Clara Washington Bruce
*Clara Washington Bruce was born on this date in 1879. She was a Black lawyer and administrator.
Clara Washington Burrill grew up in a Black middle-class family in Washington, DC, she graduated in 1897 from the city's M Street High School, a segregated school known for its rigorous curriculum and exceptional faculty. After high school, she attended Miner Normal School and then spent a year at Howard University before transferring to Radcliffe College, where she studied history, education, and philosophy.
She left Radcliffe in 1903 without earning her degree to marry Roscoe Bruce, whose father, Blanche Bruce, had been the first Black to serve a full six-year term in the U.S. Senate. Over the next 20 years, Bruce raised three children and supported her Harvard-educated husband in his career as an administrator at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and then as assistant superintendent of Black schools for the District of Columbia.
In 1923, with her children mostly grown, she pursued her longtime ambition of studying law. Bruce excelled at B.U. Law, where she published three articles in the B.U. Law Review served on the student council, ranked first among the seven women in her class, and was editor-in-chief. She was named the 1926 "class day orator" and graduated cum laude. In October 1926, Bruce became the third Black woman admitted to the Massachusetts Bar.
The following year, she and her husband accepted jobs as managers of the Dunbar Garden Apartments in Harlem, a 500-unit complex built by the Rockefeller family to provide housing for New York's middle-class Black families. After the Rockefellers sold the Dunbar in 1936, the Bruces struggled to find suitable employment in New York, an increasingly segregated city where few African Americans held white-collar jobs. Despite (or perhaps because of) these setbacks, Bruce was active in politics—nominated to the New York State Assembly in 1938 but decided not to run—and continued pursuing her love of writing, submitting essays, articles, and poems for publication.
She died on January 22, 1947, and is buried in her hometown of Washington, DC.
