[1][9] Lee also served in the United States Army Medical Corps beginning in 1950 during the Korean War, in which capacity he was assigned to Camp Stewart in Georgia, near Savannah.
However, he avoided stopping at restaurants or gas stations on highways, and left the base only with a specific destination in mind where he knew people, or to visit his mother who by then was living in Charleston, South Carolina, rather than going out "on the town".
[3] During Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to Ghana to attend the independence ceremonies in 1957, Lee and fellow African-American émigré Bill Sutherland organised a dinner for him, at which Julius Nyerere was a guest.
[12] As Lee later recounted to an American National Public Radio interviewer, his emigration from the United States was not driven by despair or abandonment of the Civil Rights Movement, but rather attraction to the enthusiasm shown by Ghanaians and their confidence "that they were going to be able to jettison colonial rule" and build up their country.
[2][13] Another major impetus was his desire to raise his children in, as he put it, "an environment that is not set up to make him hate himself", where "there isn't even any antiwhite feeling" and they "could grow up freer in their outlook on the world".
[16] However, Lee maintained his enthusiasm for the country; he stated that learning the languages of Ghana was one of the means he used to reduce the distance between himself and his Ghanaian hosts.
ADAF raised funds for the restoration through a variety of activities, including a memorial service for Louis Armstrong, whose ancestors might have come from the fort's vicinity.
"[20] However, as time went on Lee's attempts to raise funds from the United States proved to be less successful than hoped; despite promises by celebrities such as Isaac Hayes and Dionne Warwick, in the end there was little further enthusiasm among African Americans for his efforts.
Indeed, the Dutch embassy remonstrated against ADAF's involvement and complained that the focus on slavery excluded other aspects of the Dutch–Ghanaian trading relationship; the plaque presented by the city of Amsterdam refers only to "the memory of historic ties between Ghana and the Netherlands".
As a result, on 5 February 1973 the Ghanaian government broke ADAF's lease on Fort Amsterdam and ordered Lee that "any activities should cease forthwith".
Further negotiations failed to produce results acceptable to either side, and in the end the remainder of the funds that Lee had raised were donated to the Du Bois Centre.
[25] After Rawlings' second coup in 1981, which established the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), Kojo was at first suspicious of his old friend, and did not speak to him for three months, but eventually accepted the call back to service that the government extended to all discharged soldiers.
While on patrol, he shot and killed neighbourhood resident Peter Atsu Bieboo, a fellow Ghana Armed Forces member on his way to buy kenkey with his brother.
[35] In his aging years, he continued to pay attention to developments in the United States, in particular Barack Obama's presidential campaign and subsequent election in 2008.
[2] The University of Ghana-Legon awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2008 to recognise his distinguished contribution to public service, making him the second American to whom they had granted such a degree, after W. E. B.