Family and Personal History
Lewis was born on August 3, 1798, in Barre, Massachusetts, to Peter P. Lewis and Minor Walker Lewis. His full name was Kwaku Walker Lewis, named after his maternal uncle, Kwaku Walker. (Kwaku means "boy born on Wednesday" among the Akan people of Ghana.)
Lewis was one of nine children. He was raised in a prominent middle-class black family that valued education, activism and political involvement. As a young boy, Peter and Minor Lewis moved their family to Cambridge. Walker Lewis was a successful barber who owned residential and commercial building in Boston.
In March 1826, Lewis married Elizabeth Lovejoy (the mixed-race daughter of Peter Lovejoy, who was black, and Lydia Greenleaf Bradford, who was white). Their first child Enoch Lovejoy Lewis was born in June.
The Lewis family moved to Lowell, where the industrial revolution of textile mills brought economic prosperity to the area. In Lowell, together with his brother-in-law John Levy, Lewis opened a barbershop on Merrimack Street. Lewis purchased a two-family home in the Centralville section of Lowell.
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