Blanche Bruce
Blanche Kelso Bruce (* March 1, 1841 in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia; † March 17, 1898 in Washington DC ) was an American politician of the Republican Party. As the first African American, he completed a full term in the U.S. Senate.
Bruce was the son of Pettis Perkinson, a white plantation owner and a black slave Polly Bruce. He was relatively well treated by his father, who taught him along with his legitimate half-brother born. Although he had been born a slave by the legal status of his mother, but his father explained to him for free, and got him an apprenticeship.
Blance 1860 Bruce began an apprenticeship as a printer in Missouri. As a little later, the Civil War began, he tried to be included in the Union Army, but this turned him down. Instead, he worked as a teacher at a school and attended college in Ohio. Later he worked in the steamship, before he founded in 1864 in Hannibal (Missouri ) a school for African Americans.
During the Reconstruction era, Bruce became a wealthy landowner in the Mississippi Delta. [Note 1] He was appointed in Tallahatchie County in several public offices, before he won the election for sheriff of Bolivar County. Also in this district he held in the following additional offices; among other things, he was training officer (supervisor of education ). He also served as chief editor of a local newspaper.
1874 finally began his political career when he was elected by the Legislature of the State of Mississippi in the U.S. Senate. During the second representative of Mississippi, James L. Alcorn, ignoring him, Bruce became friends with other Republican senators such as Roscoe Conkling of New York State, who named his only child after him; also to Alcorns successor Lucius Lamar, he cultivated a good relationship. After a six-year tenure in Washington, he was replaced by Democrat James Z. George; the Democratic Party had in the meantime gained in the Mississippi Legislature, the majority, so that a re-election for Bruce was not possible.
At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1880 Blance Bruce received eight votes in the election for vice presidential candidates. He was the first African American who could unite at a nominating convention one of the two major parties vote.
In 1881 he was entrusted by U.S. President James A. Garfield with the position of Register of the Treasury, a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Finance. This was to see his signature on the printed during his term of office lasting until June 1885 dollar bills. From 1891 to 1893 he was recorder of deeds in the District of Columbia; the same office had previously occupied Frederick Douglass. In 1893, he was the second time register of the treasury, which he remained until his death in 1898.