Lee Stanley Smith collection of Harvard negatives

Lee Stanley Smith (AB 1969), photographer and lawyer, was born on January 15, 1947. He attended James Madison High School when schools were desegregated in Texas, then transferred to North Dallas’ St. Mark’s School of Texas, becoming the first African-American student to integrate its halls. Smith entered Harvard College in 1965 with a concentration in Government. While at Harvard, Smith was a resident of Winthrop House, and a member of several student groups, including the Young Democrats, the Association of African & Afro-American Students, Winthrop House Hockey, and the Harvard Yearbook Publications, where he served as the Assistant Photography Chairman, and of which he became the first Black managing editor.

Following his graduation from Harvard in 1969, Smith worked as a photographer in New York. He later received his JD from the University of Washington in 1974, and then took an extended trip to Morocco. After returning from Morocco, he moved back to Seattle and established a solo law practice. While in Washington, Smith spearheaded litigation against the Washington Bar Association, which led to a substantial increase in Black lawyers being able to practice in the state. In 1978, he accepted a job in Texas as the Chief Regional Civil Right Attorney for the United States Department of Health and Human Services. While in this position, Smith disassembled a 100-year regulation that allowed the State of Texas to withhold Prairie View A&M, a historically Black college, of a share of a three-billion-dollar endowment. The University of Texas later hired him.

From 1989 to 1991, Smith lived in Seattle, where he served as Counsel to the Director of the Washington State Department of Wildlife. In 1991, Smith returned to Austin, where he returned to the University of Texas system, becoming the Associate Vice President for Legal Affairs at the University of Texas Austin, a position he held until his retirement in 2017. Currently, Smith serves as special counsel, while also running his photography business called TravelerSmith. In 2021, Smith was honored by St. Marks Preparatory School of Dallas as the first distinguished alumnus. The award is now named the “St. Mark’s School of Texas Lee S. Smith ‘65 Courage and Honor Distinguished Alumni Award.”

In 1969, the United States was consumed by the Vietnam War and nation-wide societal and cultural unrest, to which Harvard University was no exception. The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) was active on campus, which gave many Harvard students a sense that the University was complicit with the role of the United States in the Vietnam War. Additionally, the University was looking to expand further into Cambridge and Boston, which would raise the cost of rent significantly and force many working class residents of the area, troubling many in the student body. The University was also lacking any meaningful representation for African-American students in the curriculum, which led students to also demand the establishment of a Black studies program. All of these issues were intensified by a lack of communication between students, faculty, and the Harvard administration, which led many students to believe that their opinions were unimportant to the administration.

In reaction to the University’s response to student and faculty concerns, the Harvard chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society planned a protest. On April 9, 1969, approximately 30 students staged a takeover of Harvard’s University Hall. The protesters forced the administration and staff members from the premises, chained the doors shut, and staged a sit-in until the early morning of April 10. Their eight demands were to abolish ROTC; restore scholarships to the Paine Hall demonstrators; replace ROTC scholarships with Harvard scholarships; roll back rent increases in university-owned apartments; prevent University Road apartments from being torn down to make room for the Kennedy complex; prevent homes in Roxbury from being torn down for the expansion of Harvard Medical School; establish a Black studies program; and to end the Vietnam War. On the morning of April 10, 1969, the Harvard administration called in the Cambridge police and the Massachusetts State Police to remove the protesters from the building, which had grown to an estimated 500 students. The altercation turned violent as the police used billy clubs and mace to break up the protest. This violence only escalated tensions between the Harvard community and the administration, resulting in Harvard students boycotting classes until April 17, when the faculty convinced the students to return to classes on the promise on increasing student representation to the university administration.

During the spring semester of 1969, a visiting lecturer named Siegfried M. Breuning offered a course at the Graduate School of Design called Planning 11-3b, "Riot Control," which proposed the creation of a program to eliminate urban riots. On February 7, 1969, 85 members of Harvard's African-American activist group, Afro, demanded at the course's first meeting that it be abolished. In response, Breuning cancelled the class, pledging instead to give a seminar on how to develop an urban studies program at Harvard. This marked the first time that students had actively interfered with the teaching of a Harvard course.

A week later, 108 Faculty members placed an advertisement in The Crimson protesting the disruption of the course. The statement read, "A university community dedicated to free inquiry and discussion cannot tolerate any interference with, or disruption of, its academic exercises...To preserve academic freedom in the University, we request the administration to take measures appropriate to assure the inviolability of instruction and examinations in all duly approved courses."

This disagreement prompted Franklin L. Ford, Dean of the Faculty, to appoint an eight-member committee, headed by Merle Fainsod, Pforzheimer University Professor, to study Faculty decision-making; this was known as the Fainsod Committee.

In October 1967, three hundred Harvard and Radcliffe students staged a sit-in at Mallinckrodt Hall in an attempt to stop Dow Chemical Corporation from recruiting on campus. The students were protesting Dow's role in the Vietnam War, as Dow was the principal supplier of napalm for the United States military. The student activists imprisoned a Dow job recruiter in a conference room for seven hours, forcing him to halt his interviews.