We Will Cherish His Memory and Imitate His Example: Melvin Garrison Becomes an Ancestor

Melvin with the Jacob C. White collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

We only knew Melvin for a couple of years. But the clarity of his support - the why behind it - changed the course of our lives.

Melvin (Red cap, beige jacket) on one of our first walking tours. photo courtesy Dominque Nicole/Terel Halsey.

There was this walking tour. Morgan and I were leading it as part of our work on the free Black community of Philadelphia. We’d done the research, mapped the streets, brought people together to experience a version of history that too often gets buried. It was one of our early public events. We were still figuring out our rhythm, still building trust.

Melvin came.

He didn’t say much. He didn’t try to take up space. He walked quietly, listening. Watching. And, in hindsight, sizing us up. Not in a petty way. In a protective way. Because he’d seen this before. He’d built this before.

Back in the '80s, Melvin had been part of the team that developed the Black history curriculum for the School District of Philadelphia. He got the scholars together. He made sure the best of that research wasn't just sitting on shelves. He helped translate them into classrooms. Into lesson plans. Into memory.

That work extended into his consulting for the Audacious Freedom exhibit at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP), one of the first major museum exhibits in the city to fully center 18th and 19th century Black Philadelphians as civic leaders, entrepreneurs, abolitionists, and visionaries.

In 'Audacious Freedom', Melvin worked to ensure all the key elements were there for future generations - everything from Stephen Smith to where our ancestors appeared in lithographs.

Without that work, I don’t know if I ever would have met Morgan. I was a docent at AAMP. She worked there, too. And we became friends - co-conspirators, really - over our shared love of the histories in Audacious Freedom and our desire to make them more widely known. That exhibit pointed us in the right direction - it was like a memory map of a world on the verge of being forgotten. And by shaping that exhibit, Melvin made sure that it wasn't.

So when he showed up to our walking tour decades later, I think he was trying to see whether the next generation had picked up what he helped lay down.

By the end of that walk, I think something shifted. He saw us—not just as tour guides, but as the next chapter of something he had helped build.

As he started to share his knowledge deeper into our walk, we realized that he knew quite a lot and we invited him to speak and share that day.

Melvin making history fun on our walking tour. photo courtesy Dominque Nicole/Terel Halsey.

And once he knew we were just as in love with and serious about our history, we had his full support.

The minute he became our mentor. photo courtesy Dominque Nicole/Terel Halsey.

That’s when he stepped in. He helped connect us to his mentee Ismael Jimenez, Director of Social Studies at the School District of Philadelphia. He opened doors. He didn’t just say, “Good job.” He agreed to be our board member, helping us select and focus on the most impactful research priorities.

He made sure the work could continue.

And then came the part that still makes my heart full: Melvin started coming with us on walking tours—not just as a supporter, but as a subject matter expert. When we partnered with the School District to take 11th grade students on these tours, he became the voice in those spaces. He wasn’t there to be symbolic. He was there to teach.

I watched those students watch him. They were locked in. Listening. Asking questions. Following his words with real attention. There was something electric in it. This man who had shaped the curriculum decades before, still out there in the streets with them—making history feel alive, present, real.

It moved me. Because I knew how much of his life he had poured into this work. And I could see how much it still mattered to him, even in his later years. He never stopped showing up.

That support led to our past incredible year, one we could not have imagined, where we helped lead two symposiums, one for academics and another for public historians, specifically on 19th Black Philadelphia. And we curated an exhibit using the same documents and same stories that inspired him from the Leon Gardiner and Pennsylvania Abolition Society collections at the HIstorical Society of Pennsylvania.

Finally we won a grant to begin writing new resources for teachers - following exactly in Melvin's footsteps.

Unfortunately, by the time we started holding all these events, Melvin's health was already starting to fail. The last time I saw him in person was when we were able to introduce Delores Walters, a descendant of someone who lived on Quince in the 1840s, to the house her ancestor grew up in .

Melvin and Delores Walters on Quince, standing in front of her ancestors home.

Some people never step away from the work because it isn’t just something they did. It’s who they are. Melvin was part of this history's living chain. And he wanted to make sure the chain never broke.

We are Bereft.

When I think about Melvin’s passing, I remember seeing something similar in the archives, a moment that echoes this grief across time.

Jacob C. White Sr. - one of Melvin’s heroes in the Black Metropolis - died in July 1872. He was a monumental figure: a builder, a strategist, a leader who mentored generations and helped Black Philadelphians not only fight for freedom, but create systems of support and growth for one another.

Jacob C. White Sr., Melvin's Black Metropolis ancestral mentor.

When he passed, the Benezet Joint Stock Association, a society he led, diverted from their normal governmental and formal writing style to write their response into the minute book - a physical representation of decades of his work, his energy. The handwriting itself was messier than the pages before it, as if written with an emotional shakiness.

"Whereas we have learned with deep regret the passing of our President Jacob C. White, and while we feel it is to be our duty to bow in humble submission to the scores of an all wise and overruling providence yet, We cannot but feel most keenly the loss of one who has endeared himself to us with kind manner and Christian deportment." This was in October.

"We will cherish his memory and imitate his example."

Entry from the Benezet Joint Stock Association Minute Book, lamenting the loss of Jacob C. White, Sr., President of the Association. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

And then… silence. No entries for three months. It was as if they could barely continue. It took nearly a year for them to begin recording their work again. That’s what it feels like when a giant leaves the room. When a pillar falls.

That’s what we feel now.

But we also know: Melvin has not left us.

He is on the ancestral plane now, standing among those who came before him—those he studied, honored, and carried with him in everything he did.

And we know he is speaking still.

Speaking to us. Speaking through us. Reminding us that the next generation must know how great they are. That they come from strength. That they are part of a long, unbroken line of brilliance, resistance, and love.