Blanche Bruce

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 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]

Bruce attended Oberlin College for two years 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. 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.^[6]

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.^[7]

In early 1889, politically connected blacks lobbied for Bruce to receive a Cabinet appointment in the Harrison Administration. Said one newspaper: "Bruce is a man of respectable ability, and has, perhaps, more than any other man of his race who has sat in Congress, the respect of those with whom he served.^[8]

Bruce served by appointment as the District of Columbia recorder of deeds from 1890 to 1893. A Philadelphia newspaper reported his appointment in 1890,^[9] 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.^[10] 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.^[11] 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.^[12]

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.^[13] 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.

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]

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.^[14]

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.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Blanche Bruce on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[16]

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.^[17]

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.^[18]

• List of African-American United States senators
• List of African-American United States Senate candidates

• 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.

• United States Congress. "Blanche Bruce (id: B000968)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Retrieved on 2009-03-26
• Blanche Bruce at Find a Grave
• Biography and Joe Kelso.Tripod
• Review of The Senator and the Socialite
• The story of his life is retold in the 1949 radio drama "The Saga of Senator Blanche K Bruce", a presentation from Destination Freedom, written by Richard Durham