For more than fifty years, Lewis Pitts has relentlessly fought for participatory democracy, children’s rights, racial and economic justice, and other progressive causes. On behalf of marginalized people and communities, he has fearlessly taken on greedy corporations, white supremacists, corrupt public officials, and others. He has done so at extreme personal sacrifice, having been repeatedly arrested, defamed, sanctioned, made financially insolvent, and threatened with violence.

Lewis’s path to becoming a social justice activist was highly unusual. He was born in 1947 and raised in rural, segregated South Carolina by middle class, devoutly Christian, white parents. As a teenager, he was apolitical, oblivious to civil rights movements underway nationwide. Midway through college, Lewis was directionless and destined for Vietnam after signing a six-year military service commitment. However, five years later—after undergoing an intellectual and moral awakening, being discharged as a conscientious objector, and graduating from law school—Lewis began his career as a crusading public interest attorney. 

His first legal job was as an assistant public defender in Columbia, South Carolina. Lewis represented individuals charged with misdemeanors and felonies, including inmates at the state’s infamous maximum-security prison. 

Then, Pitts and his friend, Bob, started The Law Offices of Warren and Pitts in Allendale, South Carolina—a small, high-poverty, predominantly African American town without a public defender or legal aid office. The duo accepted almost any case that presented a worthy cause, regardless of the client’s ability to pay. Pitts and Warren zealously fought landlords, employers, banks, law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges. They successfully challenged, in the state’s supreme court, an 1868 law that allowed magistrates to delegate to local sheriffs the power to select “respectable voters” for pools of prospective jurors in criminal cases.

While in South Carolina, Pitts also worked with and represented anti-nuclear protesters. He was increasingly drawn to the anti-nuclear movement and disillusioned with the legal system, which he viewed as rigged for the wealthy. So, he moved to Oklahoma to work pro bono on the famous Karen Silkwood case but ended up spending more time with the Sunbelt Alliance, a coalition of anti-nuclear groups in Tulsa. 

By early 1980, Pitts’s disillusionment with the law had ballooned into disdain. He decided to focus full-time on protesting and destroying property at nuclear facilities, resigning himself to a fate of prison or death. But then he happened to meet survivors of the Greensboro Massacre. On November 3, 1979, KKK and American Nazi Party members, with complicity from local and federal law enforcement, had killed five labor organizers and anti-racism activists and wounded many others. The survivors convinced Lewis that he needed to stay in the legal profession because progressive organizations and marginalized communities needed lawyers to help defend and build movements. One of the survivors, Signe Waller, wrote, “Lewis is truly a people’s lawyer and a radical revolutionary, in the best sense of these terms.”

After the Greensboro Massacre civil trial, Lewis co-founded and became director of Christic Institute South, a racial-justice-focused, movement-lawyering nonprofit organization. From 1985 to 1994, Pitts and his small but mighty staff played integral roles in successful, people-of-color-led movements to defend Black public housing residents and advocates in Louisiana and Black leaders in Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina; restart the local government in Keysville, Georgia; end corruption in the sheriff’s department and district attorney’s office in Robeson County, North Carolina; and preserve African American burial grounds and Gullah culture on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina.

Rosa Parks wrote that Pitts had “accepted the torch to continue the fight for freedom.” Anne Braden shared, “We who work in various movements across the South have come to count on the fact that when the going is rough somewhere . . . we can call on Lewis.”

During the early 1990s, Pitts became increasingly interested in the children’s rights movement – especially the notion that children should be treated as rights-bearing persons who are entitled to be heard in legal matters impacting them. He collaborated with local, state, and national organizations that were fighting for abused and neglected children to have permanent, loving homes. In a case that drew national attention, Pitts and local co-counsel obtained a Florida court ruling that a child had a constitutional right to “divorce” his abusive and neglectful parents so that he could be adopted by a loving family. The New York Times described the ruling as “a significant victory for children’s rights advocates.” 

Pitts spent the last two decades of his career working in legal aid organizations. He became the managing attorney of Advocates for Children’s Services, a statewide project of Legal Aid of North Carolina. During his tenure, he brought cases that led to the end of indiscriminate shackling of children in delinquency court, the taking of foster children’s social security benefits by social services departments to reimburse themselves for the cost of care, and automatically denying alternative education to students with long-term suspensions and expulsions from school.

Pitts retired in 2014. The following year, he became the first person ever to resign from the North Carolina State Bar. He explained that the bar, as a whole, had breached its professed ethics in service of corporate interests, and that by resigning, he sought to stimulate productive debate about the legal profession’s duty to better serve the public good.

Lewis embodies the highest ideals of the legal profession. For his service, he received awards from the Foundation for the Improvement of Justice, South Carolina ACLU, North Carolina ACLU, North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers, and North Carolina State Bar Association. His biography, The Life of a Movement Lawyer: Lewis Pitts and the Struggle for Democracy, Equality, and Justice, was published in 2024.

Although Pitts won individual and systemic cases on behalf of thousands of clients from oppressed communities and advanced various movements for justice, his most lasting impact has been how he made people feel. Lewis envelops them in heartfelt warmth and compassion, making them feel more fully human. His boundless love, profound empathy, subversive joy, limitless energy, fighting spirit, and unwavering hope are contagious.

-authored by Lewis Pitts biographer, Jason Langberg