Roscoe E. Lewis was born in Washington, D.C., the son of William Harrison Lewis and Mary Over Lewis in 1904. Equipped with a strong public education despite segregation, he graduated from the renowned M Street High School (now Dunbar High School). In 1925, he acquired a BA in Philosophy from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1927, after earning an MS degree in Chemistry from Howard University, he began working at Hampton Institute as a science teacher and remained at the institution for the rest of his career. During the summers, he did further graduate work in chemistry at Columbia University.  

In 1936, while a chemistry assistant professor, Lewis volunteered to lead a Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) team of sixteen Black writers at Hampton, one of the few African American teams of interviewers in the country. Called the Virginia Negro Studies Project and part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program from 1936-1940, the team collected over 1350 life stories from former slaves throughout Virginia, and interviewed over 300 Black Virginians, recording accounts of life and folkways before and after emancipation. The FWP hired educated African Americans to conduct interviews with Black community members. The interviews also collected more than 2,700 song text and filmed numerous musical performances. This work, written and edited by Lewis, formed the foundation of the FWP publication, The Negro in Virginia (1940), the only planned book on African American life successfully published during the FWP. Even though Lewis encountered many challenges to its contents because it did not corroborate stereotypes of slavery and segregation, he successfully prevailed in revealing truths about formerly enslaved African American lives in their own words, of past and present Virginia.  

This FWP project inspired Lewis to make a career switch to sociology, and as a Rosenwald Fellow, he studied social economy at American University from 1941 to 1942. When he returned to Hampton in 1942,  he published several articles in prominent African American journals and later compiled a catalog of the Virginia Negro Studies Project at Hampton Institute (1972). In 1948, he became chair of the Social Science department. Lewis continued to conduct interviews with formerly enslaved people for the rest of his career, hoping to publish the entire collection of interviews. Although he died before he was able to achieve his dream, many of those interviews were finally published in the book, Weevils in the Wheat (1976).

Among Lewis’ publications contributing to folklore are:

The Negro in Virginia (1940)

Perdue, Charles, ed.  Weevils in the Wheat  (1976)

Howe, Mentor A., and Roscoe E. Lewis. A Classified Catalogue of the Negro Collection in the Collis P. Huntington Library, Hampton Institute (1972).

Phyllis M. May-Machunda