Celebrating Black History Month: Blanche Bruce, first African-American senator to serve a full term

Blanche Kelso Bruce, born March 1, 1841 into slavery in Virginia, was the first elected African-American from Mississippi senator to serve a full term.  Hiram Revels, also of Mississippi was the first African-American senator but did not complete a full term.

His mother was a domestic slave and his father was her master, Pettis Perkinson, a white Virginia planter.  His father legally freed him and arranged for an apprenticeship to learn a trade.  He worked as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River and moved to Hannibal, Missouri where he established a school for black children.  In 1868, he purchased a Mississippi Delta plantation and became a landowner of several thousand acres in the delta area.  

He was elected to the Senate in 1874 and on February 14, 1879, he presided over the first African-American and the only former slave to do so.  He served from March 1875 to March 1881.  

He was appointed Register of the Treasury in 1897 by President William McKinley and served until his death in 1898.  

Celebrating Black History Month: Lewis Latimer, African-American inventor

Lewis Howard Latimer, born September 4, 1848 in Chelsea Massachusetts, was an African-American inventor.  On February 10, 1874, he was granted a patent with Charles Brown for an improved toilet system for railroad cars called the Water Closet for Railroad Cars.  (U.S. Patent 147,363).

In 1879, Latimer went on to draft drawings necessary for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. In 1881, he invented a light bulb with a carbon filament to improve Thomas Edison's original work.  Latimer received a patent in 1882 for the process of manufacturing carbons.  He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on electric filament manufacturing techniques.