Delano Lewis

Delano Eugene Lewis (; He was the only child of Raymond Ernest Lewis, a porter for the Santa Fe Railroad, and Enna L. Lewis (née Wordlow), a homemaker.

Lewis attended Sumner High School, in Kansas City, Kansas, from which he graduated in 1956. He attended Boys State in his junior and senior years of high school. He earned a law degree from the Washburn University School of Law, in Topeka, Kansas, in 1963.

Career After graduation, Lewis went to work as an attorney in the U.S. Justice Department and later in the Office of Compliance in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He was an associate director and country director for the Peace Corps in Nigeria and Uganda from 1966 to 1969.

Lewis joined The Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company in 1973 as a public affairs manager, becoming its chief executive officer in 1990. In 1988, Lewis served a one-year term as president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, and began a term as president of the newly formed City National Bank of Washington, citing "pressing time demands" as the reason for leaving in 1997. He resigned from NPR in 1998.

Lewis was also a member of the board of directors of Black Entertainment Television, and served on the boards of Colgate-Palmolive, Halliburton, and Eastman Kodak, as well. He was sworn in by federal judge John Edwards Conway, a law-school classmate. The following year, he was named founding director of New Mexico State University's International Relations Institute.

Politics Lewis was involved in the effort to establish home rule for Washington, D.C.; the District of Columbia Home Rule Act was adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1973. He was a chair of the home rule committee for VOICE, the Voice of Informed Community Expression, a group formed after the 1968 riots in Washington.

Lewis later ran for a seat on the Council of the District of Columbia (Washington's city council), losing to Barry.

Personal life and death Lewis was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and was elected president of it while at the University of Kansas. he was awarded Catholic University's President's Medal in 1978, as well.

Lewis and his wife, the former Gayle Carolyn Jones, A Baptist by birth and upbringing, Lewis converted to Catholicism when he married.