John Edward Bruce: Journalist, Nationalist, Pan Afrikanist, And Historian

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http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/bruce.html

THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY

H I S T O R Y N O T E S

JOHN EDWARD BRUCE: JOURNALIST, NATIONALIST, PAN
AFRIKANIST, AND HISTORIAN

By AHATI N. N. TOURE

By RUNOKO RASHIDI


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John Edward Bruce (22 February 1856 to 7 August 1924),
journalist, historian, writer, orator, and Pan Afrikan
nationalist, was born in Piscataway, Maryland, to
enslaved parents Robert Bruce and Martha Allen Clark.
When he was three years old, Bruce's father was sold,
never to be heard from again. In 1860 he and his
mother escaped to Washington, DC, accompanying a
regiment of Union soldiers passing through the state
to the US capital. In 1864 they moved to New York
State and later to Connecticut, where they remained
for two years and where, at an integrated school, he
received his first formal education. While largely
self-educated, Bruce also received private instruction
in Washington, DC, and enrolled in a three-month
course at Howard University.

At 18 Bruce found a job as a helper in the office of
the Washington correspondent for The New York Times in
1874. It was the beginning of a career in journalism
that spanned some 50 years and during which he wrote
for more than 40 newspapers and journals in the United
States and around the world. Bruce's articles and
editorials appeared in periodicals in Afrika, the
Caribbean, and Europe, including Duse Mohamed Ali's
London-based African Times and Orient Review. Bruce
worked in the US capital until around 1900, when he
moved to New York State -- first to Albany, and then
to New York City and Yonkers.

Beginning in 1879 Bruce founded and edited several
newspapers. Five years later he began writing regular
columns under the pen name `Bruce Grit' in The New
York Age, the journal of the fiery civil rights
activist T. Thomas Fortune. Grit, slang for courageous
or resolute, was a name for which he would from then
on be known throughout his long career. In 1887 he
became that paper's special correspondent. Three years
later he joined Fortune's Afro-American League and in
1898 its successor, the Afro-American Council. Both
groups advocated Afrikan solidarity and aggressiveness
in combating human rights abuses.

Bruce had a strong interest in Afrikan history, and
many of his writings and speeches focused on the
achievements of the Afrikan past and the importance of
history as a remedy to the ravages of white
supremacist indoctrination on the Afrikan psyche. With
the Afrikan Puerto Rico-born bibliophile Arturo
Alphonso Schomburg, Bruce in 1911 founded in Yonkers
the Negro Society for Historical Research. Three years
earlier he had been made a member of the Africa
Society of England. President Barclay of Liberia also
made him Knight of the Order of African Redemption,
and in 1913 Bruce founded the Loyal Order of the Sons
of Africa, which aimed to establish its headquarters
in Afrika and to achieve global Pan Afrikan unity.

Bruce was always a fiercely nationalistic and
independent thinker. He refused to join any
organization run or supported by Europeans, and his
work as a journalist and activist largely ignored
them. Much of his work excoriated Euro-American
society. He addressed his attention chiefly to the
human rights struggle of Afrikans in the United States
and later to fostering their political and economic
ties with Afrika. His views combined nationalist
thought -- an advocacy of economic independence,
cultural pride and solidarity, and self-directed group
initiative -- with an unrelenting agitation for
political, civil, and human rights.

Bruce advocated that Afrikans use merciless armed
retaliation to combat pogroms and lynching by European
mobs. While they are to remain politically a part of
the United States, he also urged Afrikans to resist
assimilation into Euro-American culture and society.
After intensified pogroms following World War I, he
later opted for national independence on the Afrikan
continent. His belief in an independent national
destiny led him in the period around 1919 to embrace
Marcus Garvey's Pan Afrikan nationalism. As a member
of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association,
he wrote for the movement's Negro World and the Daily
Negro Times.

Despite his productivity, Bruce found that to sustain
himself he had for most of his adult life to work for
the Port of New York Authority. After he retired in
1922, he received a small pension until his death in
New York City two years later.

Sources:

Bullock, Penelope L. The Afro-American Periodical
Press, 1838-1909. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1981.

Ferris, William H. The Afrikan Abroad or His Evolution
in Western Civilization: Tracing His Development Under
Caucasian Milieu, Volume II. New Haven, CT: The
Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor Press, 1913; reprint New
York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968.

Gatewood, Willard B. Aristocrats of Color: The Black
Elite, 1880-1920. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1990.

Gilbert, Peter. The Selected Writings of John Edward
Bruce: Militant Black Journalist. New York: Arno Press
and The New York Times, 1971.

Logan, Rayford W., and Michael R. Winston, eds.
Dictionary of American Negro Biography, New York: W.
W. Norton and Company, 1982.

Newkirk, Pamela. Within the Veil: Black Journalists,
White Media. New York: New York University Press,
2000.

Penn, I. Garland. The Afro-American Press and Its
Editors. Springfield, MA: Willey and Company, 1891;
reprint New York: Arno Press and The New York Times,
1969.

Pride, Armistead S., and Clint C. Wilson II. A History
of the Black Press, Washington, DC: Howard University
Press, 1997.

Salzman, Jack, and David Lionel Smith and Cornel West,
eds. Encyclopedia of Afrikan-American Culture and
History, Volume 1. New York: Simon and Schuster
Macmillan, 1996.

Thorpe, Earl E. Black Historians: A Critique. New
York: William Morrow and Company, 1971.

Wesley, Charles H. "Evaluation of the Black Studies
Movement: The Need for Research in the Development of
Black Studies Programs." Journal of Negro Education,
38, no. 3 (Summer 1970).

Wesley, Charles H. "Racial Historical Societies and
the American Heritage." Journal of Negro History, 37,
no. 1 (January 1952).