Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design

Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design — PLC Detroit — is the only design-focused historically Black college in the United States, teaching footwear, apparel and colour and materials design from a campus on Walker Street in Detroit. It descends from the Lewis Business College that Dr. Violet Temple Lewis opened in Indianapolis in 1928 with a fifty-dollar loan; a Detroit branch followed in 1938, the college was designated an HBCU in 1987, and it closed in 2015 after losing its accreditation.

In October 2021 the footwear designer Dr. D’Wayne Edwards, who had founded the PENSOLE academy in Portland in 2010, took a majority stake and brought the institution back under its present name, with the College for Creative Studies supporting the relaunch. Teaching is learn-by-doing and organised in masterclasses with brands and foundations, and more than 500 PENSOLE alumni work for Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Vans and Puma. The degree is an Associate of Applied Science in Product Creation, with concentrations in apparel, colour and materials and footwear, and it is currently non-accredited.