Black History Month - February 17, 2021

This house is 38 Oakland St, and it is home to an enigma. In 1880 the Whorf family, John and Lucy and their adult son Warren, lived here along with a 13 year old Black servant named Charles Bruce, who had been born in Africa. This was an age of child labor, but children that young were better suited to work under a tightly controlled factory regime; domestic service required a degree of autonomy and skill that young children lacked. John Whorf worked as a bookbinder and Warren was a nickel plater, and no one in the family was involved in anything that required travel to Africa. So how did Charles Bruce get to Melrose, and what was he doing here?

There was some African immigration to the Boston area in the late 19th century, but the most likely point of contact between Africa and Melrose would have come through a church mission. This was the heyday of the missionary movement in America, with nearly every church sponsoring missions to far-off lands to spread an aggressively imperialist version of Christianity. Africa in particular captured the public imagination, as white Christians devoured reports of cannibalism and other depravities that missionaries encountered on “the dark continent.” The advertisement (images 2 & 3) for the concert of the “Marvelous Sweet Singing African Boys” at the Melrose Methodist Episcopal Church is typical, as it implores the audience to pity the Black boys, who were “taken from huts,” and to admire the white missionaries, whose work in making the boys docile was “the ultimate triumph of Christian civilization.”

Over time this missionizing zeal would come to transform the national identity of the United States, as the country heeded the call of Rudyard Kipling to “take up the white man’s burden” in prosecuting the Spanish-American War of 1898. There is no better visual representation of this fusion of white Christian nationalism than the lovely American flag stained-glass window in the chancel of Faith Evangelical Church, which was called Highlands Baptist Church when it was installed in 1895 (image 4).

Charles Bruce’s connection with a mission remains conjecture. No matter what brought this African boy to Melrose, however, we can guess with some confidence that his neighbors thought he was lucky to be working for civilized white American Christians.