Oral history with Dr. Arthur B. Lewis, educator

              Oral history with Dr. Arthur B. Lewis, educator
This oral history is provided through a cooperative project of University of Southern Mississippi Libraries and USM's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage.
Funding provided by a National Leadership Grant for Libraries from the Institute for Museum and Library Services
The transcript is presented here for reference purposes only. Interviews in this collection are protected by copyright. PERMISSION TO PUBLISH MUST BE REQUESTED from the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. Please call ( 601) 266- 4574 for more information.
Biography
Dr. Arthur B. Lewis was born in Forest, Mississippi, November 21, 1901, the youngest of four children in the family of Reverend and Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Lewis. Dr. Lewis's roots are deep in Mississippi on both sides of the family. He recalls that on the Lewis side a number of the men were veterans of confederate military service. However, his great- grandfather, Dirk Otken, his mother's grandfather, had a different idea. He had come to America to escape the wars of his native Germany, and when the Civil War erupted he opined that " he had come over here to escape fighting, and he would go back until peace broke out."
Dr. Lewis notes that " I come from a long line of Methodist ministers . . . My brother and I are, so to speak, the first black sheep in the family for a number of generations." The family lived in many places throughout Mississippi, from Canton in the north to the Gulf Coast, as his father was moved from pastorate to pastorate by the church leadership. Arthur's education as a youth was taken wherever the family was located. He recalls that " I had been in four separate high schools before I got through, it's amazing I learned anything at all." But learn he did, and graduated from Central High School in Jackson in 1919.
Even in high school, Arthur Lewis recalls, " I knew completely that I was going to college. My family was college oriented." Millsaps College was both close by and a fine school, but Arthur Lewis had decided to study physics and found that the University of Mississippi had a better program to offer than Millsaps. He won the BA degree with distinction at Ole Miss and still takes pride in the fact that " I got a first class education." In 1926 he went to Washington, D. C. where he took a position with the National Bureau of Standards that he was to hold for more than ten years. While there he participated in a program worked out by the Bureau with Johns Hopkins University which enabled him and his fellow workers to take graduate work. He won his Ph. D. degree in 1930, and celebrated by getting married to Miss Alma Gochenour, a native Virginian then working in Washington. Eventually the Lewis family included three boys and one girl.
After more than a decade at the Bureau of Standards, Arthur Lewis began to reevaluate his goals in life. He realized that " If I work for the government for another 25 years, I'll be just another government employee," and to him that didn't sound very appealing. His heart was back at academe, and " I got to thinking about my friend, Dr. Hume, and just decided he had a better deal than I did." Doctor Hume served as Chancellor at the University of Mississippi. Dr. Lewis decided to make a career of teaching, and
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