Helen Matthews Lewis

Lewis was born in Nicholson, Georgia in 1924. Her parents were Hugh and Maurie Matthews, a postal worker and nurse, respectively, and her sister was named JoAnn. She spent her early years in Jackson county, where she witnessed and was deeply affected by Jim Crow racial discrimination. When Lewis was 10, her family moved to Forsyth County, where her father used his mail delivery job to warn incoming African Americans that Forsyth county was a dangerous place for them.

Lewis attended Tift College, where she studied for a year before taking a year off to work. She returned to school at the Georgia State College for Women, now Georgia College & State University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1946. During her studies she attended an interracial program at the Hartford Theological Seminary, where she and other students worked on industrial projects. The program was sponsored by the YWCA, and was one foundation for Lewis' enduring interest in both working class and women's issues.

While attending Duke University as a graduate student, she met Judd W. Lewis, whom she would marry. When Judd Lewis went to the University of Virginia, Helen went with him and enrolled in a master's degree program in sociology, earning her degree in 1949. Her thesis, "The Woman Movement and the Negro Movement: Parallel Struggles for Rights," links the histories and developments of the women's suffrage movement with the emerging Civil Rights Movement. Lewis earned a PhD in sociology at the University of Kentucky in 1970. Her dissertation was entitled "Occupational Roles and Family Roles: A Study of Coal-Mining Families in Southern Appalachia."

• University of Virginia, director of Bureau of Population and Economic Research: 1949-1952
• University of Virginia, Wise, professor: 1955-1977

• Highlander Research and Education Center, education staff: 1977-1980, 1985-1993, 1995-1997; director: 1978-1979
• Appalshop, director of Appalachian history film project: 1980-1984
• National Academy of Sciences, member of committee on underground coal mine safety: 1980
• Berea College, director of Appalachian Center: 1993-1995

• Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case, Appalachian Consortium Press, 1978, with Linda Johnson and Donald Askins
• Remembering Our Past, Building Our Future, Ivanhoe Civic League, 1990, with Suzanne O'Donnell
• It Comes from the People, Temple University Press, 1995, with Mary Ann Hinsdale and Maxine Waller
• Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia, University Press of Kentucky, 2003, with Monica Appleby

• W.D. Weatherford Award, Berea College, 1990, for Remembering Our Past, Building Our Future
• Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Emory and Henry College, 1999
• Honorary Doctorate of Divinity, Wake Forest University, 2000