Blanche Kelso Bruce

Born: March 1, 1841 in Farmville, Virginia

Died: March 17, 1898 in Washington, District of Columbia

United States Senator, 1875–1881

Republican from Mississippi

• Blanche Kelso Bruce was the second African American to be elected to the U.S. Senate, and the first to serve a full term. 
• Born a slave on a plantation in Prince Edward County, Va., Bruce ran away to Kansas at the beginning of the Civil War. As a fugitive slave in Lawrence, Kansas, he founded a school for Black children. In 1864 he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he started the state's first school for African Americans.
• 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. 
• Bruce was a successful farmer, businessman, educator and politician. He was considered one of the most influential men of the Black middle class of that period.
• In 1881, he became the first Black Register of the Treasury under President James Garfield.
• Bruce continued to reside in Washington D.C. until he succumbed to a kidney ailment due to complications from diabetes on March 17, 1898 shortly after his 57th birthday.
• In 2002, the Senate commissioned a portrait of Bruce, which is on display in the U.S. Capitol. 
• In 2021, the Schomburg Center, in partnership with Penguin Classics, published Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition, edited by Schomburg's Michelle D. Commander, which includes an essay by Bruce's brother, Henry Clay Bruce, "The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man" (1895).

Blanche Kelso Bruce

1895

Print Collection

Photographs and Prints Division

NYPL Digital Collections: Blanche K. Bruce, Congressman (Senator from Mississippi)