The friendship between Bob Lee, a community leader and social-justice warrior, and Michael Berryhill, a journalist and a Texas Southern University professor, was unlikely given their disparate backgrounds.

Lee, a Black man from Fifth Ward, was so rooted in the soil of the community neighbors called him the area’s unofficial “mayor.” Berryhill, who is white, grew up on the East side of Houston, attended Milby High School and didn’t know many Black people. Still, the men seemed fated to be friends, and they bonded over words and storytelling.  

After Lee died of cancer in 2017 at age 74, Berryhill gathered up many of Lee’s stories and essays and compiled them into a book, “Da Mayor of Fifth Ward: Stories of the Big Thicket and Houston,” published by Texas A&M University Press.

Berryhill became Lee’s first editor on his essays about Houston Black history and his East Texas family for the Houston Chronicle’s Texas Magazine. Lee was his first Black friend, he said, and the first person to hold his daughter when she was born. 

After Lee died of cancer in 2017 at age 74, Berryhill gathered up many of Lee’s stories and essays and compiled them into a book, “Da Mayor of Fifth Ward: Stories of the Big Thicket and Houston,” published by Texas A&M University Press. It is the first book in the Prairie View A&M University Series. 

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Culled from the Houston Chronicle. Writer, Joy Sewing is the Chronicle’s culture columnist, focusing on Houston culture, families, social justice and race. 

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Michael Berryhill brings 25 years of professional experience in journalism to the School of Communication. In 2015 the Texas Institute of Letters honored him with a membership for “for his outstanding contributions to a literary Texas.” His book, The Trials of Eroy Brown, The Murder Case that Shook the Texas Prison System was published in 2011 by the University of Texas Press. The Philosophical Society of Texas as the best-non-fiction book on Texas in 2011.