Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Senior (21 April 1879 – 16 August 1950) was an African-American educator who was known for stressing the value of practical industrial and business skills as opposed to academic disciplines.
Later he administered the Dunbar Apartments housing complex in Harlem, New York City, and was editor in chief of the Harriet Tubman Publishing Company.
[1] Blanche Bruce was a former slave, the second African American to be elected to the U.S. Senate, and the first to serve a full six-year term.
[1] His secondary education was first at Washington's M Street High School and then at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was one of the editors of The Exonian, the student newspaper.
Du Bois was making an effort to become the superintendent of schools in that area, which Washington greatly opposed due to their differing philosophies.
[5] And, following Washington's active campaign for him, Bruce became the supervising principal of a district, controlling one quarter of the black schools in 1906.
In July 1921, Bruce resigned from his position amid a controversy arising from nude photographs taken of black students as part of an ethnological study.
Bruce endured a tug-of-war for power within the D.C. education circles and became the focal point of philosophical and public relations opposition by those who supported W.E.B.
The controversy led to a scathing article in the influential Washington Bee, titled "Picture For Youth," written by former ally, Ralph W. Tyler.
[5] However, Bruce recovered and resumed his post until a scandal resulted, brought on by Herman M. Bernolet Moens, an obscure Dutch professor introduced to local black middle class circles by, none other than, W.E.B.
[5] In 1919, Bruce allowed Professor Herman Marie Bernolet Moens, a Dutch ethnologist, to take nude photographs of black high school students, allegedly as part of a study of physical differences between the races.
[9] Moens, a former Panama Canal laborer and self-proclaimed graduate of an "academy in Russia," came to the U.S. in 1914, where he became at “first touched, then interested, and finally fascinated” by African American children.
[10][11] Unable to leave the United States due to the outbreak of World War I, Moens traveled throughout the country studying African American children.
During this time, as an outspoken supporter of racial integration and equality, Moens had also become a target of the US Department of Justice, and was accused of being a German spy sent to rouse trouble within the United States.
In the fall of 1917, the Department of Justice mounted an investigation of Moens, who was arrested on October 25, 1918, at the home of an unmarried black District teacher for the Miner Normal School for Colored Children, Charlotte Hunter, while the two were having lunch.
[13] The jury found Moens guilty and sentenced him to one year in prison; however, an appeals court reversed the decision and he was allowed to return to Europe in 1920 where he published an explanation of what transpired, titled "Towards Perfect Man: Contributions to Somatological and Philosophical Anthropology".
In it, he wrote: "Science and art had, and have still, to suffer from the attacks of ignorant people, prejudiced churches and puritanical laws, prompted by the fear of truth."
Moens did receive support from New York professor, James F. Moten Jr, who wrote a letter that he asked the Washington Bee to publish.
The Dunbar Complex was financed by John D. Rockefeller and designed by architect Andrew J. Thomas, with the aim of giving decent accommodation for low-income African Americans.
[4] His son Roscoe Jr. embezzled money from an apartment complex he managed in New Jersey and then arranged a phony burglary to explain the absence of funds.