History on the Hill: Up From Slavery
The first black to serve a full six-year term as senator, Blanche Kelso Bruce (1841–1898) was born a slave. That his white father was also his owner, says biographer Graham, probably explains why Bruce was afforded some educational opportunities—acting as study companion to the owner's white son of about the same age—at a time when teaching slaves was illegal.
But he was nonetheless a slave, a plantation worker, in Mississippi and Missouri. When the Civil War began, Bruce escaped, moving to the free state of Kansas. After the war, he established schools for blacks in Missouri, studied at Oberlin College, and by 1869 had worked his way south, as a steamship porter, to Mississippi, where newly elected white Republican Gov. James Alcorn was promising blacks a larger role both in the state's economic life and in government. There Bruce settled, buying farmland, entering political life, and rising so quickly within the state's Republican Party that in 1874 the state Legislature sent him to Washington as Mississippi's next U.S. senator.
But the day of his swearing in—March 4, 1875—brought a rude awakening. According to Senate tradition, as each newly elected senator's name was called, he was to be collegially met and escorted through the Senate chamber by his state's senior senator. In Bruce's case, it should have been his onetime mentor, the former governor and now senator, James Alcorn.
Yet when Bruce's name was called, Alcorn hid his face behind a newspaper. In the few months since Bruce's election, the black senator had become a liability, Graham explains, a casualty of the South's surging white backlash and the exponential growth of groups like the "white leagues" and the Ku Klux Klan.
Despite this shaky start, Bruce proved himself a skillful politician. To be sure, Bruce was more a moderate than a reformer, Graham says. But he also "raised issues and spoke as a representative of the black experience," in a Senate increasingly indifferent, if not downright hostile, to those concerns. Bruce pressed the government to investigate intimidation of black voters in the South, urged officials to look into the vicious hazing of a pioneering black West Point cadet, and spoke up for the rights of American Indians and Chinese immigrants. Most memorably, he led the Senate commission investigating the failure of the Freedman's Bank—a bankruptcy that robbed many freed slaves of their scant savings—and obtained some financial redress for those depositors.
After leaving the Senate, Bruce gained appointments in four different presidential administrations. As register of the Treasury, he enjoyed the honor of seeing his signature appear on all paper money issued by the government. Then came the Jim Crow laws, which denied many blacks the vote and effectively kept them out of the Senate for nearly 100 years, says civil rights leader Robert Moses.
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