The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty
Lawrence Otis Graham, 2006
HarperCollins
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060985134
Summary
Blanche Kelso Bruce was born a slave in 1841, yet, remarkably, amassed a real-estate fortune and became the first black man to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate.
He married Josephine Willson—the daughter of a wealthy black Philadelphia doctor—and together they broke down racial barriers in 1880s Washington, D.C., numbering President Ulysses S. Grant among their influential friends. The Bruce family achieved a level of wealth and power unheard of for people of color in nineteenth-century America. Yet later generations would stray from the proud Bruce legacy, stumbling into scandal and tragedy.
Drawing on Senate records, historical documents, and personal letters, author Lawrence Otis Graham weaves a riveting social history that offers a fascinating look at race, politics, and class in Americarts. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Raised—Westchester County, NY
• Education—B.A., Princeton Univesity; J.D.,
Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Westchester County, New York
Lawrence Otis Graham is an attorney and commentator on race, politics, and class in America. He is one of the nation’s leading authors and experts on race, politics and class in America. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, he is the author of 14 books and numerous articles in such publications as the New York Times, Essence, Reader’s Digest, Glamour and U.S. News & World Report. His book, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class was a New York Times, L.A. Times and Blackboard bestseller.
Graham’s newest book, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty is an important biography of U.S. Senator Blanche Bruce, the first black to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. Graham is also the author of such books as The Best Companies for Minorities, Proversity—two Important guides on diversity in the workplace—as well as the very popular Member of the Club, which focused on his now-famous experience of leaving his New York law firm and going undercover as a busboy to expose racism, sexism and anti-Semitism at an all-white country club in Greenwich, Connecticut. That was originally a cover story on New York magazine.
Graham has appeared on more than one hundred TV shows including Oprah, Today Show, The View, Good Morning America, and has been profiled in USA Today, Time, Ebony, People Magazine and many other publications. He is a popular speaker at colleges, corporations and other institutions where he has addressed the issues of diversity and culture. His audiences have included Duke, UCLA, Howard, Yale, Kraft Foods, Corning, Xerox, Disney, American Library Association and many other organizations around the U.S. and Japan. His research and advice have appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
He is leading a campaign to get the U.S. Post Office to honor Senator Blanche Bruce on a stamp since the nation has never placed a black elected official on a stamp. Graham is married to the corporate executive, Pamela Thomas-Graham, who is the author of novels including Blue Blood and Orange Crushed. They live in Manhattan and Westchester County, New York. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A compelling portrait of the Bruce family’s rise, dynamics and downfall.... A poignant tale of struggle, accomplishment...an illuminating account.
Eric Foner - Washington Post
Not just a history but a revealing commentary on race and class, and their force in shaping our lives today.
Chicago Tribune
Excellent history of slavery, Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, late 19th century politics and the misunderstood differences between early Republicans and Democrats.
San Francisco Chronicle
Graham is a superb storyteller, and the Bruce dynasty perfect fodder for this gifted writer.
Amersterdam News
Graham digs deep and unearths secrets in…his absorbing book on money, class and color issues.
Essence
In 1878, the Times ran its first wedding announcement for a black couple: Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce, a former slave who entered the Senate in the fading days of Reconstruction (many newspapers ignored his election, assuming that he would never be seated), and Josephine Willson, a daughter of the light-skinned black élite. The Bruces established what the author calls America’s first black dynasty, although its members “lived much of their lives outside of black circles.” Graham, whose “Our Kind of People” profiled the black upper class, recovers the history of a family that broke barriers in Washington and at Exeter and Harvard. At the same time, he offers a devastating view of the compromises it made.
The New Yorker
Buried within this account of a black family that includes "a United States senator; a bank president; [and] a Washington socialite" is a rags to riches to welfare tale that ought to intrigue, but merely bores. Slave-born Blanche K. Bruce (1841-1898) was the first African-American to serve a full term in the United State Senate (1874-1880). Having obtained wealth in addition to political clout in Mississippi, he acquired elite class status through his marriage to Josephine Willson, daughter of a wealthy dentist whose freeborn roots extended back to the late 18th century. The first half of this repetitious family biography focuses largely on Bruce's political life, the second on his son Roscoe, who after a stint at Tuskegee returns to Washington as superintendent of "Colored Schools." The family spirals through a decline that finds Roscoe managing an apartment complex in Harlem and his sons jailed for fraud. In tracing the fortunes of the clan, Graham (Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class) allows an absorption with class status to obscure fresher areas, such as Blanche Bruce's involvement in the serious work of the black women's club movementlists.
Publishers Weekly
Graham, an attorney and noted author (Our Kind of People), tells the fascinating story of Blanche K. Bruce, the first African American elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate (he represented Mississippi from 1875 to 1881), and of his heiress wife, family, and descendants. Graham opens with an account of Bruce's rise from Virginia slavery to a position of power and influence, first in the Senate, then as a government bureaucrat in Washington, DC, until his death in 1898. He then details the sad story of the downward mobility experienced by Bruce's son, Roscoe, and grandson, Roscoe Jr. The family's downfall was propelled partly by an extravagant lifestyle that ultimately went beyond its means and culminated in a jail term served by Roscoe Jr. in the 1930s. In the end, Blanche's son worked in a laundry despite his Harvard degree, and his granddaughter passed for white. Unfortunately, this interesting saga is marred by errors: whole sentences are repeated unnecessarily, the chronology is often confusing, and Boston, it seems, is 500 miles from New York City. Still, given the importance of the story it tells, this is recommended for major libraries. —A.O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN
Library Journal
Graham details the political machinations of the post-Reconstruction South to keep blacks from rising above servitude, the venality of congressional politics that went along with the injustices, and one man's attempts to build and maintain a dynasty in the midst of great social and political turmoil. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist
A former slave, Blanche Kelso Bruce, becomes a U.S. Senator (1875-81), a man of wealth and prestige; a couple of generations later, all is gone. Graham, who has published previously on race and class (Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class, 1999, etc.), ends with a sad image. At a 2002 unveiling of a portrait of Sen. Bruce in the U.S. Capitol, only one member of the populous Bruce family attended. (Some, we learn, are apparently passing for white.) The author charts the spectacular rise and fall of the Bruces. Born in 1841, Bruce moved around a bit with his white owners, who were involved both in tobacco and cotton. After his manumission (the details of which are sketchy), Bruce barely escaped Quantrill's raiders in Kansas and, after a brief stop at Oberlin College (he ran out of money, didn't graduate), ended up in Mississippi, where he profited mightily from Reconstruction and from the recent enfranchisement of freed slaves. After holding a few offices (including county sheriff), Bruce won the Senate election in the state legislature and headed off to Washington. He married a well-to-do woman from a prominent black family and with his own healthy investments in Mississippi real estate, they lived well and sent their son, Roscoe, to Phillips Exeter and Harvard, where he excelled. After the senator died, both his widow and son worked for Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee. But Roscoe, says Graham, was an arrogant man who preferred the company of whites, and he soon fell from grace (he'd once dined with the Rockefellers). The fortune melted away in the next generation—as did the prestige. Roscoe's son (also named Roscoe) served a prison sentence; a daughter passed for white; a third son also had legal difficulties. Graham's research is impressive and comprehensive—though some disjointedness, abruptness and occasional omissions suggest substantial textual cuts. A compelling story that shows how the American Dream can transmute into the American Nightmare.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Senator and the Socialite:
1. What qualities did Blanche Kelso Bruce possess that allowed him to rise—not just from obscurity, but from slavery? In what way was Bruce better positioned to succeed after the Civil War than most other slaves?
2. How does Graham present the variety and complexities of the slave experience, in which some slaves were given far greater freedoms than others?
3. Bruce and his wife Josephine lived largely outside the African-American community, associating primarily with whites. Would you say they deliberately turned their backs on their own race...or would you say that the nature of their accomplishments placed them in the circle of the white establishment (i.e., rich people tend to associate with rich people)?
4. A follow-up to Question 3: Can Bruce's treatment of his tenant farmers—the conditions he permitted them to live under—be justified? What about his silence in the Senate as white violence stripped black people of their rights?
5. Talk about the succeeding generations of the Bruce family. Which descendants do you admire...or whom do you feel were less than admirable? What about the two Roscoes, son and grandson? What was the cause—or causes—of the family's downfall?
6. Discuss the nature of the Bruce family's relationship with Booker T. Washington. Does the author represent Washington and his views on education and segregation objectively? How do you feel about Washington after reading this book? Did he make undue concessions...or did he face the facts as they existed in his era?
7. Does the author see the story of the rise and fall of the Bruce famil as a cautionary tale? Or does he position the story as an inspiration for later generations? How do you see the story?
8. Is America still as race-obsessed today as it was in the post-Civil-War years?
9. What have you learned from this book—about the nation, its history of racism, and the individuals it covers?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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