Bob Lee was the kind of ‘servant leader’ we’ll always need
His life dedicated to social activism, ‘mayor’ of Fifth Ward gave of himself to help others
The last time I saw Bob Lee, he was focused and lucid, despite years of suffering from multiple sclerosis. He was the unofficial mayor of the Fifth Ward, a community organizer who tended to the needs of people, from finding laptop computers for needy students to saving elderly widows the cost of mowing their lawns by doing it himself. The MS finally put him in a wheelchair but he kept gathering clothes and making calls and helping people. Then three weeks ago painful cancer put him in the hospital and he died March 21. He said the doctors were taking care of his body, and he was taking care of his mind. He was focusing on love.
He had pictures of the many children he loved — one of them, my daughter, his godchild. I became part of his network. One day he might be telling me about an old lady who kept rooms for intellectually disabled people and needed an air conditioner, and could I get some of my “potnahs” to chip in for one. When I was down, he could pick up on it from the tone of my voice and encourage me. And when he was down and disappeared for about six months, I got on him about turning his back, just not on me but his other friends and family.
He had suffered a lot during the last year, since his younger brother, Harris County Commissioner El Franco Lee, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Together they had built the most powerful, unchallenged political coalition in Houston politics. It was based on what Bob called a rainbow coalition, and its origins go back to the late ’60s, when Bob was a member of the Black Panthers in Chicago.
The story was told in a 1969 documentary, “American Revolution II,” by the late Mike Gray. It showed Bob Lee, a thin, young man with a deep voice, a black beret and a calm gravity organizing a group of young Appalachians against police brutality. It was the first time a black community organizer crossed the color line.
During the early ’70s, when Mickey Leland, Barbara Jordan and El Franco Lee and other blacks won elections to the Texas Legislature, Bob flew in from Chicago and helped them organize.
“My suggestion was to seek out the
white community in Houston,” Bob said. “It was a young, progressive community, and they were in the college communities.”
Bob urged Franco to stay away from the news media, saying, politicians who live by the media, die by the media.
“What you want to do,” he said, “is go to the churches, find the people and go to them. Every human being you meet on the streets is a constituent. You always talk about their services and needs.”
The philosophy worked. Franco Lee was elected again and again from a precinct of 900,000 people in which blacks are a minority.
I met Bob in 1989. The first thing he wanted to know was where I had gone to high school. Bob graduated from Wheatley in the Fifth Ward about the same time I graduated from Milby in the East End.
“So,” I said. “You’re the guy they wouldn’t let me go to school with.”
That was the beginning of a long friendship. I was the fine arts editor at the Houston Chronicle and working on a column called “State Lines” for the Sunday “Texas” magazine. Bob sold us several stories, always humorous and full of his love of life. Often he wrote about his mother’s family, who hailed from the East Texas town of Jasper, behind the pine curtain.
In the summer of 1997, he became concerned about reports that racists had been burning rural black churches. On weekends, he had been driving to a Jasper cemetery and spending the night under a pine tree with a pump shotgun he used to hunt squirrels. I went along, not taking the threat very seriously. About 1 a.m., he got nervous and decided we should leave. He wasn’t worried about his safety, but mine.
Early on a Monday morning in June 1998, Bob phoned and poured out a grief and rage I had never heard before. Someone had lynched the son of his mother’s cousin. Someone had dragged him 3 miles down a country road outside Jasper and left the body at the gate of the Huff Creek Cemetery, where his mother was buried.
I had known Bob for eight years, and I had never heard such anger. He was describing a lynching that had happened on a road we had driven together and ended in a cemetery we had sat in together.
His grief at El Franco’s death was terribly painful. He helped raise Franco from a baby, took him everywhere, on his high school dates, to his social work in Oakland, teaching disabled children to swim. Many of Franco’s ideas, such as the Street Olympics and recreational swimming programs, came from hanging out with Bob. When Franco started the Thomas Street AIDS clinic, Bob worked there for 10 years as a social worker, helping people he grew up with go through illness and death. He and Franco were what are called servant leaders. They didn’t do their work for themselves, but for all of us.