Lewis College of Business

History

Violet T. Lewis founded Lewis Business College in 1928 in Indianapolis with a fifty-dollar bank loan, a single rented room, and a clear premise: Black women shut out of clerical and office work by both white-owned employment offices and white-only secretarial schools required their own pipeline into the professional economy. The Indianapolis school was the first business college in the country owned and operated by a Black woman.

In 1939, at the invitation of Detroit civic and business leaders responding to the city's rapidly growing Black migrant population, Lewis opened a Detroit branch. The Detroit campus quickly outgrew the Indianapolis original and became the institution's center of gravity. Through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lewis College placed graduates into the first Black office positions at Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Michigan Bell, and the major Detroit banks — positions from which Black workers had been categorically excluded a generation earlier.

In 1987, federal authorities formally designated Lewis College of Business as a Historically Black College or University, codifying what had been institutionally true for nearly six decades and granting Michigan its first and only HBCU. The designation also placed Violet T. Lewis among the small group of Black women HBCU founders — by the conventional accounting, the second after Mary McLeod Bethune to have founded an institution that ultimately received federal HBCU recognition.

After Violet Lewis's death, her daughters Marjorie Harris and others sustained the institution into the twenty-first century. By the 2000s the broader collapse of the proprietary business-college sector, combined with the encroaching dominance of community colleges and online vocational programs, eroded Lewis's enrollment base. ACICS withdrew accreditation in 2007 and the college ultimately closed its physical doors in 2013.

Significance

Lewis College of Business is the only HBCU founded in Michigan and the only HBCU founded outside the former Confederacy and border states whose closure left an entire region of the country — the industrial Midwest — without a federally designated Historically Black College for nearly a decade. Its 2022 revival as Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design is the first instance in modern HBCU history of a closed HBCU being reconstituted with its federal designation restored.

Violet T. Lewis's founding of an institution at twenty-one years old with a fifty-dollar loan in 1928, in a city not associated with HBCU formation, and in the specific field of business education rather than the more common liberal arts or normal-school mission, makes Lewis College a distinct institutional type within the HBCU universe. The college trained clerical and administrative talent at the precise economic chokepoint at which segregated hiring had locked Black workers out of white-collar employment in the industrial Midwest.

The revival remains institutionally incomplete in one important respect. As of mid-2026 Pensole Lewis College is not independently accredited by an accrediting agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education; it delivers its degree programs through a partnership with Detroit's College for Creative Studies while pursuing its own accreditation, federal authorization, and recertification of HBCU status for federal funding purposes. The federal HBCU designation and the academic accreditation are separate instruments, and the second has not yet followed the first.

The Pensole Lewis successor institution preserves the original HBCU charter and lineage while redirecting the academic program toward footwear and product design — a deliberate response to the same exclusion problem in a contemporary industry. The continuity, more than the discontinuity, is the point. The model is gaining traction: in March 2025 the college launched the Light School, a free seven-week night program in footwear, apparel, and accessory design backed by StockX and the Detroit Pistons, and in 2026 it delivered an eight-week virtual certificate program in inclusive and sustainable design developed with Target. In July 2026, marking the tenth anniversary of a partnership that had by then placed more than thirty-five PLC Detroit alumni into full-time roles at the company, the college and New Balance launched a ten-week global design capstone — an industry-credential program in footwear, apparel, and materials design for a selected cohort of sixteen emerging designers.