Brokering Culture: Elma Lewis, Cultural Politics, and Community Building in Postwar Boston

Abstract

Elma Lewis was an artist, educator, and bridge leadership activist. Her lifelong commitment to institution building linked earlier, foundational, community "uplift" efforts of the 1930s and 1940s to broader, sustained struggles for educational equality, economic justice, and community control during the 1960s and 1970s. The cultural programs and institutions that she founded were integral to the articulation of black community consciousness that developed in postwar Boston and, ultimately, formed the "cultural base" upon which increased calls for "community control" and sustained organizing and mobilizing efforts were launched during the late 1960s and early 1970s—most notably, those around the long struggle for educational equality. On the whole, her work was part of a broader tradition of black women's activism that contributed to ongoing community-building efforts central to the postwar black freedom movement in Boston and the nation.