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
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:
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Revised: December 11, 2001.
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