Interviewer(s): Ezell Wilson & Natalie Garza

Project: University of Houston

This interview with Elwyn Lee, the current Vice President for Community Relations and Institutional Access (as of Fall 2013), recounts his roots and subsequent return to the city of Houston, especially focused on his involvement with the birth of the African American Studies program at the University of Houston. Lee, who first came to Houston less than a year after his birth in 1949, recalls growing up in the Third Ward during the increasingly racially polarized ‘50s and ‘60s. His experiences at Yale during the Civil Rights era (such as seeing the rise of an African American studies program, and being influenced by the Voting Rights Act) would inspire him to return to his hometown, where he was instrumental in getting the African American Studies program off the ground as one of its first directors.