Chester I. Lewis, born in 1928, grew up in Hutchinson where his father, a World War I veteran and editor of the African American newspaper The Blade, exposed racial inequalities locally and statewide, and Chester helped edit the paper while being pushed toward a strong education and vocabulary. After graduating from Hutchinson High School in 1945, he enlisted in the Army, served on Okinawa in the 1225th Engineer Fire Platoon, and after his discharge in 1951 enrolled at the University of Kansas, graduating third in his class in 1953 before beginning a law practice in Wichita. In Wichita, where segregation was stricter and the Black population was concentrated on the Northeast side, he set out to challenge discriminatory policies. His first major victory came in 1953 when he sued Wichita over segregated swimming pools, using a little known and seldom enforced 1874 Kansas law forbidding discrimination. He then pressed for change in employment by seeking meetings with Boeing, Cessna, Coleman, and the Wichita Police Department about hiring practices, and most companies changed their practices immediately. Widely regarded as instrumental in the Dockum Sit-in of 1958, he trained and prepared the students, and within three weeks the successful protest helped bring desegregation to lunch counters statewide. Although he supported the NAACP's courtroom strategy, he believed more active public action could produce faster results, became involved with the Young Turks movement, and resigned from the NAACP by 1968. After the Piatt Street Crash in 1965 killed 23 people on the ground and seven people on the plane, he was the first lawyer families called, did most of the work for free, challenged the lack of compassion shown afterward, and pursued legal action and full satisfaction for his clients. His legacy was a lasting fight for civil rights and for people who had been disenfranchised in Hutchinson, Wichita, and beyond.