Lenecia Bruce

Lenecia Bruce, League of Women Voters Activist, Dies at 99
Lenecia L. Bruce was born on August 17, 1922, in Attalla, Alabama. She was the first child of John Bert Layman, a part-time farmer and coal miner who worked in the often-violent coal mines around Birmingham owned by the notorious Charlie DeBardeleben, and Lena Iberia Ross Layman, a self-taught social worker, schoolteacher, and piano instructor. As early as age five, Lenecia was performing as an orator reciting poetry to audiences in South Alabama. She was one of the first graduates from the famed Minor High School in Birmingham, Alabama and attended Birmingham Southern University before World War II intervened.
During World War II, she was an air traffic communications specialist at the old Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta and at the Tri-Cities Airport in Bristol, Tennessee. After the war, she married Willis Bruce, who was an air traffic controller, and later moved with him to Savannah, Georgia, where she lived for twenty-one years before he passed away of a heart attack. She was active in the garden club but also active in voters rights. In 1963, she joined the League of Women Voters in Savannah and went door-to-door in political campaigns.
She had two sons, Charles Bruce and Stephen Bruce, who both excelled in school. Charles Bruce became a professor of neuroscience at Yale University, and Stephen Bruce became a lawyer who wrote a treatise on pension law and founded the Workers Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.
After her first son went off to college at Caltech in Pasadena, Ms. Bruce returned to college herself at Armstrong State College and in 1968 graduated cum laude. After a year teaching English at Savannah High School, she went to graduate school at Duke University where her other son attended. At Duke, she studied under the renowned women’s historian Anne Firor Scott and obtained a Master’s degree in 1971 writing her thesis on the 1920-1922 municipal reform effort of the Atlanta League of Women Voters.
After six years of planning for branch banks in the private sector. Ms. Bruce was hired by the Georgia League of Women Voters as its first paid office manager and worked for the Georgia League for twelve years helping to bring the League into the computer age. She wrote numerous historical and policy reports for the Georgia League and conducted dozens of interviews of League activists, which are on file with the Georgia Archives. For her service with the Georgia League, she received the Eleanor Raoul Greene Lifetime Achievement Award. Until she was in her mid-80's, she continued to volunteer for the DeKalb County League and received an award for her years “service to the voters of DeKalb County.”
Throughout her life, Ms. Bruce was active in the church, first at Bull Street Baptist and Memorial Baptist Churches in Savannah, where she taught Sunday School and ran the Vacation Bible School, and since 1972 at Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta where she volunteered in Central’s homeless shelter and helped distribute the church’s newsletter before it became electronic.
In addition to keeping up with all of her relatives, she had scores of close decades-long friendships. And in the last fifteen years of her parents’ lives, she took care of them, first by driving every weekend from Atlanta to Alabama with bags of groceries to cook for them, and then taking them into her home until they passed away in 1987 and 1991.
In 2005, she moved into the independent living unit in Clairmont Place in Decatur, where she developed innumerable new friendships and continued to be active at Central Presbyterian and in the League. After fifteen years there, she died at age 99½ at Piedmont Hospital of natural causes.
She is survived by her two sons, their spouses, Harriet Friedman of New Haven and Jeanette Bruce of Washington, D.C., three grandchildren, Sophia, Aaron, and Ben Bruce, one brother, Ross Layman of Odenville, Alabama, and ten nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her sister Betty Moberly of Philadelphia, PA, her brother H.T. Layman of Waco, TX, and a sister Alta Layman who died at age two when Lenecia was only seven.
In June 2000, a Proclamation issued by DeKalb County to honor her said that “her family, friends and those who work with her” all “characterized her as a caring neighbor, an exceptional volunteer, a wonderful daughter and a devoted friend.”
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Lenecia's memory to Central Presybterian Church or the League of Women Voters.