Melvin Reeves was a powerful and beloved leader, public servant, advocate, mentor and photographer.
Donate to Support Melvin’s Legacy Today.
With the blessing of Melvin’s family, his friend Tanya is fundraising to digitally archive decades of Melvin’s work, and create a website of his photography that family and loved ones can visit anytime.
After Melvin’s accident in 2017, Tanya collaborated with him in hospitals, rehabs and his apartment on many small creative projects. During the pandemic, he honored her by allowing her to be his hands as they began to put together a draft of a photography book of images he took over many years at parades. Melvin was passionate about “Parade Days” - and very discerning about which images were to be included in the book from the lovingly organized files he kept of his edited images. Melvin loved to shoot photographs at parades because, he said, “that is where people come because they want to be seen.”
When Melvin was in the hospital the last few weeks before he passed, he told Tanya that he wanted her to finish his book and build a website for friends and family to be able to see his work- projects he was both planning before his accident. She promised she would do her best to bring his work to the world.
You are invited to help support this work via a financial contribution. We are raising funds to cover the costs of hiring archivists, print production and shipping of softcover books, and website costs.
Melvin’s extraordinary journey began early in life in Boston, where he was among some of the first Black students to be part of the Metco program, the longest-running voluntary school desegregation and bussing program in America.
Melvin went on to become a Harvard University graduate whose distinguished public service career spanned not only innovating and powerfully impacting the lives of New York’s homeless families and disaster victims, but thousands of families throughout the world whose loved ones were tragically lost on 9/11.
For over 20 years, Melvin served as a senior leader at the American Red Cross in Greater New York pioneering NYC’s first model temporary housing facilities for homeless families. Then, as Director of Disaster Services, he was a senior leader in response to multiple devastating local and regional disasters, including the Happy Land Social Club fire in the Bronx, and the crash of TWA Flight #800. After 9/11, Melvin planned and implemented the Red Cross’ 9/11 long-term recovery work designing and providing services to families of victims in over 50 countries.
For 11 years, Melvin served as the Director of Education and Special Projects at the beloved non-profit public media organization, StoryCorps. In alignment with his commitment both to history and the future, Melvin led the creation of the largest single collections of both African-American and Latino oral histories in the country. These stories were collected across America, archived at the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and broadcast on public radio.
Melvin was a creative visionary, accomplished photographer and a beloved mentor to a large group of emerging leaders. He was a man of evidenced strength and courage who chose to embrace and master adversity.
In the Spring of 2017, while engaged in his passion of photographing parades (because, as he said, that is where “people go to be seen”), Melvin had a fall. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and later a stroke, resulting in near full paralysis. Over the past three and a half years, a powerful community response brought together a committed network of his family, friends, and loving mentees, who returned to him, in ways large and small, the multiplicity of “gifts” that he spent a lifetime so generously giving to others.
Melvin Reeves passed peacefully on the morning of Election Day after a 6 week hospitalization. Always committed to the public good and an avid follower of current events and global politics, Melvin’s last act was to proudly cast his vote for Biden and Harris on an absentee ballot from his hospital bed, and to passionately affirm the power of grit, faith and hope that guided him through his life.
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I have a fascination with how everyday people and common objects can portray the sacred.
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— Melvin Reeves