Samella Lewis, taken 1947.
Samella Lewis was born in 1924, the daughter of farmer Samuel Sanders and seamstress Rachel Taylor Sanders. The New Orleans where Lewis grew up was racially segregated but had a more diverse population and richer cultural life than many other cities in the American South. Although she attended Negro schools and was deprived of opportunities available to whites, she saw beyond arbitrary borders and learned to find her way in a deeply conflicted society.
Lewis met her most important mentor, Elizabeth Catlett, in 1941 when she enrolled at DiIlard University, a historically black liberal arts college in New Orleans. After Catlett was hired to teach at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically black university in Hampton, Virginia, Lewis transferred there and was granted a Bachelor of Science degree in 1945. Lewis subsequently attended the Ohio State University and earned a master’s degree in fine art in 1948 and a PhD in art history in 1951.
Lewis began teaching at Morgan College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore. The Morgan position launched a long and distinguished career in academia, which took her to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. While living in Florida, from 1953 to 1958, she was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, making her a target of government officials who accused her of being a Communist and members of the Ku Klux Klan who shot out windows of her home. Undaunted, she founded a chapter of the NAACP in Plattsburgh.
In the early 1960s, Lewis became deeply engaged with Chinese studies. In 1962, when it was extremely difficult for Americans to travel to mainland China, she won a Fulbright fellowship to Taiwan, where she worked at the T’ung Hai University and studied the extraordinary Chinese collection housed at the Palace Museum.
Upon her return to the United States, she was granted a National Defense Education Act fellowship to study Chinese language, philosophy, and history at the University of Southern California. Samella also taught at the California State University at Long Beach State and Dominguez Hills and coordinated education programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before joining the faculty at Scripps College. She taught Chinese, Native American and African art history and black studies at Scripps from 1970 to 1984, while directing the college’s Clark Humanities Museum and guiding a new generation of artists, curators and historians. Lewis also founded the Museum of African American Art in 1976 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts while she was teaching at Scripps College. She died in 2022.