George Henry White (December 18, 1852 – December 28, 1918) was an American attorney and politician, elected as a Republican U.S. Congressman from North Carolina's 2nd congressional district between 1897 and 1901. He later became a banker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and in Whitesboro, New Jersey, an African-American community he co-founded. White was the last African-American congressman during the beginning of the Jim Crow era and the only African American to serve in Congress during his tenure.
In North Carolina, "fusion politics" between the Populist and Republican parties led to a brief period of renewed Republican and African-American political success in elections from 1894 to 1900, when White was elected to Congress for two terms after serving in the state legislature. After the Democratic-dominated state legislature passed a suffrage amendment that disenfranchised blacks in the state, White did not seek a third term. He moved permanently to Washington, D.C., where he had a law practice and became a banker, moving again to Philadelphia in 1906.
After White left office, no other African American served in Congress until 1929. No African American was elected to Congress again from a former Confederate state until Barbara Jordan's election in 1972, and there no African American was elected to Congress from North Carolina again until Eva Clayton in 1992.
Early life and education
White was born in 1852 in Rosindale, Bladen County, North Carolina, where his natural mother may have been a slave. His father, Wiley Franklin White, was a free person of color, of African and Scots-Irish ancestry, who worked as a laborer in a turpentine camp. George had an older brother, John, and their father may have purchased their freedom.
In 1857, George's father married Mary Anna Spaulding, a young local woman of mixed race and the granddaughter of Benjamin Spaulding. Born into slavery as the son of a slave mother and a white plantation owner, Benjamin Spaulding had been freed by his father as a young man. As a free man of color, Spaulding worked to acquire more than 2,300 acres of pine woods, which he apportioned to his own large family.
In 1860, the White family lived on a farm in Welches Creek township, Columbus County. Because George White was so young when Mary Anna joined the family, he always thought of her as his mother. She and his father had more children together, his half-siblings.
In 1874, White started studies at Howard University, founded in 1867 in Washington, D.C. as a historically black college open to men and women of all races. He studied classical subjects to be certified as a schoolteacher. In addition, he worked for five months at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had visitors from around the world, and got to see something of its thriving black community, some of whose ancestors had been free since shortly after the American Revolutionary War, when Pennsylvania abolished slavery.
White finished at Howard in 1877 and returned to North Carolina, where he was hired as a principal at a school in New Bern. He also read the law, studying it in the city as a legal apprentice under former Superior Court Judge William J. Clarke, who had become a Republican after the war and founded a newspaper. In 1879, White was admitted to the North Carolina bar.
Marriage and family
On February 27, 1879, White married Fannie B. Randolph, who was the daughter of John Randolph Jr., and Della Redmond Randolph. She died in September 1880, soon after the birth of their daughter Della. In 1882, he married Nancy J. Scott, who died that same year.
On March 15, 1887, he married Cora Lena Cherry. Her sister Louisa was married to Henry Plummer Cheatham, a future political rival. White and Cora had three children: Mary Adelyne, called "Mamie;" Beatrice Odessa (who died young); and George Henry White Jr.
Three of White's four children survived to adulthood: Della died in 1916 in Washington, D.C., followed by George Jr., who died in Pittsburgh in 1927. Mamie died in New York City in 1974.
His wife, Cora Lena White, died in 1905. In 1915, George White married Ellen Avant Macdonald of North Carolina, who survived him.
Political career
thumb|right|220px|This portrait of George Henry White appeared in the NAACP monthly, [[The Crisis, shortly after his death.]]
In 1880, White ran as a Republican candidate from New Bern and was elected to a single term in the North Carolina House of Representatives. He helped pass a law creating four state normal schools for African Americans in order to train more teachers, and was appointed in 1881 as the principal of one of the schools in New Bern. He helped develop the school in its early years and encourage students to go into teaching.
In 1884, White returned to politics, winning election to the North Carolina Senate from Craven County. He was, along with R. S. Taylor, one of two black senators in the 1885 session. In 1886, he was elected solicitor and prosecuting attorney for the second judicial district of North Carolina, a post that he held for eight years until 1894. While considering running for Congress, White had deferred to his brother-in-law, Henry Plummer Cheatham, who was elected to the U.S. House in 1890.
White was a delegate to the 1896 and 1900 Republican National Conventions. In 1896, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, representing the predominantly black Second District from his residence in Tarboro. He defeated the white Democratic incumbent Frederick A. Woodard. The Republican president William McKinley carried many on his coattails, but White also benefited because a Democratic-Populist fusionist candidate had drawn off votes from Woodard. In addition, the 1894 legislature had repealed some laws that Democrats had used to restrict black voting, and the turnout in 1896 among black voters was 85 percent.
In 1898, White was re-elected in a three-way race. In a period of increasing disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, he was the last of five African Americans who were elected and served in Congress during the Jim Crow era of the later nineteenth century. There were two from South Carolina, Cheatham before him from North Carolina, and one from Virginia. After them, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1972, after federal civil-rights legislation was passed in 1965 to enforce constitutional voting and civil rights for citizens.
Republicans since the 1880s had been calling for federal oversight of elections, to try to halt the discriminatory abuses in the South. Representative Henry Cabot Lodge and Senator George Hoar led a renewed effort in early 1890, when Lodge introduced a Federal Elections Bill to enforce provisions of the 15th Amendment giving citizens the right to vote. Henry Cheatham was the only black Congressman at the time, and he never gave a speech while the House considered the bill. It narrowly passed the House in July but languished in the Senate; it was eventually filibustered by Southern Democrats, overwhelmed by debate on silver coinage to relieve economic strain in rural areas.
Representative Edgar Dean Crumpacker of Indiana, who was on the Select Committee of the Census, had introduced a reduction measure that got the most attention, but it was reported out of committee in 1899, too late for action. In 1901, he introduced another measure, this one proposed to penalize Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, which had approved state constitutions disenfranchising blacks. (They were followed by other Southern states through 1908.) Crumpacker proposed a plan based on reducing representation based on total state illiteracy rates, as he believed that illiterates would fail the education or literacy tests. While his plan earned much discussion, his bill was tabled. A reduction effort in 1902 also failed. On January 20, 1900, White introduced the first bill in Congress to make lynching a federal crime to be prosecuted by federal courts. He argued that the majority of lynchings punished consensual sex between black men and white women, and that far more white men assaulted black women. A February 2 editorial by Josephus Daniels, one of the ringleaders of the Wilmington Coup, who also later served as Secretary of the Navy, in the News and Observer, responded with personal attacks against White, and claimed that White was justifying assaults on white women by slandering white men. The bill died in committee, opposed by Southern white Democrats, who were making up the Solid South block.
A month later, as the House was debating issues of territorial expansion internationally, White again defended his bill by giving examples of crimes in the South. He said that conditions in the region had to "provoke questions about ... national and international policy."</blockquote>
White delivered his final speech in the House on January 29, 1901:
<blockquote>This is perhaps the Negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress, but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people; faithful, industrious, loyal, rising people – full of potential force.</blockquote>
On March 4, 1901, at the moment that White's term formally ended, white legislators in Raleigh celebrated. North Carolina Democrat A. D. Watts announced:
<blockquote>George H. White, the insolent negro... has retired from office forever. And from this hour on no negro will again disgrace the old State in the council of chambers of the nation. For these mercies, thank God."
In 1906, the White family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city with a well established African-American community, which was then experiencing significant growth due to the Great Migration. During this time, White practiced law and founded a commercial savings bank. White was a co-founder of the town of Whitesboro in southern New Jersey as a planned community developed for African Americans. and was buried at an unmarked grave in Eden Cemetery in nearby Collingdale. His son George Jr. (d. 1927, Pittsburgh) and daughter Mamie (d. 1974, New York City) were buried next to him. His widow, Ellen White, moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1920; by 1930, she married Edward W. Coston there.
- In 2012 George Henry White: American Phoenix, a documentary about George Henry White's life and legacy, was released. 115 mins. Produced by LightSmith Productions.
- The George Henry White Fund was set up to support efforts for education about his life and legacy.
- In 2013, a historic marker in White's honor was set up in Whitesboro by the "Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro, New Jersey."