By: Rodney Griffin Missouri City resident Rodney Griffin has a long history of public service to the community, and it’s being recognized in a big way. On December 3, he will receive a President’s Lifetime Achievement Award at an event at City Centre in west Houston. Griffin, 77, who grew up in the Sunnyside neighborhood of south-east Houston, has lived in Missouri City since 1980. His parents, Margaret and William Griffin, were both educators and business people who were adamant that their children excel in their studies. Griffi n attended Houston public schools and received a Jesse H. Jones Scholarship from the Houston Endowment, the philanthropy found-ed by the well-known Houston business and governmental leader. He chose to attend the University of Texas in Austin, where his older sister had already graduated. Griffin received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, with a minor in government studies, in 1970. “I’m proud to say I was in that first decade of African-American students to actually attend the University of Texas as undergraduates,” Griffin said. Th e university first desegregated its undergraduate programs in 1956, he said. Griffin and his fellow Black undergrads from that era formed an organization called Precursors Inc., who recently partnered with UT to honor and archive the history of that era with a monument and a trail of historical markers. Griffin said that if there was any benefit to the Jim Crow era that we

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