‘He Never Stopped Being Mayor’

When Jim Melvin was growing up in Greensboro, his father Joe had a rule: If he ate at the family table, he worked. The young Melvin pulled many shifts at the family’s two-pump Texaco gas station on Asheboro Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive). Later in life, he would joke he had to go off to UNC-Chapel Hill and the Army just so he could stop working Saturdays.

That work ethic never left him, fueling his early volunteering with the United States Junior Chamber (Jaycees), successful banking and political careers and beyond. He served as mayor of Greensboro for a decade from 1971 to 1981—a period of rapid growth, social change, and shocking violence that, in some ways, continues to define the city. He left office, he would say, but never left service. He continued shaping the city and mentoring generations of new leaders as president of the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation for the rest of his life.

Melvin played a key role in transformative projects in Greensboro, from development of the Randleman Reservoir and Greensboro’s coliseum expansion to the creation of the downtown baseball stadium. His long-term vision and leadership in assembling the Greensboro-Raldoph Megasite led to a Toyota battery plant and nearly $14 billion in investment, the largest economic development coup in North Carolina history.

When Melvin died last week at 91, he had been taking meetings just weeks earlier—with an oxygen tank and private nurse in tow.

“That’s how he was,” said Mayor Nancy Vaughan. “You couldn’t stop him. Always on the phone, always having a meeting with someone. In a way, he never stopped being mayor.”

‘It’s Not About That Little White Ball’

Growing up in the Warnersville area, at the intersection of Black and white neighborhoods, a young Jim Melvin had formative experiences marrying twin passions—politics and golf.

The Jaycees, a youth volunteer service organization whose Greensboro chapter was founded in 1936, was a draw for civic-minded and ambitious young people, including Melvin.

“The club members created a Christmas fund for needy children,” wrote Howard E. Covington Jr. in his book Once Upon a City: Greensboro, North Carolina’s Second Century. “And in the early days of World War II devoted countless hours to the collection of scrap paper, iron and metal.”

Over time, it became a powerful pipeline for young progressives tackling some of the day’s thorniest social issues on their way to adult political leadership. In Greensboro, the Jaycees were out front on desegregation. It was the first civic club to support the local Board of Education’s desegregation efforts after the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The fight didn’t stop at schools.

In 1955, six Black men defiantly played a historic round of golf at the whites-only course at Gillespie Park, where a young Melvin had learned to love the game. They were arrested for trespassing. One of those men, Dr. George Simkins Jr., would lead the Greensboro branch of the NAACP for a quarter century and have a lifelong relationship with Melvin.

Simkins was a mentor to Melvin “Skip” Alston, now chair of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners.

“It could be a love-hate kind of relationship,” Alston said of Simkins and Melvin. “But they always respected each other. They could always talk—one of them the mayor of Greensboro and the other the mayor of Greensboro’s Black community. They got things done, and they did it over golf.”

Alston didn’t understand the golf attraction at first, he said. He was more interested in the fast-paced game of basketball than in hitting a little white ball for four hours. But Simkins and Rev. Prince Edward Graves helped open his eyes.

“They said, ‘It’s not about that little white ball,'” Alston said. “‘It’s about being out there for four hours with that CEO, that leader, that politician on your golf cart. You have their undivided attention, you’ve got their ear.’ That’s why it was important for us to be on those golf courses, in all those places those conversations were being had and those deals were getting done.”

That was a lesson Melvin learned as a young man. Access was important. Building relationships was important. Change sometimes came slowly, not always easily.

As founders and organizers of the Greater Greensboro Open, the Jaycees had the opportunity to use the high-profile event to make an important political statement. In 1961, Simkins challenged the group to invite the Professional Golfers’ Association’s first black pro, Charlie Sifford, to play in the tournament. Melvin had a front row seat as the group negotiated Sifford’s entry with the then all-white Sedgefield Country Club and dealt with white hecklers, who had to be ejected from the event.

It was something Melvin would remember the rest of his life, often discussing it over golf with Simkins at Gillespie Park. When the park fell into disrepair in later years, Melvin became determined to restore it. Working with the city, the Bryan Foundation, and youth golf organization First Tee, he attracted top golf teachers to the course. In the last years of his life, he worked to complete the project as a monument to Simkins and a key moment in the city’s civil rights history.

“That was one of the things that he and I talked about toward the end,” said Robbie Perkins, former mayor of Greensboro now running to return to that office. “If I’m elected mayor of Greensboro, I am going to make sure we complete his work and make that happen.”

‘Mr. Greensboro’

After college and two years of Army service, Melvin had early success in the banking business, becoming a branch manager with North Carolina National Bank (later the core of Bank of America). As the sixties came to a close, he turned his attention more seriously to politics.

In 1968, he made a name for himself in Democratic politics by managing the successful sixth district congressional campaign of L. Richardson Preyer. A year later, he kicked off his first city council campaign with an unlikely slogan: “Greensboro Stinks.”

It got laughs, but people had to admit it was true. The city had a lot of aging infrastructure and unfinished projects. One of the most unpleasant was an old waste treatment plant that produced a stomach-churning smell, especially in south Greensboro.

“He really concentrated on those projects that he knew were important and he could get done,” said Perkins. “That was always the thing for him. We see the problem. How do we solve it? Let’s get it done.”

That concentration on tangible solutions and long-term vision was a core part of his time on council, especially after he was first elected mayor in 1971.

“He could really see what was needed, sometimes before anybody else and clearer than anybody else,” said Chris Wilson, the recently retired interim city manager. “He had that long-term vision.”

Melvin was a mentor during Wilson’s 30 years in local government, helping him see how important the building blocks for success were even when they weren’t the most immediately exciting.

The Randleman Reservoir may have seemed like nuts and bolts infrastructure work, Wilson said. But it became central to expanding water service to Greensboro and its surrounding areas, allowing housing and business growth and expanding the bounds of the city.

“He could certainly see the whole board,” said Vaughan.

Greensboro’s coliseum was ideally situated to attract big crowds from its inception in 1959. But while other cities let similar assets atrophy and grow outdated, Vaughan said, Melvin saw the wisdom in improving and expanding the facility. Today, it draws more people to sporting events, concerts, and conventions than ever.

Piedmont Triad International Airport, which Melvin always championed, is another example, she said.

“People used to laugh at that, when they would throw around the word ‘aerotropolis,’” Vaughan said. “But look at it now. We have one of the best airports, not just in the state but in the country, when you look at all of the innovation and aerospace industry we have attracted.”

When Melvin was first elected, Greensboro was one of many cities struggling with white flight and economic disinvestment from its downtown. Sprawling suburbs, new shopping centers and malls drew away a lot of the lustre. Melvin helped engineer a deal to keep the city’s daily newspaper, which would become the News & Record, centrally located — drawing it to the former site of the King Cotton Hotel and avoiding a large, lingering vacancy there after the hotel was demolished.

When the city hall was revamped as a large and modern government office complex, it was named in his honor—the Melvin Municipal Office Building. The tribute was a surprise to him, and brought him to tears.

“When you look at everything he did, you can see why he was called ‘Mr. Greensboro,’” said Mayor Pro Tempore Marikay Abuzuaiter, now running for mayor herself. “I don’t know if you can point to any other single person who did more, maybe in the city’s history.”

‘You Don’t Get Everything Right’

While Melvin was presiding over a decade of transformative change in Greensboro, long-simmering racial and social tensions in the city were boiling over.

In 1969, the year of his first run for council, protests at James B. Dudley High School and N.C. A&T State University erupted into what would be called “The Greensboro Uprising.” Clashes between students and police escalated to tear gas and gunfire. The National Guard was called in with a tank, airplane, and helicopter, and hundreds of students were detained or arrested. One A&T student, 22-year-old Willie Grimes, was shot and killed, while a number of police officers and students suffered serious injuries. The campus was shut down, and a state of emergency declared in the city.

In 1970 the Greensboro Association of Poor People (GAPP) helped Black tenants organize a rent strike against the city’s largest realty company, forcing them to bring their properties up to code. GAPP also helped organize a protests and strike at the National
Industries for the Blind’s Greensboro SKILCRAFT plant. They brought national media attention to the filthy and dangerous conditions in which more than 150 blind people worked there, more than half of them Black. After months of tensions, the company improved conditions and increased wages.

These episodes highlighted the gaping divide between Black and white, poor and affluent, the city council was not effectively confronting.

During his five terms as mayor, Melvin found such problems much more difficult to navigate than infrastructure and economic development.

Then, on November 3, 1979, members of the Communist Workers Party met at the largely Black Morningside Homes public housing project for what they billed as a “Death to the Klan” rally. Members of the Klan and American Nazi Party arrived with a cache of guns, killing five protesters and injuring at least ten more.

It would come to be called “The Greensboro Massacre,” and it focused a national spotlight on longstanding racial tensions, economic inequality, and social unrest in the city. Melvin led Greensboro through the crisis, weathering criticism of the police and the city’s role and reaction. He framed the conflict as a political one between outsiders and not reflective of the city or its problems, a stance for which he would be criticized for decades.

“But when that happened, he called up Dr. Simkins, and he called other leaders in the Black community who he trusted and who trusted him,” said Alston. “That’s why it wasn’t worse with rioting. He had built relationships and trust with people who could talk to the community.”

After decades of court cases and public debate over the tragedy, the Greensboro City Council issued a formal apology for the city’s role in 2020. Its resolution said the police department, “along with other city personnel failed to warn the marchers of their extensive foreknowledge of the racist, violent attack planned against the marchers by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.” It also acknowledged “numerous factors have contributed to an atmosphere of blaming the victims of the Greensboro Massacre rather than encouraging an objective investigation and comprehensive trial process.”

Melvin’s critics believe he was part of the problem. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, he insisted it had nothing to do with racial tensions in Greensboro. As late as 2015, he said he opposed the use of the term “massacre” because he believed the Communist Workers Party “picked a fight” — sentiments to which progressive activists pointed in protesting a portrait of Melvin hanging at Elon Law School in 2021.

Friends, colleagues, and local journalists noticed a change in Melvin after the massacre. He seemed exhausted, combative, and sharp-tongued in his last term. He had been mayor for ten years — longer than anyone in the city’s history. He was ready to go.

After George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in 2020, there were nationwide protests and calls for racial reckoning, including in Greensboro. Vaughan remembers talking to Melvin as she navigated that period as the city’s mayor.

“He told me he was probably one of the only people who really understood what I was going through in that moment,” Vaughan said. “He told me I could handle it, to trust myself, to trust my instincts, but also to listen.”

“You don’t get everything right when you’re in office,” Vaughan said. “But I think being able to admit when you’re wrong and do something about it is important. And Jim could do that.”

A major regret for Melvin was an area in which Greensboro made little progress during his time as mayor—Black representation on its city council.

In those days, the council was elected entirely at large, by a vote of everyone in the city. White voters were still the majority, which often meant an all white council or only token Black representation. Reformers, including Simkins, argued for a district or ward system. That would allow more representation for heavily Black parts of the city, they said, where minority voters found their political power diluted by at-large voting.

Melvin opposed the change to a district system for most of his tenure on council, only endorsing a failed compromise in his last term. It was a stance he came to regret. The shift finally came in 1983.

“We were probably wrong to stand our ground as long as we did,” Melvin told Covington for his book, Once Upon a City. “Maybe in hindsight I should have been more proactive, but back in those days, the feeling was so strong in the community that it would have cost you your political career. It may have been right, but it would have been dead right.”

His friend Simkins tried to convince him that a lack of Black voices in decision-making was simply wrong, no matter how equitably and fairly those in power might believe they were governing. It was beyond politics, he said.

“I missed it,” Melvin said. “I admit that.”

Beyond Politics

After leaving office in 1981, Melvin concentrated on his banking career until retiring in 1996, but he was never truly out of public life. He kept a hand in through philanthropy, deal-making, and a role as mentor and advisor to generations of leaders at the city, county, and state levels.

Melvin’s friend Joseph M. Bryan, the prominent insurance executive and philanthropist, died in 1995. He named Melvin co-executor of his vast estate and put him in charge of his charitable foundation. Bryan left about $68 million to the foundation, enough to do some serious good in Greensboro, and a trust Melvin took very seriously.

“When he would meet with you, he would sit so that a portrait of Mr. Bryan was looking over his shoulder,” said Wilson, who had that experience many times. “It reminded him that he had to make the right decision, because Mr. Bryan had entrusted him with this.”

After his time in government, the role with the Bryan Foundation suited Melvin, said Ed Kitchen, vice president of the foundation.

“He was coming out of the elected side of things,” said Kitchen, a former city manager who spent decades in local government himself. “The resources that were available to us here put us in a position to take some of those risks that a government would have a hard time doing.”

Beyond supporting public parks, recreation centers, and the Greensboro Children’s Museum, Melvin and the foundation provided tens of millions to K-12 public schools and projects at N.C. A&T and UNCG.

Melvin also helped secure the $10 million in funding needed to launch Elon University’s law school in 2004. The foundation donated the title to the law school’s primary campus in downtown Greensboro and contributed more than $17 million in support for it, including establishing the Elon Law Distinguished Leadership Lecture Series.

“Under his guidance, the foundation, joined by philanthropists across the community inspired by Jim’s vision, made it possible for Elon Law to transform downtown Greensboro into a hub of legal learning and leadership development,” said Elon University President Connie Ledoux Book.

Alston, the county commissioners chair, credits Melvin with working behind the scenes to help him and Earl Jones make the International Civil Rights Center & Museum a reality.

“We were able to get the $24 million in tax credits for the museum because the Bryan Foundation gave us the $4 million in order to get that done,” Alston said. “A lot of people couldn’t see what it could be. But Jim did. And now the museum is bringing in 90,000 people from outside of Greensboro every year.”

The move was politically controversial in some quarters, Alston said. But he believes Melvin’s old friend Simkins would have been proud.

“In the end, he loved Greensboro,” Alston said. “He put the people and the city first, and in the end, he was beyond politics.”

This, Vaughan said, is what she meant in saying Melvin never stopped being mayor.

“When you’re mayor, people look to you to speak for the city and you’re one vote on a nine-member council,” Vaughan said. “But the other part is, you have to bring people together. You have to bring groups together. You have to get people to the table and get things done. You have to have a vision for the city and work to execute it. Sometimes that means putting politics aside.”

“That’s what Jim never stopped doing,” Vaughan said. “That’s the part he loved.”

A public visitation is scheduled for Monday, August 18, from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at First National Bank Field in downtown Greensboro.

A memorial service will be held Wednesday, August 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Market Street United Methodist Church. A reception will follow at the Bryan Enrichment Center at Bryan Park. 

Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.

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