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Blanche Bruce

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Blanche Bruce
Register of the Treasury
In office
December 3, 1897 – March 17, 1898
PresidentWilliam McKinley
Preceded byFount Tillman
Succeeded byJudson Lyons
In office
May 21, 1881 – June 5, 1885
PresidentJames A. Garfield
Chester A. Arthur
Grover Cleveland
Preceded byGlenni Scofield
Succeeded byWilliam Rosecrans
United States Senator
from Mississippi
In office
March 4, 1875 – March 4, 1881
Preceded byHenry R. Pease
Succeeded byJames Z. George
Personal details
Born
Blanche Kelso Bruce

(1841-03-01)March 1, 1841
Farmville, Virginia, U.S.
DiedMarch 17, 1898(1898-03-17) (aged 57)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Resting placeWoodlawn Cemetery
Political partyRepublican
SpouseJosephine Willson
ChildrenRoscoe
EducationOberlin College
Signature

Blanche Kelso Bruce (March 1, 1841 – March 17, 1898) was an American politician who represented Mississippi as a Republican in the United States Senate from 1875 to 1881. Born into slavery in Prince Edward County, Virginia, he went on to become the first elected African-American senator to serve a full term (Hiram R. Revels, also of Mississippi, was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate but did not complete a full term).[1]

The Blanche K. Bruce House is a National Historic Landmark.

Early life and education

Bruce's house at 909 M Street NW in Washington, D.C. was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1975

Bruce was born into slavery in 1841 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, near Farmville to Polly Bruce, an African-American woman who served as a domestic slave. His father was his master, Pettis Perkinson, a white Virginia planter. Bruce was treated comparatively well by his father, who educated him together with a legitimate half-brother. When Blanche Bruce was young, he played with his half-brother. One source claims that his father legally freed Blanche and arranged for an apprenticeship so he could learn a trade. In an 1886 newspaper interview, however, Bruce says that he gained his freedom by moving to Kansas as soon as hostilities broke out in the Civil War.[2][3]

Career

Bruce taught school and attended for two years Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. He next worked as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River. In 1864, he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he established a school for black children.

In 1868, during Reconstruction, Bruce relocated to Bolivar near Cleveland in northwestern Mississippi, at which he purchased a Mississippi Delta plantation.[4] He became a wealthy landowner of several thousand acres in the Mississippi Delta. He was appointed to the positions of Tallahatchie County registrar of voters and tax assessor before he won an election for sheriff in Bolivar County.[5] He later was elected to other county positions, including tax collector and supervisor of education, while he also edited a local newspaper. He became sergeant-at-arms for the Mississippi State Senate in 1870.[4]

In February 1874, Bruce was elected to the U.S. Senate, the second African American to serve in the upper house of Congress. On February 14, 1879, Bruce presided over the U.S. Senate, becoming the first African American (and the only former slave) to have done so.[2] In 1880, James Z. George, a Confederate Army veteran and member of the Democratic Party, was elected to succeed Bruce.

At the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Bruce became the first African American to win any votes for national office at a major party's nominating convention, with eight votes for vice president. The presidential nominee that year was Ohio's James A. Garfield, who narrowly won election over the Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock.[6]

Bruce served by appointment as the District of Columbia recorder of deeds from 1890 to 1893. A Philadelphia newspaper reported his appointment in 1890,[7] but persistent claims that his salary was $30,000 a year are not substantiated by any primary records. He also served on the District of Columbia Board of Trustees of Public Schools from 1892 to 1895.[8] He was a participant in the March 5, 1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of Frederick Douglass and the American Negro Academy led by Alexander Crummell.[9] He was appointed as Register of the Treasury a second time in 1897 by President William McKinley and served until his death from diabetes complications in 1898.[10]

Relationship with other African Americans

On the Bruce plantation in Mississippi, black sharecroppers lived in "flimsy wooden shacks," working in oppressive conditions similar to those on white-owned estates.[11]

After his Senate term expired, Bruce remained in Washington, D.C., secured a succession of Republican patronage jobs and stumped for Republican candidates across the country. He acquired a large townhouse and summer home, and presided over black high society.[11]

One newspaper wrote that Bruce did not approve of the designation "colored men." He often said, "I am a Negro and proud of it."[4]

Personal life

On June 24, 1878, Bruce married Josephine Beall Willson (1853–1923), a fair-skinned socialite of Cleveland, Ohio, amid great publicity; the couple traveled to Europe for a four-month honeymoon.[12]

Their only child, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, was born in 1879. He was named for U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, Bruce's mentor in the Senate. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Blanche Bruce on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[13]

In the fall of 1899, Josephine Bruce accepted the position of principal at Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama.[14] While visiting Josephine at Tuskegee, during the summer break of his senior year at Harvard, Roscoe Bruce met Booker T. Washington and secured a position at Tuskegee as head of the Academic Department.[14]

Honors and legacy

Blanche Kelso Bruce (2001)

In 1975, the Washington, D.C. residence of Bruce, was declared a National Historic Landmark and formally named The Blanche K. Bruce House.[15]

In October 1999, the U.S. Senate commissioned a portrait of Bruce. African-American Washington D.C. artist Simmie Knox was selected in 2000 to paint the portrait, which was unveiled in the Capitol in 2001.

A historical highway marker marking Bruce's birthplace at the intersection of highway 360 and 623 near Green Bay, Prince Edward County, Virginia, was unveiled by the African American Heritage Preservation Foundation on March 1, 2006.[16]

In June 2006, a historical book about Bruce was authored by Lawrence Otis Graham, titled The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty: The Senator and the Socialite.[17]

Bruce School

Main article: Bruce-Monroe Elementary School at Park View

In July 1898, the District of Columbia public school trustees ordered that a then-new public school building on Marshall Street in Park View be named the Bruce School in his honor.[18] Marshall Street later became Kenyon Street and the Bruce School became Cesar Chavez Prep Middle School in 2009, named for the Mexican-American labor organizer Cesar Chavez. In 1973, the all-black Bruce School and James Monroe school were combined in a new campus as the integrated Bruce-Monroe. In 2008, the school was relocated to Park View and the old building demolished in 2009.

See also

References

  1. ^ Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Bruce, Blanche Kelso" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
  2. ^ a b Glass, Andrew (February 14, 2011). "Freed slave presides over Senate: February 14, 1879". The Politico.
  3. ^ "Reminiscences of the Kansas Life of Ex-Senator B. K. Bruce".
  4. ^ a b c Wright, John Aaron (2002). Discovering African American St. Louis: A Guide to Historic Sites. St. Louis, Missouri: Missouri History Museum.
  5. ^ Rev. William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising, 1887. pp. 699–703. Geo. M. Rewell& Co., 1887
  6. ^ Turkel, Stanley (2005). Heroes of the American Reconstruction: Profiles of Sixteen Educators, Politicians and Activists. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. p. 6. ISBN 0786419431. Senator Bruce was also the first African-American to preside over the Senate and the first African-American whose signature appeared on all the nation's paper currency (as Register of the Treasury starting on May 18, 1881)
  7. ^ "Blanche K. Bruce's New Office". The Philadelphia Inquirer. January 30, 1890. p. 1. Retrieved May 23, 2023 – via Newspapers.com.
  8. ^ The Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the third session of the fifty-third Congress 1894–1895. Government Printing Office. 1895. p. 819. Retrieved September 16, 2016.
  9. ^ Seraile, William. Bruce Grit: The Black Nationalist Writings of John Edward Bruce. Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2003. pp. 110–111.
  10. ^ "Blanche K. Bruce". Biography. Archived from the original on October 13, 2018. Retrieved October 12, 2018.
  11. ^ a b Eric Foner (July 2, 2006). "Rise and Fall of the House of Bruce". The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.
  12. ^ Gardner, Eric (January 2006). Bruce, Josephine Beall Willson : African American National Biography. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195301731.
  13. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1573929638.
  14. ^ a b Pielmeier, Douglas Eugene (1992). Roscoe Conkling Bruce and the District of Columbia's Public Schools, 1906 to 1921 (Thesis). doi:10.13016/M2XS7M.
  15. ^ "Blanche K. Bruce House - Blanche K. Bruce, the only formerly enslaved man to serve in the Senate and the first Black man to serve a full term, lived in this house while a Senator". DC Historic Sites. Retrieved August 27, 2023.
  16. ^ African American Heritage Preservation Foundation, Inc. (February 13, 2006). "Dedication Ceremony honoring ex-slave Blanche Kelso Bruce, 1st Black senator to serve a full term". History News Network.
  17. ^ "The Senator and the Socialite - Lawrence Otis Graham - Paperback". HarperCollins Canada. Retrieved August 27, 2023.
  18. ^ Annual Report of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia for the year ended June 30, 1899. Government Printing Office. 1899. p. 36.

Bibliography

  • Graham, Lawrence Otis (2006). The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0060985134.
  • Patler, Nicholas (2012). "The Black 'Consummate Strategist': Blanche Kelso Bruce and the Skillful Use of Power in the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction Eras," pp. 23–46, in Matthew Lynch, ed., Before Obama: A Reappraisal of the Black Reconstruction Era Politicians. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishing. ISBN 978-0313397929.
  • Patler, Nicholas. "A Black Vice President in the Gilded Age? Blanche Kelso Bruce and the National Republican Convention of 1880," in Journal of Mississippi History (Summer 2009), pp. 105–138.
  • Rabinowitz, Howard N., ed. Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (1982), pp. 1–38.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Blanche Bruce.
U.S. Senate
Preceded by United States Senator (Class 1) from Mississippi
1875–1881
Served alongside: James L. Alcorn, Lucius Lamar 		Succeeded by
New office Chair of the Senate Mississippi River Levees Committee
1877–1879 		Succeeded by
???
Honorary titles
Preceded by Baby of the Senate
1879–1881 		Succeeded by
Political offices
Preceded by Register of the Treasury
1881–1885 		Succeeded by
Preceded by Register of the Treasury
1897–1898 		Succeeded by
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