Who is Blanche K. Bruce?

Quick facts

• Born: March 1, 1841, Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia (born into slavery)
• Died: March 17, 1898, Washington, D.C. (aged 57, of diabetes)
• Full name: Blanche Kelso Bruce (born Branch Bruce; adopted Kelso as an adult)
• Known for: First African American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate; first Black American to preside over a session of the Senate; first Black American to chair a congressional committee; Register of the Treasury under three presidents
• Party: Republican
• Senate term: 1875 to 1881 (44th through 46th Congresses), representing Mississippi
• Spouse: Josephine Beall Willson, the first Black teacher in the Cleveland, Ohio public school system; married 1878
• Child: Roscoe Conkling Bruce (born 1879), named after Bruce's Senate mentor Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York
• Education: Briefly studied at Oberlin College in Ohio

His story

Blanche Kelso Bruce, a Reconstruction-era senator from Mississippi, was born a slave in Virginia in 1841. The son of a slave mother and white planter father, Bruce was well educated as a youth. Shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, Bruce fled to Kansas, becoming a free man before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. As a fugitive slave in Lawrence, Kansas, he founded a school for Black children, and in 1864 he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he started the state's first school for African Americans.

He set up a school for African Americans in Missouri and in 1868 moved to Mississippi, where he entered politics as a Republican and quickly gained both popularity and wealth in Bolivar County. He was appointed to the positions of Tallahatchie County registrar of voters and tax assessor before winning an election for sheriff in Bolivar County. He later was elected to other county positions, including tax collector and supervisor of education, while he also edited a local newspaper.

In 1874, Mississippi's Republican-dominated state legislature elected Bruce, a Republican, to a seat in the U.S. Senate. He was 33 years old, a formerly enslaved man who had walked out of bondage to become one of the most powerful people in Washington.

What he achieved in the Senate

Hiram R. Revels, also of Mississippi, had served first but did not complete a full term. During a debate on the Chinese Exclusion Bill in 1879, which he opposed, Bruce also became the first Black American to preside over a session of the Senate. As chair of the Senate Select Committee on the Levees of the Mississippi River in the 45th Congress, Bruce was the first African American to chair any congressional committee.

He served from 1875 to 1881, advocating just treatment for Blacks and Indians and opposing the policy excluding Chinese immigrants. He is remembered best for his thorough investigation into the collapse of the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company, a bank set up by the federal government to help former slaves become economically stable.

After the Senate

Mississippi voters turned Bruce out of office in 1880 in favor of a Democrat who supported white supremacy. But the federal government kept calling on him. President James Garfield named him Register of the Treasury, a post he held until 1885. He served as Recorder of Deeds for the Circuit District of Columbia between 1889 and 1893 under Benjamin Harrison. When William McKinley became president, Bruce was again appointed Register of the Treasury. Blanche Kelso Bruce died in 1898 while holding this office.

Bruce and his family were part of what historian Willard Gatewood has called "Aristocrats of Color," wealthy and powerful African Americans at the center of Washington social life. Both Roscoe Conkling Bruce and his son attended Harvard University.

In his own words

From his Senate speech "Voting Practices in the State of Mississippi":

"We simply demand the practical recognition of the rights given us in the Constitution and laws, and ask from our white fellow-citizens only the consideration and fairness that we so willingly extend to them."

Worth knowing

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Blanche Bruce on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. That same year, the Senate commissioned a portrait of Bruce, which hangs in the U.S. Capitol. The gap between Bruce leaving the Senate in 1881 and Scott Colom's potential arrival in 2027 would be 146 years without a Black senator from Mississippi. That is not a gap in history. That is a wall, one vote at a time.