a serious financial operator.

The McCall proceeds gave him the equity base to attempt something much larger. In 1987, Beatrice Companies announced the sale of its international division, Beatrice International Foods. The international division was a sprawling collection of food businesses across 31 countries, worth roughly $985 million. The bidders were the major private-equity firms of the era. Lewis bid. And he won.

The Beatrice deal closed on November 30, 1987. It was the largest offshore leveraged buyout in history at that time. The financing was complex, structured with junk bonds placed through Michael Milken's Drexel Burnham Lambert and equity from TLC Group, Lewis personally, and co-investors. Within 90 days, Lewis had restructured the operations, sold off several non-core divisions, and retained the most profitable businesses as TLC Beatrice International.

By 1992, TLC Beatrice International had annual revenue of $1.8 billion. At its peak in 1993, revenue reached $2.2 billion. It was the largest Black-owned business in American history and one of the largest food companies in the world. Lewis's personal net worth reached approximately $400 million, making him one of the wealthiest Black Americans who had ever lived.

He died on January 19, 1993, of brain cancer. He was fifty years old. He had been diagnosed only weeks earlier. His widow, Loida Nicolas Lewis, a Filipino-American attorney, took over as Chair and CEO of TLC Beatrice International. Under her leadership, the company continued to grow before being successfully wound down in a planned liquidation that returned capital to shareholders at a profit.

Before his diagnosis, Lewis had been working on his autobiography with journalist Blair S. Walker. The book, titled Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? How Reginald Lewis Created a Billion-Dollar Business Empire, was published posthumously in 1994. The title was not bitter. It was a challenge. He was telling young Black professionals that the rooms they had been told were closed were in fact enterable, if you were prepared to do the work and the math.