Melvin Giles
*Melvin Giles was born on this date in 1958. He was a poet, educator, and community activist.
From Mississippi, he was the son of a traveling Baptist preacher who worked on the railroad. Giles’s early southern childhood exposed him to the harsh reality of the Jim Crow South. When he was about 4 years old, his family moved to Chicago, Illinois. He and his family were part of the Great Migration of the 20th century. Soon, his family moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, his father found work at a meat packing company, and he worked as a railroad pullman porter.
Young Giles graduated from St. Paul Central High School in 1977; this was followed by attending Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Augustana University in South Dakota. While in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he published a community newspaper called Everyday Close, a voice for Native, Black, and other progressive voices. Giles also became a certified massage and reflexology therapist. Melvin, in the late 1980s, returned to St. Paul and founded programs centered on engaging and healing. And was a member of the World Peace Prayer Society, becoming a Peace Representative who supported peace poles as symbols of world peace and unity.
He and his partner, Mary Salter, planted hundreds of peace poles around Minnesota and the country. As part of his peace activism, Melvin blew bubbles, filling rooms and spaces that he entered. He used bubbles as part of his peace messages and to create processes and places/spaces of peace. Giles started using bubbles to bridge the gap of distrust between the Black community and the St. Paul Police Department in the late 1990s by offering police officers bubbles to assist them with domestic calls.
In 1997, Melvin helped found the first Community Peace Celebration in response to violence that occurred in the Frogtown neighborhood. Giles served with Catholic Charities for 15 years; the last 7 years as the Director of Catholic Charities Frogtown Center. He was a veteran educator in peace, diversity, and dismantling racism. He has extensive experience working with youth, academia, government agencies, nonprofit agencies, and neighborhood groups.
Notable accomplishments include serving as an adjunct community faculty instructor in Bethel University’s Anthropology Department, a member of AfroEco and the Growing Food and Justice All Initiative, advisor to the Diversity Committee of Ramsey County Master Gardeners, certified facilitator of Racial Sobriety workshops, anti-racism trainer for the Minnesota Tri-Council Commission of the Council of Churches, and founding member and key organizer of the St. Paul Pluralism Circle.
Giles received the Martin Luther King “Dream Keeper” Award in 2003, the McKnight Foundation “Virginia McKnight Binger Awards” in Human Service in 2005, the “Outstanding World Citizen” Award in 2008, Bethel University’s “George K. Brushaber Reconciliation Award” in 2009, and the Morrill Hall/Rachel Tilsen Social Justice Award in 2011. He was a constant, grounding presence in the family, according to his relatives.
Melvin Giles died on July 1, 2025.
