Hoge Hall was formerly known as Lee Hall, named after Dr. Claudius Lee, an 1896 alumnus of Tech and a professor of electrical engineering who served the university in various capacities for nearly seventy years. In 1997, students in a history class found a page in the 1896 "Bugle" (Virginia Tech's student yearbook) that seemed to indicate that while an undergraduate, Claudius Lee had been president of a campus Ku Klux Klan as well as being named "Arch-fiend" of the Pittsylvania Club organization, whose yearbook page featured a black person being lynched. After years of pressure from students and alumni, Lee Hall was renamed Hoge Hall after the late Janie and William Hoge. Janie and William Hoge were a local African American couple who played a critical role in the success and well-being of the first African American students attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the 1950s.