Who is Matthew Lewey and who is he to us?  A veteran, educator, justice of the peace, politician or journalist?  All the above and perhaps even more.

Lewey was engaged in the issues of his time as an African American man who fought with Union troops during the Civil War and then took up the cause of social justice on many fronts before he died in August 1935.

Now, a group of people in the Gainesville community have come together to pay tribute to Lewey and give him the place in the collective history that he deserves.

Nkwanda Jah, executive director of the Cultural Arts Coalition and the main organizer of the Matthew Lewey Intergenerational Event at the Thomas Center on Sunday, said she is amazed by all that Lewey achieved.

“We want to make Matthew Lewey more visible to us,” Jah said. “But not just to make him bigger but for us to understand that Lewey and the people he worked with could realize these accomplishments right after slavery. They did all this; we should be able to do even more.”

Lewey’s achievements included serving as a newspaper editor and publisher, a postmaster, lawyer, politician, and justice of the peace in Florida.  He also served as an officer in the Union Army. Lewey, who was from Baltimore, Maryland, was the first licensed Black male lawyer in Florida. He also was elected to the Florida House of Representatives and served on Gainesville’s city council.

He ended up in Gainesville because of the relationship he developed with Josiah T. Walls and the work they did as journalists and newspaper publishers. Lewey died in Jacksonville in 1935 and is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Gainesville.

Author and journalist Cynthia Barnett, one of about 100 people who attended the event, said everyone present was inspired to get out more information about Lewey.

“Attendees committed to further documenting the life, work, and impact of Matthew Lewey in Alachua County and beyond, ensuring children and others learn about him via a public exhibit, digital timeline, documentary film, and other means,” said Barnett, who is also senior lecturer and director of the Climate and Environment Reporting Initiatives at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications.

Those who attended the event were organized into tables of 10 people around different areas of life where Lewey achieved success – veterans, elected officials, educators, journalism, the judiciary, the postal service and more.

Judge Gloria Walker of the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida is the first African American woman to hold that judicial position. She wore her robes to the event and offered the help of her legal interns to help research Lewey’s justice of the peace and legal cases.

Rachel Grant, assistant professor of journalism at UF, said to the gathering that those present should try to follow in Lewey’s footsteps.

“As a nation divided, we need each other more than ever,” she said. “We should be inspired by the work of Mathew Lewey to never give up, to find solutions when we see a problem, and finally, to build our communities by serving others. Everyone adds value, and we need the hope that change is already here.”

It was Paul Ortiz, former UF professor and director of the Samuel R. Proctor Oral History Project, who first stumbled upon Lewey while doing research in the Frederick Douglass Collection at the Library of Congress in 1996.

“I was at the same time angry, amazed, and inspired,” said Ortiz, now a professor of Labor History at Cornell University. “Angry because I had never been taught about this amazing individual and his generation of courageous African American freedom fighters who fought the Confederate Army, the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow.

“[I’m] amazed that M.M. Lewey’s life in the struggle spanned his heroic service during the Civil War in the 1860s to the election of 1920. Inspired because Matthew Lewey taught the importance of Black History and equality for all in decades when the United States denied all these things.”

Event sponsors included the George A. Smathers Libraries and the College of Journalism and Communications, both at UF, the Alachua County Community Remembrance Project, the Cultural Arts Coalition and the city of Gainesville.