Bertie Bowman, who began his career sweeping the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 1944, joined the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1965 and retired 56 years later, making him the longest-serving Black staff member in Congress, died on Wednesday in North Bethesda, Md. He was 92.
His stepdaughter, LaUanah King-Cassell, said the death, at a rehabilitation facility, resulted from complications of heart surgery.
Mr. Bowman spent his first two decades in Washington as an “underground” man, working janitorial and service jobs in the depths of the Capitol, roles that are out of sight of the throngs of tourists who pour through the building but that are vital to keeping Congress going.
He got his break in 1965, when J. William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the committee, hired him as a clerk for the panel. He later rose to assistant and then head coordinator, a position in which Mr. Bowman got to know, and become friends with, a long list of powerful senators and visiting dignitaries.
His nearly six decades with the committee make him the longest-serving Black staff member in the history of the U.S. Congress, according to a statement by Jim Clyburn, a Democratic representative from South Carolina and his party’s assistant House minority leader.
Mr. Bowman’s primary task as coordinator included welcoming witnesses, making sure the microphones were working and keeping the senators on pace with their questions. The assignment required deep knowledge of Senate protocol and, more important, perfect people skills.
“There was just a special grace about him,” Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee who served as chairman of the committee from 2015 to 2019, said in a phone interview. “We’d have really serious hearings about war and death and destruction, which was our job, but then there’s Bertie over there, a living example of the good in this world.”
Mr. Bowman was just 13 years old when he ran away from home in South Carolina, where his family worked as sharecroppers. He worked the fields, too, but he dreamed of bigger things.
“The main thing on my agenda was I didn’t like the farm,” he told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call in 2013. “When I was in the cotton fields, I used to hear airplanes, and when buses went by I used to wonder where they were going.”
One day he was in a local store when a line of cars carrying Senator Burnet R. Maybank of South Carolina, a Democrat, stopped in front for a campaign stop. The senator invited anyone in the crowd to stop by his office if they ever happened to be in Washington.
“So I ran up to him before he could get in his car and get away, and I said, ‘If I come to Washington, D.C., can I come by and see you?’” Mr. Bowman told Roll Call. “And he said, ‘Yes.’”
Mr. Bowman was soon on a train north, without his parents’ permission and with just a few dollars in savings pinned to the inside of his shirt. Black train porters helped him find his way to Washington, where he planned to look up a cousin.
But he lost the cousin’s address and ended up sleeping in Union Station for a few nights. Finally, he went to find Mr. Maybank — who, to his surprise, not only got him the job as a sweeper, but also paid his $2 a week salary out of his own pocket. Mr. Maybank later got him a job inside the building, in a coffee shop. Mr. Bowman went on to shine shoes and work in the Capitol barbershop before joining the Foreign Relations Committee.
One of his tasks as a committee clerk was overseeing the young interns and messengers, among them Bill Clinton, then a junior at Georgetown University. The two bonded over a shared love of Elvis Presley and could sometimes be spied singing, and trying to dance, along to the music.
They stayed in touch: Mr. Clinton wrote the foreword to a book by Mr. Bowman, “Step by Step: A Memoir of Living the American Dream” (2008).
“Bertie Bowman was a remarkable person — a first-rate example of the men and women who love our country and work hard every day with little fanfare to keep it running,” Mr. Clinton said in a statement after Mr. Bowman’s death. “I’ll always be grateful for every encounter I had with him over the years.”
Bertie Herbert Bowman was born on April 12, 1931, in Summerton, a small town about 60 miles southeast of Columbia, the capital. He was the son of Robert and Mary (Ragin) Bowman.
His first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, Elaine King-Bowman, died in 2009. Along with his stepdaughter, he is survived by his children, Charlene Bowman Smart and Gregory, Wilbert and Bertie P. Bowman; his brothers Larry and Jimmy Lee; his sister, Dorothy Floyd; 17 grandchildren; 31 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.
Mr. Maybank was not the only powerful senator to take an interest in Mr. Bowman — so too did his successor, Strom Thurmond, a pro-segregation Republican.
When, after completing high school, Mr. Bowman applied to and was rejected by Howard University in Washington, Mr. Thurmond placed a call to a senior administrator at the school.
As Mr. Bowman recounted the call to NPR in 2012, “He said, ‘Bob, I have a young man down here — and believe it or not he said, you know, he didn’t say boy, he said a young man — that tried to get in your school and you would not take him in.
“And he said, ‘Bob, don’t you know 80 percent of your funds comes from the government?’”
Mr. Bowman was accepted. He studied American government for two years at Howard, but left before receiving his degree.
He left the Foreign Relations Committee in 1990 to take over his father-in-law’s limousine service in Washington. But in 1999 he returned, at the behest of the chairman, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a Republican.
Mr. Maybank, Mr. Thurmond and many of the other senators who helped Mr. Bowman early in his career were segregationists — a fact that, he said, complicated their relationships but did not get in the way.
“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,” he said of Mr. Thurmond in a 2008 NPR interview. “The good outweighed the bad, the way I look at it.”
Not that he would say otherwise. Mr. Bowman was assiduous in his nonpartisanship, one thing that enabled him to befriend Republicans and Democrats alike. When asked in 2021, on the cusp of retirement, whom he admired most among all the senators he encountered, he demurred.
“The committee has 27,” he told the Federal News Service. “All of them were my favorites.”
