Discovering that many of the prejudices that afflicted his family in Arkansas and Louisiana had followed him to Chicago, Bruseaux took on a sideline gig investigating racial violence. He dug into bombings of Black family homes on the South Side, the burning of a Black church, and the murder of a Black 16-year-old by a white druggist from whom the boy had tried to purchase pomade. By investigating such crimes, Bruseaux’s agency offered an alternative path to justice for Black Americans shunned by the legal system.
Bruseaux also began interrogating the root causes of social problems. One client hired him to look into the conditions causing Black unemployment in the Midwest. In a letter to an official at the Department of Labor, Bruseaux asked “why the Negro is constantly being discharged from positions, and even the commonest labor at which he has previously been employed.” Bruseaux frequently drew from interviews, surveys, and first-person observation—mirroring the pioneering work being done by sociologists at the University of Chicago. He waded into public debates, and once used statistics to dispute charges that Black men were responsible for a disproportionate amount of the city’s crime.
As Bruseaux’s profile grew, his work took him farther afield—to investigate a lynching in North Carolina; to reexamine the killing of a Black teenager by a policeman in Gary, Indiana; and to locate a Creek Indian girl in Oklahoma who claimed that she was coerced by a group of white men to sign over a deed to valuable oil lands.
Though Keystone promised in its ads that all client business would be kept “strictly confidential,” Bruseaux’s exploits were breathlessly covered by the press. When hired by attorneys to testify in court, he often delivered sensational evidence on the stand. In 1923, during the scandalous divorce proceedings of Williams Stokes, a millionaire real estate heir, and his second wife, Helen, Bruseaux was brought in to rebut a maid’s accusation that Mrs. Stokes had been seen in the apartment of another man. After the maid’s testimony, Bruseaux shocked the court by producing an affidavit from her mother stating that she was lying, forcing the witness to break down and admit that she had perjured herself. The move, one newspaper noted, “puts Mr. Bruseaux on record as one of the cleverest detectives in the country, not only of his own race, but any race.”