Lewis Pitts was born in 1947 in Clinton, SC. Both of Lewis's parents were college educated, and his mother worked as a school teacher. His father had a small business selling meat. They abhorred the KKK, but accepted the realities of "separate but equal" as it was relentlessly practiced in the Jim Crow South. Accepted into the law school at the University of South Carolina, Pitts sought to utilize the practice of law as a way of promoting social good. He clerked at the public defender's office and began to get involved in the civil rights movement. In 1976 Pitts and a fellow progressive lawyer named Bob Warren came up with a bold plan. Together they did a revolutionary thing—they opened a practice for poor African-Americans and whites in Allendale, SC. They did the work practically pro-bono, and began winning some cases that changed the law, challenging the establishment on a number of fronts. Moving to Greensboro, NC in 1980, Pitts became involved with the victims of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, and in 1985 won the groundbreaking civil case that found police, KKK and Nazis responsible for the death of one of the five murdered that day. For that fight Pitts worked with the legendary attorney Flint Taylor (also an interviewee in this archive.) In the years that followed Pitts joined Legal Aid of NC, and worked tirelessly in the areas of mental health reform and the rights of children. Lewis Pitts has dedicated his life to the civil rights movement and to human justice. He is a tireless fighter who at age 72 still breathes the fire of commitment, based on a deep faith that justice can prevail, no matter the odds.