By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff, and Edgar J. Driscoll Jr., Globe Correspondent,
1/2/2004

A tireless warrior in the crusade against civic apathy and cultural ignorance, the brassy and often controversial Miss Lewis made only a handful of public appearances in recent years. She preferred to receive visitors in her Homestead Street residence, which was filled with souvenirs from her half-century career in teaching and the performing arts, the numerous honors she received over the years, including a presidential arts medal, and mementos of her close friendships with many of the world's foremost artists, black and white.

In September 1996, hundreds of proteges and admirers gathered for a 75th birthday salute to Roxbury's "grande dame." Befitting her influence on the city's entire cultural infrastructure, the three-day celebration included events at the Franklin Park Zoo, the Boston Public Library, and the Museum of Science, among other venues. Guest speakers included poet Maya Angelou and former UN ambassador Andrew Young.

In a Globe interview that year, Miss Lewis acknowledged that her abrasive style was off-putting to many, particularly in her younger days. However, she said, "As I aged, I couldn't bother with all that. I could not do all that work and fight at the same time. And the work will stand. I really, really believe that."

Miss Lewis had suffered for many years from failing eyesight and other complications of diabetes. She died at home last night of pulmonary complications related to the disease, the Associated Press reported.

Often described as "the doyenne of black culture" locally, Miss Lewis opened the Elma Lewis School for the Performing Arts in Roxbury in 1950. More than 6,000 students would pass through its portals over the next five decades. Scores of her former pupils fashioned major careers in the performing arts. Inside the school, Miss Lewis used vision, commitment, and energy to pump cultural lifeblood into thousands of other youngsters, gifted or not. "The point," she once said, "was to make people."

She was also a guiding force behind the founding, in 1980, of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury. Of the center, a repository for black culture, she said at the time: "It is where we, the blacks, are going to state our black heritage and share our culture and the beauty of our arts with all people, black and white alike."

A short, hefty woman with electrifying eyes, Miss Lewis was a dynamo and a force to be reckoned with, whether you were a 6-year-old aspiring ballerina or the mayor of Boston. "She terrorized people," one mother recalled of her daughter's experience at Miss Lewis's school. "But she did it for their own good."

Militancy was another tool she employed effectively. Raised by parents who were devotees of black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Miss Lewis once answered critics by declaring, "If you're black and you're not angry, you belong in a mental institution."

Appealing to the white community for support on another occasion, Miss Lewis said, "I'm not here to entertain. Yes, I'm always grinning in public, but that's the way my face is made. We [her students] never entertain. We educate. We dignify. Black people don't need any more words. They need action."

On balance, however, and especially as the years wore on, Miss Lewis's voice stood out as an inclusive, uplifting one. She believed artistic excellence was every person's birthright and that the arts are as necessary to the human spirit as food is to the human body. The arts, she felt, are also best understood in the context of one's individual culture if they are to become a humanizing force bridging all cultures.

It was to this end that Miss Lewis helped bring the National Center of Afro-American Artists into being in 1968. She did so as tireless fund-raiser, self-appointed lobbyist, and the cultural conscience of the people she served. Her school became part of the center when she acquired, with the aid and generosity of Boston's Jewish community, the former Temple Mishkan Tefila and its school building on Elm Hill Avenue overlooking Franklin Park. "It seems singularly appropriate that the buildings which have symbolized the heritage of Boston's Jewish community should now announce to the world the proud heritage of Boston's black community," she said at the time.

Although the school was defunct by the mid-1980s, nothing, not even chronic diabetes, seemed to slow down its founder. For many years she operated the Elma Lewis Playhouse in the Park during the summer months in Franklin Park, where artists such as Duke Ellington and Arthur Fiedler's Boston Pops played to capacity crowds. To foster community pride, Miss Lewis launched a massive clean-up campaign in 1969, ridding the park of drug users and debris so that it would once again be, as she said, "a place where everyone can enjoy themselves, black and white, young and old."

The late Vernon Blackman, who grew up with Miss Lewis and later headed her school's drama department, once commented, "If the teachers are low on energy, we just sit around Elma for a while. She's like a generator."

She almost had to be. Over the years the buildings sometimes went heatless -- and the staff payless -- for weeks at a stretch. The school began in a six-room, $100-a-month apartment in Roxbury. "We started," she liked to recall with a characteristic chuckle, "with $300 and a secondhand piano. Our goal was to provide quality education in the arts for neighborhood children."

Through the years the school moved five times before finding a permanent home in the former Jewish synagogue. When her school was in financial trouble in the 1970s, Miss Lewis recruited a number of black celebrities for fund-raisers.

The center was in receivership from July 1975 to September 1976, with debts totaling $721,000. It was rescued, at least temporarily, by infusions of support from business, industry, and private foundations. Enrollment dwindled steadily after that, though. In 1981, the three-story building housing drama, art, music, and after-school day care programs was the victim of a $50,000 fire. Two more fires of unknown origin eventually led to the school being closed in 1986.

Miss Lewis was frequently the target of critics who questioned her financial acumen. She bristled at charges that she misspent funds or planned programs too ambitiously. "We have never had enough money to do the things we try to do," she once said. "Many of our grants have not covered administrative costs. Some are restricted in use. We are providing a service to the city and state, to the educational community. If we are wrong, stop us. If we are right, support us."

Despite criticism that her ideas exceeded her means to finance them, many hailed Miss Lewis as a superlative arts administrator with the touch of genius about her. A 1968 New York Times profile described her as "Sol Hurok, Tyrone Guthrie and P. T. Barnum rolled into one." In 1981 she was among the first group of recipients of a MacArthur Fellow "genius" grant. Two years later, President Ronald Reagan awarded her a special arts medal. At the first National Black Arts Conference in 1988 she was declared a Living Legend.

Miss Lewis was born in Roxbury on Sept. 16, 1921, the daughter of parents who had emigrated from the West Indies. She was educated in the Boston public schools and Roxbury Memorial High School for Girls and Emerson College, class of 1943. The following year she received a master's degree from Boston University's School of Education, where she specialized in the education of the exceptional child.

In later years she was outraged to discover a Ruggles Street Nursery School form, dated 1924, that evaluated her as an exceptional 3-year-old whose mental development "as measured by the IQ is probably, as is usual with members of her race, at a higher peak now than it will be when she grows older."

Attitudes like that are why she started her school, she said. "We keep saying there's a level playing field," she said in the Globe interview, "but this nonsense still persists. People know better than to write it down, maybe. But it's precisely what happens."

As a child she had taken extensive lessons in voice, piano, and dance. She worked her way through Emerson by acting in Boston theatrical productions, including the lead role of Julie in Molnar's "Lilliom" at the old Copley Theater, Back Bay.

Before founding her own school, Miss Lewis had taught speech therapy at New England Hospital, Massachusetts Mental Health, and the Habit Clinic of Boston. She also had been a fine arts worker at Harriet Tubman House, taught dance and drama at the League of Women for Community Service and the Cambridge Community Center, and staged two dozen operas for the Robert Gould Shaw House Chorus.

She held honorary degrees from Emerson College, Harvard University, Boston College, Colby College, Anna Maria College, Salem State College, Regis College, Merrimack College, and Clark University. She also won numerous awards from community, arts, and African-American organizations.

In her 1996 Globe interview, Miss Lewis quoted her close friend and former student Talley Beatty, the choreographer. "Show me the body of your work," Beatty had said. Added Miss Lewis, "When I leave here, the body of my work will be all these wonderful people out there in the world, doing great things." Details of her memorial arrangements were unavailable.