William Seraile. Bruce Grit: The Black Nationalist Writings of John Edward Bruce.

Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003. 280 pp. $34.00.

An overview of John Edward Bruce's life reads like a thrilling work of fiction. Born a slave in Maryland in 1856, he met Charles Dickens, Martin Delany, and Henry Highland Garnet as a child and claimed to have delivered secret messages for John Wilkes Booth and seen Lincoln's corpse shortly after the assassination. In 1874 he began working as a journalist, a profession which brought him great fame in the last two decades of the nineteenth century when he founded and edited several papers and contributed to more than 100 black periodicals using the pseudonym Bruce Grit. He met and/or corresponded with every American President from Cleveland to Taft; exchanged letters with people of color throughout the globe, including his mentors Edward Blyden and Alexander Crummell; published articles in African, West Indian, European, and American journals; wrote historical pamphlets, political tracts, short stories, novels, plays, and poetry; and founded or belonged to organizations such as the Afro-American League, the American Negro Academy, the Niagara Movement, the Negro Society for Historical Research, the Negro Library Association, the Loyal Order of the Sons of Africa, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Five thousand people attended his funeral in Harlem in 1924, at which he was eulogized by T. Thomas Fortune, Arthur Schomburg, and Marcus Garvey. William Seraile's Bruce Grit covers not only the highlights of Bruce's career but also his sometimes myopic loyalty to Republican politicians; his chronic financial difficulties, which on several occasions caused him to compromise his principles; and his inconsistency on a variety of subjects, most notably the credibility of Garvey and the desirability of emigration to Africa. Nevertheless, Seraile insists that "all of his contradictory endeavors on behalf of his race were motivated by his sense of race pride and love of his people."

If a figure such as the editor and writer Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) presents Herculean challenges to a would-be biographer because of her confounding periods of silence, largely unknown personal life, and meager papers, Bruce poses problems of an opposite order. He was involved in national and racial politics for more than four decades, published indefatigably throughout his life, had an extensive correspondence, and left a huge trove of materials at his death (now the John Edward Bruce Papers at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Seraile follows in the footsteps Peter Gilbert and Ralph Crowder, who have sought to address the key question of how Bruce can be virtually unknown today when he had attained such early and sustained success as a newspaperman and held prominent positions in several major American and international black organizations. According to Gilbert, who compiled The Selected Writings of John Edward Bruce: Militant Black Journalist (1971), Bruce wrote to and for the black masses, urging them to become more self-reliant and fight for their Constitutional rights in a militant voice that removed him from the black mainstream represented by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Crowder suggests that, because Bruce refused to join white-run and white-supported organizations (he took part in the Niagara Movement but refused to join the NAACP), he was written out of the white American historical record. An additional reason may be that Bruce produced no major work championing his personal and political philosophy along the lines of Up from Slavery or The Souls of Black Folk, although he did write a fascinating (if confusing and unresolved) early detective novel featuring a West African protagonist. A ringing indictment of white prejudice and black accommodation (the hero, Sadipe Okukenu, leaves a Tuskegee-like Southern college in disgust after only one week), this serial, The Black Sleuth (1907-09), appeared in a black magazine so obscure that many of its issues are no longer extant. Likewise, Bruce's only novel in book form, The Awakening of Hezekiah Jones (1916), about black Americans and politics, was brought out by a small Kentucky press and has received little or no critical attention.

In an 1889 speech, "The Application of Force," Bruce told African Americans that they must be prepared to repay white violence in kind:

   Under the Mosaic dispensation, it was the custom to require "an eye
   for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Under a no less Barbarous
   civilization than that which existed at that period of the world's
   history, let the Negro require at the hands of every white murderer
   in the South or elsewhere a life for a life. If they burn your
   houses, burn theirs. If they kill your wives and children, kill
   theirs. Pursue them relentlessly. Meet force with force, everywhere
   it is offered. If they demand blood, exchange with them until they
   are satiated. By a vigorous adherence to this course, the shedding
   of human blood by white men will soon become a thing of the past.

Seraile, however, asserts that this is "clearly an aberration of his true sentiments," for Bruce's writings as a whole belie his reputation for militancy, a misperception held by many of his contemporaries and perpetuated by Gilbert: "More often, Bruce left revenge to the providence of God or cautioned against individuals striking against a superior force unless they had the support of the federal government."

Evidence of what Seraile refers to as Bruce's "complex and contradictory personality" may be found in his relationship with Washington (a subject addressed by Crowder in one of his many essays on Bruce). Like Du Bois, who would later become one of the Wizard's strongest critics, Bruce initially failed to see the dangers posed by the educator. He was attracted not only to Washington's message of self-help but, because of his dire financial situation, to the money being offered by the Tuskegee machine for favorable propaganda. Although Washington and Fortune sought to exploit Bruce's considerable influence with black readers, neither trusted Bruce, and in time their misgivings proved justified. When Bruce finally did break with Washington, he lashed out at his former patron with characteristic verve, as evidenced by this passage from a piece entitled "Industrial Education" (1903):

   For a man who has never voted in his life, as he confesses,
   Mr. Washington's political activity and influence is greater
   than that of any veteran politician in the country. If the
   Negro can be kept in the background politically through
   Mr. Washington's influence for the next five years, he will
   become a complete political pariah. And that is the game now
   being played by Mr. Washington's rich white friends who have
   made him the star performer in the tragedy--the denouement of
   which is the undoing of the Negro by "the greatest Negro in
   the world." The plot is as dazzling as it is spectacular and
   there's millions in it.

Oddly, for a book subtitled The Black Nationalist Writings of John Edward Bruce, Seraile does not define or discuss Black Nationalism in any detail; nor does he use extended passages from Bruce's writings to illustrate his points about them, relying instead on paraphrase and brief quotations. Although he notes the frequency with which Bruce refers to the Psalms verse "Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God" (68:31), Seraile does not discuss Ethiopianism, which profoundly influenced African American thought throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and which figures prominently in Bruce's literary texts and his personal belief system. More importantly, perhaps Seraile should have organized his book chronologically rather than topically. After a chapter on Bruce's early years, he devotes two chapters to national politics, followed by chapters devoted to civil rights, Bruce's racial ideology, African emigration, the Garvey Movement, and Bruce's final years. The decision to separate Bruce's involvement in and growing disillusionment with party politics from his opinions about and advocacy for blacks in the United States and abroad renders chapters two and three somewhat lifeless and deprives the reader of the context necessary to understand his "shocking" conversion to Garveyism in October 1919.

After years of supporting the party of Lincoln only to see its leaders do little to deter lynching and disenfranchisement in the South and Jim Crowism in the North, Bruce was confronted with two terms of the presidency of the Virginia-born Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who fired black civil servants, segregated restroom and dining facilities in government buildings, turned a blind eye to Southern racial atrocities, and publicly praised D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. The segregation of black soldiers during World War I, the denial of rights to African American veterans upon their return, Wilson's talk of self-determination for Europeans but not Africans and Asians, and the bloody race riots that erupted across the country in 1919 further embittered Bruce, causing him to embrace, advise, and propagandize for Garvey, whom he had earlier dismissed as a fraud. As Seraile explains in his highly effective "Epilogue," Bruce earlier "had embraced moral suasion, protest politics, alliances with progressive whites, and militant pleas to white America to accept full integration of African Americans. However in the twilight of his life, he gave up the belief that blacks could overcome in America."

As the first book to chronicle Bruce's remarkable life and examine his many writings, Bruce Grit will prove extremely valuable to scholars who do not have access to the Schomburg's Bruce collection or the time necessary for the daunting task of sifting through its contents.

John C. Gruesser

Kean University