Melvin Blake back in the USA

Topic: CRS Version
In 1956, Ralph Dodge, who had been serving as “secretary for Africa and Europe on the staff of the Methodist Church’s Board of Missions” in New York City since 1950, [1] was named Bishop for the Angolan, Rhodesian, and Southeast African Conferences.  Melvin Blake was asked to take his place in New York. [2]  But, instead of a quiet office job, this turned into another test of Blake’s resilience.

1957 was the year Ghana gained its independence from the United Kingdom and what Harold Macmillan termed the “wind of change” began blowing across Africa. [3]  Before Blake left Angola, Portugal responded by establishing secret-police (PIDE) stations in Luanda. [4]

Two years later, Blake warned missionaries that “everything is moving rapidly” and they must be prepared to “share with the African as a colleague and sometimes work under his direction” [5]  The article appeared in May.  In March, PIDE had begun rounding up members of pan-Angolan independence parties.  The whites were jailed, then deported to Portugal.  The Africans were beaten and/or tortured, and sent to a prison camp on Cape Verde. [6]

The Congo won independence in June of 1960.  In August, Blake began working with others to establish a technical school in the new nation. [7]  Patrice Lumumba was ousted in September by Joseph Kasavubu, with the aid of the US Central Intelligence Agency.  Kasavubu’s position was legitimatized by the United Nations in November. [8]

Kasavubu was part of the Bakongo ethnic group, which straddled the Congo-Angolan border.  On 3 January 1961, Bakongo farmers in Angola rebelled against demands they plant cotton.  The revolt spread, and the Portuguese military dropped grenades on seventeen villages in February, [9] killing an estimated 5,000 people.  Nearly as many were arrested. [10]  Bakongo refugees fled north across the border.  Kasavubu asked Methodist missionaries to leave while its own civil war continued in Katanga province. [11]

In February, a Kimbundu-speaking group attacked police stations in Luanda to free some of its prisoners.  In March, the revolt spread to the coffee plantations, including Dembos. [12]  The Portuguese blamed Protestant missionaries.  On March 26 the government told the churches it would not protect them. [13]  Three days later, white mobs, led by PIDE, attacked the Methodist mission in Luanda.  During the spring at least 17 native pastors and teachers were killed along with thousands of others.  Many more simply disappeared. [14]

Methodist students, who were being watched in Lisbon by PIDE, feared for their lives.  Students in Frankfurt asked the local bishop to alert Blake, who stopped by the Methodist student hostel in Lisbon when he was in the country in May.  He passed the information on to the World Council of Churches in Geneva.  It, in turn, contacted a French group experienced in saving individuals from the war in Algeria. [15]

Everything surrounding the planned rescue was secret; even the participants who wrote about it only knew parts.  While the World Council was meeting in June 1961,  Eugene Smith promised the Methodist Church would pay all the costs. [16]  Smith was head of the Mission Board for which Blake worked. [17]

Bill Nottingham, a fraternal worker for the Disciples of Christ, [18] organized the actual escape.  In June, he and three college students drove small groups north from Portugal, and moved them across the Rio Minho into Galicia where they lodged with a smuggler.  From there, nineteen were taken across Spain to the French border on June 20.  Nottingham took the remaining forty-one in a tourist bus that was stopped at the French border by a Spanish policeman who had been reprimanded for letting the first group leave. [19]

This apparently was the first António Salazar, prime minister of Portugal, knew of the escape. [20]  In retaliation, PIDE arrested a Methodist missionary in Angola, Raymond Noah, on July 14 [21] for aiding three students trying to escape through Nigeria. [22]

Meantime, Salazar began threatening the United States military with ending its lease on an airfield in the Azores on 31 December 1962. [23]  In the interdepartmental jockeying within Kennedy’s administration, it prevailed and the country stopped supporting African independence movements. [24]

In August, Portugal complained to the US about the activities of missionaries like Noah, and the government, in turn, warned the Methodists they were damaging their cause.  “The Methodist Missionary Board replied that ‘it knows what risks it was taking and proposes to continue its present course’.” [25]

Meantime, Methodists continued to help Angolan refugees in the Congo through the International Rescue Committee. [26]  In April, Blake sent a representative to help 25,000 displaced people. [27]  The US government refused to support their activities in November. [28]

Simultaneously, major changes were underway in The Methodist Church.  Membership had not kept pace with population growth in the United States in the 1950s. [29]  In 1964, it agreed to merge with the Evangelical United Brethren. [30]  The next year the total membership of the two denominations peaked, and had begun to decline [31] before they formed The United Methodist Church in 1968. [32]

The Board of Missions consolidated oversight for the activities of two denominations, and eliminated redundant positions.  Smith left the board in 1964.  He was then fifty-two years old, and had worked for the Board since 1949.  He moved to the World Council of Churches office in New York. [33]

Blake left in 1968. [34]  He was fifty years old when he called on his reserves of resilience again, this time to begin a new life as a graduate student at Boston University.  [35]   He earned his PhD in psychology in 1975 [36] and opened a private practice in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. [37]

He and his wife divorced. [38]  Sometime after he retired in 1984, Blake moved to Palm Beach, Florida.  He remarried in 1993, and moved again to Traveler’s Rest, South Carolina, where he joined the Piedmont Men’s Chorale. [39]  Blake died in 2001 as a retired elder of the Indiana Conference of The United Methodist Church. [40]  His death was marked by a celebration of his life by Greenville’s Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. [41]

Graphics
Photographs of Blake appear in the post for 28 February 2021, on the Photos K tab, and with the version of the Voices article uploaded to the Academia.edu website.

End Notes
World Outlook was published by The Methodist Church, Board of Mission.

1.  “Dodge, Ralph Edward.”  Methodist Mission 200 website.
2.  “Bishop Dodge Assigned to Area.”  62–63 in World Outlook.  January 1957.

3.  Harold Macmillan.  “Wind of Change.”  Speech given in Ghana on 10 January 1960 and to the Parliament of South Africa, 3 February 1960. [42]  Macmillan was prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963.

4.  Fernando Tavares Pimenta.  “PIDE’s Racial Strategy in Angola (1957–1961).”  In Colonial Policing and the Transnational Legacy.  Edited by Conor O’Reilly.  London: Routledge, 2017.  No page numbers in on-line edition.   PIDE is the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado.

5.  C. Melvin Blake.  “New Frontiers for the Missionary.”  8–11 in World Outlook.  May 1959.  10.

6.  Pimenta.

7.  “Methodists Plan Congo Technological School.”  46–47 in World Outlook.  November 1960.  49.

8.  Madeleine G. Kalb.  “The C.I.A. and Lumumba.”  The New York Times.  2 August 1981.  Section 6, page 32.

9.  John P. Cann.  “Baixa do Cassange: Ending the Abuse of Portuguese Africans.”  Small Wars and Insurgencies 23:500–516:2012.   Page 509 cited by Aharon de Grassi.  “Rethinking the 1961 Baixa de Kassanje Revolt: Towards a Relational Geo-History of Angola.”  Mulemba 5(19):53–133:2015.  59.

10.  Aida Freudenthal.  “A Baixa de Cassange: Algodão e Revolta.”  Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos N.os 18–22:245–283:1999.  Page 267 cited by Grassi.  59.

11.  “Missionaries Return To Central Congo.”  44–45 in World Outlook.  July 1962.  44.

12.  Samuel Dzobo.  “Toward a New Church in a New Africa: A Biographical Study of Bishop Ralph Edward Dodge 1907 – 2008.”  PhD dissertation.  Asbury Theological Seminary, April 2017.  210.

13.  Luís Nuno Rodrigues.  “‘Today’s Terrorist Is Tomorrow’s Statesman’: The United States and Angolan Nationalism in the Early 1960s.”  Portuguese Journal of Social Science 3(2):115–140:2004.  124.

14.  Charles R. Harper and William J. Nottingham.  The Great Escape That Changed Africa’s Future.  Saint Louis, Missouri: Lucas Park Books, 2015.  4.

15.  Harper.  4–5.  The French group was Comité inter-mouvements auprès des évacués (Cimade).

16.  Harper.  15.

17.  “Rev. Dr. Eugene Smith.”  The New York Times.  25 February 1986.  Section D, page 31.

18.  Harper.  11.
19.  Harper.
20.  Harper.  91.
21.  “Methodist Missionary Jailed in Angola.”  41–42 in World Outlook.  September 1961.

22.  Lawrence W. Henderson.  The Church in Angola.  Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1992; original in Portuguese in 1990.  269.

23.  Rodrigues.  127.
24.  Rodrigues.

25.  Rodrigues.  124.  Quotation from “Possibility of Approaching US Protestant Missionary Groups.”  Memorandum from William Blue to William Tyler.  1 August 1961.  US State Department lot file.

26.  Rodrigues.  131.
27.  “Missionary Off To Aid Refugees.”  50 in World Outlook.  June 1962.
28.  Rodrigues.  131.

29.  “United Methodist Membership as Compared to the United States Population Census.”  The United Methodist Church General Commission on Archives and History website.

30.  David Oberlin.  “Two Separate Unions Formed One United Church.”  20–42 in The Chronicle, Historical Society of the United Methodist Church Susquehanna Conference.  1979.

31.  Dean M Kelly.  Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.  New York: Harper and Row, 1972.  5–6.

32.  Oberlin.

33.  Morris L. Davis, Jr., Kathleen Knaack, and Mark C. Shenise.  “Guide to the Eugene Lewis Smith Papers.”  Drew University Library, United Methodist Archives and History Center website.

34.  “Charles Melvin Blake.”  The New York Times.  21 March 2011.  The impact of the merger on May Titus and the Board for Missionary Education is mentioned in the post for 1 November 2020.

35.  New York Times, Blake.

36.  “Dr. Charles Melvin (Mel) Blake.”  The [Needham, Massachusetts] Newton Tab.  22 March 2011.

37.  New York Times, Blake.
38.  “Doris N. Blake.”  The Boston Globe.  17 August 2008.
39.  New York Times, Blake.

40.  “Blake, C. Melvin.”  The United Methodist Church, Indiana Conference.  Official Journal for 2011.  251.

41.  New York Times, Blake.
42.  Wikipedia.  “Wind of Change (Speech).”