The son of sharecroppers, Mr. Bowman ran away from home at age 13, swept the Capitol steps and then became the longest-serving African-American congressional staff member in history.
Bertie Bowman, the son of South Carolina sharecroppers who arrived at the U.S. Capitol in 1944 as a 13-year-old runaway, got a $2-a-week job sweeping the building’s steps, and then became the longest-serving African American congressional aide in history, died Oct. 25 at a rehabilitation facility in North Bethesda, Md. He was 92.The cause was complications from recent heart surgeries, his stepdaughter LaUanah King-Cassell said.
Mr. Bowman grew up with 12 siblings in a house without indoor plumbing. The children plowed the fields barefoot and wore shoes only in winter. “Escaping, or ‘going up the road’ as the locals put it, was a very common dream among blacks,” Mr. Bowman wrote inpublished in 2008. He found Maybank in his office. The senator hired him to sweep the Capitol steps, paying him out of his own pocket. Bertie slept on benches at night until he was able to afford his own accommodations. After five years of sweeping the steps, Maybank got him a job inside the Capitol at a coffee shop.One position led to another, then another, until Mr. Bowman landed a clerical post at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966. A year later, Clinton showed up for work.
“Now, I’d be telling you a lie if I said some things he said didn’t hurt me, if that’s what you want to hear,” Mr. Bowman answered. “He said it. But then again, I said, ‘Well, he’d done so much — the good outweighed the bad, the way I look at it.” The children went all winter without taking baths. They told time by the sun’s position. Yellow school buses filled with White children passed them as they walked three miles to school.
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