Gilbert Lewis

1904-1931

Gilbert Lewis was born of working-class parents in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1904. Arriving in New York City in 1928, he secured work as a window cleaner. He was an active member of the window cleaner's union, winning the union over to the Communist red trade-union movement. He joined the CPUSA in 1929 and soon became an active party functionary.

In early 1930 he was sent to Tennessee as an organizer for the Trade Union Unity League. Here he was frequently arrested and, at one point, sentenced to time on a chain gang, where he contracted tuberculosis.

Lewis was a member of the John Reed Club, a writer of poems and short stories, and a contributor to the New Masses, the Daily Worker, and other publications.

In the fall of 1930, he was sent to the Soviet Union, both to study and to receive medical care. Despite the best efforts of the Soviet doctors, he died in a Yalta Sanatorium, age 26.

Works and Related Articles:

1929: Negro Workers Endorse Party, Daily Worker, August 28, 1929
1929: Rights Sabotage Window Strike, Daily Worker, November 14, 1929

1930: Revolutionary Negro Tradition, Daily Worker, January 9, 1930
1930: In Action Against Jim Crow, Labor Defender, February 1930
1930: A Negro T.U.U.L. Organizer in the South, Daily Worker, March 26, 1930
1930: Gastonia Points the Way to Negro, White Unity, Daily Worker, April 1, 1930
1930: Class Against Class in the South, Part I;, Part II, Daily Worker, April 7-8, 1930
1930: Our Tasks in the South, Daily Worker, May 27, 1930
1930: In a Georgia Mill Town, New Masses, July 1930
1930: In Birmingham Jail, Daily Worker, September 13, 1930

1931: Death of Gilbert Lewis, a Revolutionary Negro Worker, Negro Worker, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1931
1931: Gilbert Lewis, New Masses, July 1931
1931: Scottsboro Protest in U.S.S.R., Southern Worker, July 25, 1931