Helen Lewis (1924-2022) was a towering figure in the fields of sociology and history who advanced an understanding of women’s roles in working-class communities and developed an interpretation of Appalachia as an internal colony of the United States.

Her focus on the role Appalachia and its coal-mining communities played in the development of modern America and 20^th Century labor relations distinguished her work, but it was the way she challenged fellow academics to reconsider the human element of the people and issues they study that defined her contribution as a radical educator and activist.

“One of the things that Helen used to say about herself is that she didn't necessarily put out new ideas,” said Sandra Godwin, professor of Sociology at Georgia College & State University (GCSU). “She just took bits and pieces of other people's ideas and brought them together and broadcast them.”

Lewis was born on October 2, 1924 in Nicholson, Georgia. She was deeply affected by the people she met through her father’s work as a rural mail carrier. Lewis credited her father for providing a foundation of fairness and caring that inspired her work on issues of social equity and justice.

But it was biblical scholar Clarence Jordan’s cotton-patch adaptation of the Good Samaritan parable that Lewis cited as the spark igniting a flame for social justice that burned brightly throughout her life and career. As a student at Georgia State College for Women (GSCW), now Georgia College & State University, Lewis became active in gender, labor and racial equity issues through the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).

In an interview published in the Appalachian Journal, Lewis praised the women she encountered through the YWCA “who had either been in the labor movement or were real activists,” for helping her cultivate her reaction to the social climate that gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.

As a student activist at GSCW in the 1940s, Lewis participated in integrated, racial justice action conferences and planning meetings. She engaged in summer programs on labor issues that gave her first-hand experiences in manufacturing operations at non-union facilities.

Returning to campus decades later as a visiting scholar, Lewis would share these experiences to challenge current students about how they will meld their convictions with the education they’re pursuing at Georgia College.

“She asked students what would you go to jail for? What are you committed to so much that you would go to jail? And that really got their attention,” Godwin said.

But it was not getting into good trouble for its own sake or developing a set of bona fides best communicated on a rap sheet. It was about meeting people affected by an issue where they are and leveraging the knowledge of academia to create meaningful impact in the communities that bear the brunt of an issue.

Veronica Womack is director of GCSU’s Rural Studies Institute, an initiative focused on developing the knowledge base necessary to inform sustainable economic development in rural communities in the Black Belt Region of the Southeastern United States. Lewis was an inspiration to Womack for the ways her research centered on people whose lived-experience gave them invaluable insight into and context about a subject, like mining or a place like Appalachia.

“Helen was always good about not allowing people to just use census data to explain Appalachia,” Womack said. “That's what made it so powerful. Anybody can pull the data and analyze the data without context, but when you actually add context—the people, the history, the social stratification and geography—it makes it so much more powerful. She was very interdisciplinary in her approach; I learned a lot from that.”

But Lewis’s relationships with people who lived in the communities she studied broke the mold of researcher and subject. Womack says Lewis exemplified the role of a public scholar for the way she empowered people to address issues in their community.

“A public scholar—this is my own definition—is someone who sees the interaction and the connection, the cooperation, the collaboration with community and uses their expertise to help community and partner with community on specific issues that the community would like to address,” Womack said. “It's not just about publishing in the top journal of your discipline, it's about taking that knowledge, that time, that energy and using your knowledge of the system and how it works to benefit the public.”

Godwin agrees that Lewis’s practice of empowering communities by helping them to realize their own voice is perhaps the greatest legacy Lewis leaves the activism-minded academics who succeed her. Godwin quotes Lewis to illustrate the potential when researchers challenge academia’s rigid ideals about objectivity.

“When people begin to research their own problems, they begin to feel that they have some control over the information, some beginnings of a feeling of power vis-à-vie the experts. That feeling is strengthened when they confront the experts, such as the health department or other government officials, and they discovered that they knew what the scientists did not, and that they had a right to speak out on what they knew.”

In 2021, Georgia College’s Rural Studies Institute celebrated Lewis as a foundational example of the potential that can be unlocked through a liberal arts education. Womack invited scholars and activists from across the country and globe to reflect on Lewis’s impact on Appalachia, rural development, academic engagement and community empowerment. The result was “the Dr. Helen Lewis Symposium: What’s Your Place in the Space?”

The symposium was the institute’s first public outreach event. Womack said it was important for her, as director, to use that opportunity to highlight a Georgia College alumna who embodies the institute’s mission of developing sustainable rural communities.

“Helen [Lewis] was a scholar who embodied rural studies in a way that I hope Georgia College will be able to do,” Womack said. “So, I thought it was very important for our campus to know her better. She impacted so many people in a positive way. She’s a gem that we had here for a short time at Georgia College, but she’s made us very, very proud.”

You can learn more about Helen Matthews Lewis in the book “Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia.”