Blanche K. Bruce was born into slavery in Prince Edward County, Virginia, and went on to become a politician who represented Mississippi as a Republican in the United States Senate from 1875 to 1881. He was the first elected Black senator to serve a full term (Hiram R. Revels, also of Mississippi, was the first Black man to serve in the U.S. Senate but did not complete a full term). Bruce taught school and attended for two years Oberlin College 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. The son of a slave mother and white planter father, Bruce was well educated as a youth. After the American Civil War, he moved to Mississippi, where in 1869 he became a supervisor of elections. By 1870 he was an emerging figure in state politics. He served as sergeant at arms in the state senate, and he held the posts of county assessor.
Bruce was also sheriff, and a member of the Board of Levee Commissioners of the Mississippi River. Through these positions he amassed enough wealth to purchase a plantation in Floreyville, Mississippi. In 1874 Mississippi’s Republican-dominated state legislature elected Bruce, a Republican, to a seat in the U.S. Senate. He served from 1875 to 1881, advocating just treatment for both Blacks and Indians and opposing the policy excluding Chinese immigrants.
He sought improvement of navigation on the Mississippi and advocated better relations between the races. Much of his time and energy he devoted to fighting fraud and corruption in federal elections. Bruce lost his political base in Mississippi with the end of Reconstruction governments in the South. He remained in Washington when, at the conclusion of his Senate term, he was appointed register of the Treasury. He served in that post from 1881 to 1885 and again from 1895 to 1898.
● Blanche Kelso Bruce was the second Black man 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.
● 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.