Lewis family.

George F. Lewis was born in Harvard, Massachusetts in 1828. He moved to Mt. Clemens, Michigan in 1835. In 1845 he became acquainted with Horace Greeley, and in July of 1848 he took a position on the Daily Commercial Bulletin, which was starting in Detroit. He helped to put in type the first news of a presidential election ever received by telegraph. He helped to found the Saginaw Daily Courier in 1868 and started the Mt. Pleasant Journal in 1880 and the Daily Call in Bay City in 1881. He continued to publish the Saginawian, a Democratic paper. He was postmaster at Mt. Clemens from 1856-1859, mayor for Saginaw from 1877-1879 and postmaster for Saginaw from 1879 until his death in 1890.

The Lewis family arrived in Raleigh, N.C., in 1923, when John D. Lewis Sr. took a job as a district manager for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company of Durham, N.C. He and his wife, Luella Alice Cox Lewis, and their two children, J.D. Lewis (John D. Lewis Jr.) (1919-2007) and Vera Lewis Embree (1921-2004), lived in southeast Raleigh and were members of First Baptist Church. J.D. Lewis was a Morehouse College graduate, one of the first African American members of the United States Marine Corps, and the first African American radio and television personality, corporate director of personnel, and director of minority affairs for WRAL of the Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC). J.D. Lewis also worked as the special markets representative for the Pepsi Cola Bottling Company; as the project director of GROW, Incorporated, a federally funded program for high school dropouts; and as the coordinator of manpower planning for the state of North Carolina. Lewis was active in many civic and community organizations as well. Vera Lewis Embree (1921-2004) graduated from the Palmer Institute for Young Women and Hampton Institute. She built a successful and celebrated career as a choreographer and professor of dance at the University of Michigan.