The Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design serves as a beacon of hope in the HBCU community. Michigan's only HBCU, the Lewis College of Business, was rebranded as the Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design in 2021 following Governor Gretchen Whitmer's signing of House bills 5447 and 5448, which enabled the institution's reopening.
Dr. D'Wayne Edwards, the founder of the newly reopened institution, spoke with Fashionista about his career and extensively spoke about how the reopening of Pensole Lewis came about. Edwards's penchant for mentorship spurred him to delve into education.
“I started mentoring and developing kids to become interns. I did that for 10 years, working with kids who were in high school or in college, showing them the proper way to design and create. I realized I liked teaching, but there were no schools that taught footwear. I resigned as design director at Nike and took eight weeks off. I told them I didn't know if I was coming back, but that I wanted to test this idea of having a design academy.”
Edward elaborates on his creation of a two-week program mirroring Jordan's work process in high-pressure scenarios. He sponsored 40 students to attend his class at the University of Oregon, where they underwent intensive 14-hour daily training sessions for the entire duration.
“I did go back to Jordan for six months. I wanted to finish up whatever I could. I told [Michael Jordan] and all the athletes I was leaving. I felt like I could help more teaching. I saw the lack of representation, and it wasn't changing… Design school is more expensive than regular school, and, most of the time, Black people are talked out of creative careers, usually by their own parents, because it can be lumped into art, and art isn't seen as a secure career. Nike would recruit at the traditional, predominantly white institutions that have, say, a 2% African American graduation rate. You would've never found me there.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Edwards learned of Lewis College School of Business, which officially closed its doors in 2015, and the process of reopening it started.
“In 2020, the world shuts down, and we shut down. One of my alumnae who lives in Detroit tells me casually in conversation that Detroit used to have an HBCU, but it closed. I jumped on Google and started to read about the founder. Dr. Violet Lewis was a Black woman in 1928 who founded a college in Indianapolis with a $50 loan and borrowed typewriters, purely to educate Black women on the skills they needed to work in corporate offices. She started this small school with her own money, it grew, she got investors, and it grew more… In 1987, after moving to Detroit, it received the HBCU designation, making her the second Black woman to found an HBCU ever. Then it started to go backwards.”
Edwards acknowledged this historic precedent that he was faced with. No HBCU had ever reopend after closure. But, he sought to do the work to make the reopening of Lewis College of Business a reality.
“The trouble is no HBCU has ever reopened. Several have closed, several have lost accreditation, but none have ever shut doors and reopened. We had to write two state legislative bills of how we're going to reopen and why. It was a technical oversight by the state that they never actually acknowledged on record that Lewis College of Business was an HBCU in the city of Detroit, even though their location is a historical state landmark. Both bills passed in two months; the governor signed it back into law in December 2021. It reopened May 2022.”
Per his comments in Fashionista, Pensole Lewis College School of Business and Design is super-serving it's student body and working to prove great opportunities.
“During the academy, we placed over a hundred designers at Nike. Over a hundred of our students work at Nike now. When I went to Nike saying I was thinking about opening up this historically Black college focused on design, they wanted to know how they could help. The Black Community Commitment and having Nike behind you with anything wakes people up. It woke the industry up like, ‘Oh, this is something Nike's investing in. This must be important.'”
Edwards also has a bold, ambitious vision for the future of the institution, especially as it moves closer and closer to its centennial anniversary in 2028.
“I would go to 2028 — that's our 100th anniversary. In 2028, you'll be able to walk into those doors and see the history of Black creativity everywhere you walk. What I learned in this journey is: Our story isn't told anywhere. You'll find pieces of it in the Smithsonian, but there's no book, no website that shares the contributions of Black people [to] design and creativity. We're opening Ruth Carter's sample room in a few months. Every room is named after whoever the pioneer was in that industry.”
The History of Lewis College School of Business
Dr. D'Wayne Edwards reopening of the college puts a spotlight on the beautiful history of the institution, founded in 1928 by Dr. Violet Temple Lewis. Lewis, known as a pioneer in the development of black secretaries in the midwest, was the second black woman to have founded an HBCU. She started the institution with a $50 loan from a local bank after observing a lack of Black women secretaries.
Lewis established the institution in Indianapolis, Indiana after state higher education institutions denied African-American students. In 1938, a branch was launched in Detroit, MI, eventually surpassing the original Indiana school. In 1987, Lewis College School of Business gained its HBCU designation, as it was an institution of higher learning created prior to the Higher Education Act of 1965 that was created to educate African-American students.
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