Kenneth E. Reeves, the first African American Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was born Kenneth Errol Reeves in Detroit, Michigan, on February 8, 1951. His parents were Jamaican immigrants who divorced when he was just a year old, and he was reared in a single-parent household by his mother. His older brother is Donald Reeves.
Reeves’ early education began at Thirkell Elementary School in Detroit. In 1968, Reeves graduated from Cass Technical High School in that city where he majored in the Performing Arts. He then enrolled in Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut but transferred to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1969 and received a Bachelor of Arts in American history in 1973. While at Harvard, he was a Glee Club member and a Kuumba Singers founder. He received the Michael Clark Rockefeller Fellowship, during which he studied in the West African country of Benin. He also spent a fellowship-sponsored year in Stockholm, Sweden, studying social welfare legislation.
Reeves earned a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1976. He returned to Cambridge and practiced as a lawyer while becoming involved in local politics. He was elected to the Cambridge City Council in 1990 and remained there for 23 years.
Reeves was selected by the city council as mayor of Cambridge in 1992 and served until 1995. He made history as the first openly gay Black mayor in the nation. After leaving office as mayor he held a number of posts. Between 1997 and 1998, he held a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Fellowship in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He completed executive programs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and served as the Managing Attorney of the General Motors/ United Auto Workers Legal Plan. As an attorney, he specialized in insurance, utility, and banking regulations for the National Consumer Law Center in Boston. After working in private practice in the law firm, Singleton, Reeves, Bowzer & Huggins, Kenneth Reeves served again as Mayor of Cambridge from 2006 to 2007.
Reeves led numerous initiatives, including efforts to ensure affordable housing in the city. His visionary leadership resulted in a $10 million investment to preserve affordable housing in Cambridge and the creation of nearly 1,000 new housing units. He also made history by establishing the city’s first Office of Tourism and a commission that represented the city’s Haïtien and Latin American immigrants.
In 2004, Reeves championed the opening of Cambridge City Hall before midnight, a strategic move that allowed LGBTQIA couples seeking marriage to have immediate access to marriage equality after the U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing same sex marriage.
From 2015 to 2017, Reeves was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he taught the course a seminar course “The Future of American Cities” and conducted a three-day seminar on the city of “Detroit: from 1950 to 2015.”
In 2023, Reeves was the special guest speaker at Foley Hoag’s Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Thought Leadership Series which focused on the intersectionality of African American and LGBTQIA identities and legislative goals.
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The Cambridge Room, “The Kenneth E. Reeves Papers and Digital Collection is Now Available,” https://thecambridgeroom.wordpress.com/2023/10/26/the-kenneth-e-reeves-papers-and-digital-collection-is-now-available/; Kenneth E. Reeves, “Remembering 1972: Looking Back on Harvard,” https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1997/6/3/remembering-1972-looking-back-on-harvard/; “MIT Infinite History Project: Kenneth E. Reeves (2015),” https://www.blackhistory.mit.edu/archive/mit-infinite-history-project-kenneth-e-reeves-2015.
