Skip to main content

Lewis M. Steel

Biography

Lewis M. Steel

Lewis M. Steel worked as a lawyer for the NAACP and is now Senior Counsel to Outten & Golden LLP. He works on a range of class action cases involving sexual and racial discrimination and overtime claims. His precedent-setting decisions include Sumitomo Shoji America, Inc. v. Avagliano, 457 U.S. 176, which established that American subsidiaries of foreign corporations must obey American civil rights laws. He lives in New York.

Lewis M. Steel

Books by Lewis M. Steel

The Butler's Child: An Autobiography
by Lewis M. Steel and Beau Friedlander - Law, Memoir, Nonfiction, Racism, Social Issues

THE BUTLER’S CHILD is the personal story of a Warner Brothers family grandson who spent more than 50 years as a fighting, no-holds-barred civil rights lawyer. Lewis M. Steel explores why he, a privileged white man, devoted his life to seeking racial progress in often uncomprehending or hostile courts. In fact, after writing a feature for The New York Times Magazine entitled "Nine Men in Black Who Think White," Lewis was fired from the NAACP and the entire legal staff resigned in support of him. Lewis speaks about his family butler, an African American man named William Rutherford, who helped raise him, as well as how Robert L. Carter, the NAACP's extraordinary general counsel, became his mentor, father figure and lifelong close friend.