Honorary Degree Recipients

Loretta “Lee” Blake is an educator and president of the New Bedford Historical Society. She has spent much of her life raising awareness about Black history, and the important role New Bedford played in the Underground Railroad in the 1800s. Born and raised in New Bedford, she began to organize students in her high school in the late 1960s, and demanded African American studies classes and African American afterschool programs, so that students could connect to their own identity and have positive images of Black people.

Blake attended UMass Amherst and UMass Dartmouth in the early 70’s and was a member of only the second UMass class to integrate. While still a student at UMass, Lee was one of the founding members of the New Bedford Women’s Center in 1973, where she worked to share information on free women’s health services and birth control throughout the region. After graduation, Blake’s first job was teaching African American studies classes at her former high school in New Bedford. After four years, she moved to New York, where she first worked to integrate the construction unions, and then was appointed Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Educational Services in the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins. There she coordinated education initiatives and served as the liaison to the Board of Education, City University and the New York State Board of Higher Education.

She returned to New Bedford in 2001, seeking more community involvement in New Bedford’s development. For the last eight years, Blake has been President of the New Bedford Historical Society, working with other organizations to make sure that voices from all corners of this richly diverse community are heard through events and preserving New Bedford’s history for people of color. Blake has worked to ensure that the Society proactively supports multicultural and multi-racial history that reflects New Bedford’s African American, Native American, and Cape Verdean communities.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded the New Bedford Historical Society five grants relating to the city’s history with the Underground Railroad and Frederick Douglass. In partnership with UMass Dartmouth, the New Bedford Historical Society has hosted several summer workshops for approximately 400 teachers from around the country to learn about the Underground Railroad from the maritime perspective. Blake led the creation of a movable campus using historical sites in New Bedford, including its Quaker meeting house, the New Bedford Whaling Museum.