Barriers that Bend but Don’t Break
As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the BU Law Review, we look back at the life of Clara Burrill Bruce, the first woman and first African American elected to lead the publication.
Clara Burrill Bruce with the rest of the BU Law Review Editorial Board.
Barriers that Bend but Don’t Break
As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the BU Law Review, we look back at the life of Clara Burrill Bruce, the first woman and first African American elected to lead the publication.
“All, hail to the conqueror! That is the way this lady should be addressed. Not only is she an honor student of first rank, but she has achieved a distinction never conferred on a woman before—she is editor-in-chief of the Law Review. Even all this does not sufficiently occupy her for she has a grown family to whose needs she finds time to attend. What a lot they have to live up to!”
This inscription appears in BU Law’s 1926 yearbook beside the photo of Clara Burrill Bruce (’26). A mother of three in her mid-40s, Bruce was the only African American woman in her class, and her election to chair of the Boston University Law Review was historic: she was the first woman to head the publication at BU and the first African American to become editor-in-chief of a law review anywhere in the country.
Bruce grew up in a Black middle-class family in Washington, DC, graduating in 1897 from the city’s M Street High School, a segregated school known for its rigorous curriculum and exceptional faculty. (Teaching was, at that time, among the few professions available to well-educated African Americans.) 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 in order to marry Roscoe Bruce, whose father, Blanche Bruce, had been the first African American to serve a full six-year term in the US 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 BU Law, where she published three articles in the BU Law Review, served on the student council, and ranked first among the seven women in her class, in addition to serving as editor-in-chief. She was named the 1926 “class day orator” and graduated cum laude.
“Clara’s success in law school was phenomenal,” says Lawrence Otis Graham, author of The Senator and the Socialite, which chronicles the lives of Senator Blanche Bruce and his descendants. Her hard work is particularly impressive, he notes, because she never expected her accomplishments to lead to a career as a practicing attorney. “She knew when she started that it was unlikely that would be permitted in the North,” Graham says. “The only opportunities available to Black attorneys would have been reserved for men.” Rather, she studied law as an intellectual pursuit and in hopes of using her knowledge to benefit the Black community.
In October 1926, Bruce became the third Black woman admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. The next 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—she was nominated to the New York State Assembly in 1938 but decided not to run—and continued to pursue her love of writing, submitting essays, articles, and poems for publication. She died in 1949 and is buried in her hometown of Washington, DC.
Now, as the BU Law Review marks its 100th anniversary, an anonymous donor has honored Bruce by establishing a scholarship in her name that will support underrepresented and first-generation students at BU Law.
“Clara Burrill Bruce is at once an inspiring example of perseverance and achievement, and a painful reminder of the barriers that many excellent students faced—and too often still face—in gaining full access to the legal profession,” says Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig. “Having this scholarship in her name will help BU Law keep opening doors for all qualified students, which is a crucial element of our vision for the future.”
