Blanche K. Bruce House

The Blanche K. Bruce House sheltered the Senate's first Black full-termer — a man born enslaved. Bruce was born into slavery in Virginia in 1841, taught by his enslaver's son's tutor, and fled to freedom in Kansas when the war came. Mississippi politics during Reconstruction carried him from sheriff and tax collector of Bolivar County to the U.S. Senate in 1874 — the only formerly enslaved man ever to serve there, and the first Black senator to preside over the chamber.

In the Senate he was more radical than his colleagues could absorb — fighting for Black veterans' rights, voting against the Chinese Exclusion Act, condemning the federal treatment of Native Americans. The senior Mississippi senator refused even to mentor him. In 1878 he married Josephine Willson of Black Washington's elite, and they bought the Second Empire rowhouse at 909 M Street in Shaw — the neighborhood named for the 54th Massachusetts' colonel.

Bruce stayed in Washington after Reconstruction — Register of the Treasury under Garfield, Recorder of Deeds, Register again until his death in 1898. The Shaw house holds the arc: the self-emancipated senator's Washington years, in the neighborhood where the freedmen's encampments had stood, in the city that let him serve and the country that took the rights back.

The Blanche K. Bruce House is the archive's senator file — the Shaw rowhouse of the only formerly enslaved man to serve in the Senate, first Black senator to complete a term and to preside over the chamber.