When he was orphaned in his early teens (his West Indian immigrant parents died within a year of each other), he went to live with and was raised by an aunt.
He received his Juris Doctor degree in 1962, and at the graduation ceremony, he was an escort for the speaker, Robert Kennedy, who offered him a job in the Justice Department.
Lucas was elected Wayne County sheriff in his own right in 1970 and reelected twice thereafter, serving in that capacity for thirteen years.
He won the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1986, only the second Black person in American history to win a major party nomination for governor.
He ran on a platform that stressed the historic nature of his candidacy, fiscal responsibility, and law and order, but lost by a large margin in the general election to the incumbent Democrat, James Blanchard.