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Before Ida Lewis became the first black woman to publish a national magazine, the first editor-in-chief of Essence, or the first financial editor at New York's Amsterdam News, she was a student in Boston University's College of Communication, eager to pursue a career in journalism and explore new opportunities for young African-Americans. Since then, she has interviewed African dignitaries in Paris, led a delegation to the Third International Women's Conference in Beijing, and worked as a press officer for a presidential candidate-and all the while maintaining a connection to COM and the opportunities it offers for young journalists of color.
"I loved the four years at Boston University; they were the best in my life," says Lewis (CGS'54, COM'56). "I want more people from my community to go and share that experience."
To achieve that goal, and address what she perceives as a critical lack of racial diversity at the University and in journalism, Lewis recently signed a $100,000 bequest that will be used to endow a scholarship for minority students at COM. "We need good, intelligent African-American journalists like we need them from any other group," she says. "So I hope, in the future, my bequest will help a student, or some students."
Lewis has been a role model for many journalists, achieving a remarkable series of firsts for women and for African-American women in particular. She was a Paris correspondent for several major newspapers and magazines, including Life and The New York Times, and interviewed African politicians and heads of state for BBC Africa and the magazine Jeune Afrique. In 1971, Lewis became the first editor-in-chief of Essence magazine, and later that year founded Encore, a news magazine that explored African-American perspectives on global issues, becoming the first black woman to publish a national magazine.
She shifted to public relations in the 1980s, working as a media consultant on several major political campaigns, including Ross Perot's presidential campaign in 1992, and returned to journalism in 1998, when she became the first female editor-in-chief of the NAACP's The Crisis, then eighty-eight years old and the country's oldest African-American journal.
Throughout her career, she has remained involved in the training and education of young journalists, as a lecturer at Boston University and Columbia University and as a member of COM's National Alumni Committee and the dean's Executive Advisory Board. And while she is particularly interested in young African-American journalists, she says that understanding the importance of diversity, and learning in an environment that promotes differences, are key for anyone who hopes to be a journalist.
"The world is getting smaller, and we're all in it together," she says. "I think it's important that all students cultivate an open mind, particularly if they're going to report."
Now she's cultivating new interests. Having been a writer, an editor, and a publisher, at age seventy-one she is becoming a filmmaker. She has hoped "for decades" to produce a movie on the life of Russian poet and playwright Aleksandr Pushkin; now, semiretired, she has time to develop the needed skills. And in her spare time, she is writing her memoirs and teaching a course on race and the media at COM during the spring semesters.
"There are many things I feel proud of," she says. "I went from being a newspaper journalist to a magazine editor to a magazine publisher, so I think what I'm proud of now is what I'm doing now.
"It's such a challenge at my age," she adds. "But I feel as young as I did thirty years ago. I've discovered that you never stop learning, and you must always strive to go one more step."
—Jessica Ullian
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