In 1956, Towles married Richard C. Caesar, a retired combat fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, San Francisco philanthropist/civic leader, and prominent dentist.

[5] Limiting her touring time after her marriage, as Lois Caesar, she became noted for her community activism, focused on women's and children's issues.

[6][23] She completed her studies in 1943 with a thesis The History of Music Education at Wiley College, becoming only the second person to have obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree at the university and the first African-American to have done so.

[11][25][Notes 2] She enrolled in Juilliard to pursue her doctorate, studying under Sascha Gorodnitzki, and was appointed as "artist in residence" at Tennessee State University.

[6] She debuted at Tennessee State on October 22, 1947, and the review of Ruth Campbell of The Tennessean compared her performance to that of Arthur Rubinstein, a well-known pianist with an international reputation.

[6][11] She spent the summer of 1948 studying with him and took courses at the University of California, Berkeley, while touring to capacity crowds in major cities throughout the South.

Besides practicing six to eight hours per day, Towles performed, earning praise for recitals at the American Embassy of Paris, the Opéra-Comique, the Gaveau Salon, and for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Late that year, she performed as the accompanist of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and hosted her sister Dorothea, who would become a model for Christian Dior.

[6] In 1956, while appearing at a concert in San Francisco, she rekindled a friendship with Richard Caesar, whom she had met while she was teaching at Fisk and he was attending dental school.

[26][34] Though she would continue performing for another ten years, after her marriage Towles took the name Lois Towels Caesar and began focusing on community activism and development.

[6][26] From the early 1960s to 1965, she and her sister operated a finishing school in San Francisco, teaching women about etiquette and fashion, but also about building self-confidence.

They made presentations across the country at universities and women's organizations[38][39][40] and she published the column, "Fashionably Dressed on a Budget" for the Pittsburgh Courier.