Blanche K. Bruce

Blanche Kelso Bruce was born into slavery on a plantation near Farmville, Virginia, on the first of March 1841. He took his early education from a private tutor hired to educate his master's son — an arrangement extended to Bruce only because the two boys were inseparable. He escaped to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1861.

He settled in Mississippi after the Civil War, accumulated significant landholdings in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta through cotton-trading, and entered Reconstruction politics. He served as sheriff and tax collector of Bolivar County from 1871, and the Mississippi state legislature elected him to the United States Senate on the fourth of February 1874. He took his seat on the fourth of March 1875 and served a full six-year term — the first African American to do so, and the only African American to serve a full Senate term until 1979.

In the Senate he chaired the Select Committee on Pensions, advocated for desegregated public accommodations and for federal protection of Black voting rights, and presided over the body — the first time an African American had presided over the United States Senate — when Vice President William Wheeler was absent in 1879.

After leaving the Senate he served twice as Register of the Treasury (1881-85 and 1897-98) and as Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia (1889-93). His signature appeared on United States currency throughout these tenures.

He died at his home in Washington, D.C., on the seventeenth of March 1898, age fifty-seven.

He is honored here as the formerly enslaved senator who served a full term and presided over the body.