In 1915, University of Virginia president Edwin A. Alderman recruited Lewis, who became Professor of Biology and Agriculture, and began to modernize the institution and increase its research output.
In the 1920s, Lewis championed the state's Anglo-Saxon clubs as staving off apocalyptic "racial decay", including giving a lecture "What Biology Says to the Man of Today.
"[4] Lewis thus worked with alumnus John Powell, Major Earnest S. Cox and Dr. Walter Plecker (a physician who as state registrar vigorously enforced the 1924 Racial Integrity Act).
Lewis had unsuccessfully opposed admission of Gregory Swanson, who matriculated at the university's law school in the fall of 1950 pursuant to a federal court order after the NAACP victories in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, but Swanson left about a year later after encountering the "overwhelming climate of racial hostility and harassment" he had experienced.
Thus, Walter N. Ridley, a professor at Virginia State College who arrived a semester after Swanson actually became the first recipient of a postgraduate degree at UVA (his PhD in education was the first such awarded to a Black man from a major Southern institution).