STAFF INDUCTEES

WILLIAM E. LEWIS (1839-1890)

A veteran of the Civil War and an evangelist, William E. Lewis was one of the early “state secretaries” at a time when the YMCA Movement was responding to the need to coordinate and support the work of local associations. He was working with the Massachusetts YMCA when he was recruited to become State Secretary for Wisconsin. At that time, there was a movement underway to provide a standardized training program for YMCA secretaries to create professionalism in the field. Lewis convened an organizational meeting to discuss the creation of a summer school for YMCA secretaries. The meeting was at Camp Collie, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in August of 1884. The outcome was the establishment of the “Western Secretarial Institute,” which Lewis founded with I.E. Brown and Robert Weidensall. That institute became the Lake Geneva campus of George Williams College. Lewis was named the institute’s first president.

MAX YERGAN (1892-1975)

Beginning as a Student Secretary while in college, Max Yergan worked to promote the YMCA Movement to colleges in the Southwest. After graduating from college, he became a teacher in Raleigh, NC, but rejoined YMCA work as a War Work Secretary in 1916. He spent two years accompanying the Indian Troops in Dar-Es-Salaam, German East Africa, then went to France to work with the African-American units of the Expeditionary Army. After the war, he returned to the United States and was ordained a minister. In 1921, he set out for South Africa to develop a YMCA for black South Africans. A fierce advocate for the rights of black South Africans, Yergan lectured before the white Student Christian Associations in South Africa on the inclusive nature of the Kingdom of God, forcing them to re-examine the racial conditions of their country. Yergan’s work got a boost when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., donated $25,000 toward the construction of a YMCA building, which Yergan called the South African Training Center. In 1936, he returned to the United States and became the first teacher of African-American Studies at City College of New York. Yergan was a controversial activist whose politics, over years, shifted from Communist to anti-Communist, but his pioneering YMCA work in South Africa stands as his monumental legacy.