Joel W. Lewis was a prominent African-American businessman and abolitionist. He was among the best known and respected reformers in antebellum Boston.^[1][2]

He was the son of Job Lewis (?–1797), a former slave who served in the Continental Army.^[3] He was a brother of author and entrepreneur Robert Benjamin Lewis.^[4] After attending Hosea Easton's vocational school, he went on to become the owner of a large and successful blacksmith shop in Boston, which employed both black and white mechanics.^[3] The shop operated from the 1830s to at least 1870.^[4] In the years before the Civil War, he lived at 4 Southac Street in Boston's West End.^[5]

In 1833 Lewis became the first vice-president of the Boston Mutual Lyceum, one of several educational and cultural organizations co-founded by William Cooper Nell (apparently separate from the Boston Lyceum, which was founded in 1829).^[6] In 1836 he was elected president of the Adelphic Union for the Promotion of Literature and Science, another group founded by Nell; also known as the Adelphic Union Library Association,^[7] the group held weekly lectures and debates at the Abiel Smith School on Belknap Street. The Adelphic Union rented a hall in the center of town, rather than in a predominantly black neighborhood, to encourage white Bostonians to attend their lectures and pave the way for black Bostonians to attend lectures at white institutions.^[8]

Lewis was active in the abolitionist movement and aided refugees from slavery. In 1840, he was the Chairman of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.^[9] In the 1850s he was a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee.^[7] A moderate, he opposed the use of violence, believing it would only reinforce white stereotypes of blacks as uncivilized.^[10] He was also involved in the temperance movement, and opened a temperance boarding house in 1839.^[11]

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