A historian’s history: Pulitzer Prize-winner David Levering Lewis recalls a Little Rock childhood

“Unbeknownst to both of us, I’d been chasing Lewis for years. He grew up on Ringo Street. I grew up 15 blocks away and 48 years later, on Izard Street. I, like Lewis, attended an HBCU and decided to study the humanities. I even went to grad school at a university a few blocks north of Lewis while he was at New York University. I regret not knowing better to look him up back in 2010. From Washington Square, I began working in Harlem for the Harlem Children’s Zone’s Writing Corps, a writing collective that worked to revive the literary spirit of the Renaissance Lewis explored in his book ‘When Harlem Was in Vogue.’ Had I known, I certainly would’ve assigned excerpts from his text as class reading.”