Tee grew up in Richmond in Gilpin Court, a majority Black neighborhood with one of the highest poverty rates in the country. After a career in the US Air Force, he returned to Richmond in the 1980s. Having become an ordained minister, Tee wanted to serve the community where he came from. He became the director of the Peter Paul Development Center, an organization designed to provide family services to Church Hill residents in east Richmond, but after heading this operation for a few years he realized the limitation of working within Black communities exclusively. He met the Reverend Benjamin P. Campbell, an Episcopal priest, the founder of the Richmond Hill retreat center which was to become a major resource for racial healing and spiritual renewal. Marvin Chiles writes in The Struggle for Change how Tee, at the time, “did not trust most white people beyond where he could see them.” However, he and Ben became firm friends and were to become inspirational figures in a revolutionary movement for Richmond to acknowledge its racial history. Campbell introduced him to the Initiatives of Change team (then called Moral Re-Armament) which was starting some work focused on honest conversation and racial healing. In 1993, Tee and Ben were leaders of the team that designed the city’s first walk through its racial history, the centerpiece of the Healing the Heart of America conference.
