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George H. White (1852-1918)
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This article was authored by Caitlyn Cobb in 2022, and updated in 2024 and 2025. All the sources are linked throughout the article in green. with a source list at the bottom of this article. To see more about this 2025 #VRABlackHistory #WeWillToo Series, see below the source list.


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Today, February 13th, 2025, we honor George H. White, who was a lawyer and a Republican African-American Congressman from North Carolina’s Second Congressional District (1899-1901).
 

Today, we remember A Legacy of Disenfranchisement: Black Massacres (1860's - early 1900's) #VRABlackHistory 2022


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The Black massacres of the 1860's- 1880's, highlighted in our #VRABlackHistory 2025 Article "Past American Insurrections" and covered in more detail to the left of this text, were over voting. While many more massacres occurred after 1880's, the extreme concentration of Black massacres during this time period were specifically targeted against Black men exerting their right to vote under 15th amendment.

Despite the horror that article showed, this article follows upon the previous two articles on the Reconstruction Congress of 1867 and the First National Conference of Colored Women of America in 1895 and continues to provide a contrast to the massacres of Black people who dared to exercise their right to vote from the 1860's - 1900's: that even when everything seems hopeless, progress still finds a way and will always find a way to rise as a phoenix.

"Facing overwhelming odds in the wake of the further disfranchisement of North Carolina blacks, he declined to run for re-election in 1900." White was part of the 56th Congress of the United States and was the last African-American member of Congress since Reconstruction, and there wouldn't be another African-American Congressperson until 28 years later in 1928. White would also be the last African-American Congressman "elected from North Carolina until the 1990s".


White represents the last of the 22 African-American men who, since 1870, "had served reconstructed southern states in Congress." While he was last; he certainly was not least, and it is our pleasure to lift up and honor a man who so earnestly loved the law, his country, and his race.


"In January 1901, at the beginning of a new century, George H. White was ending his term as a Congressman from North Carolina’s Second Congressional District. Realizing that he was bringing to a close a thirty two year period when nearly forty Southern African Americans sat in Congress, White used the occasion of his farewell address to remind that body and the nation of the reason for his defeat and the elimination of black representation in the nation’s capital. He also predicted that African Americans would return to Congress. His prediction became a reality when in 1928, Oscar DePriest was elected to represent a Chicago congressional district."


What made White's farewell address even more commendable was that it wasn't supposed to even be a farewell address. White was on the House floor "considering the bill (H. R. 13801) [that would make] appropriations for the Department of Agriculture for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1902". White says in this speech that, because he had been denied the chance a couple days earlier to speak, he had taken this chance while he was on the House floor and had the attention of all the Congressmen to divert from the subject of the bill- leaving the bill to be discussed by more knowledgeable agriculturists- and instead use his five minutes to "enter a plea for the colored man, the colored woman, the colored boy, and the colored girl of this country."


White covered many issues in his speech, including:


  • The racism displayed by the 56th Congress;


  • The attempts of several Congressmen to repeal the 14th and 15th Amendments;


  • The voter suppression tactics used against African Americans;


  • The hierarchy, destructive nature, and hypocrisy of White Supremacy;


  • The statistics of how African-Americans were doing in 1901 compared to 30 years before;


  • The state of poverty that African-American families still faced; and,


  • The two bills he had proposed in the first session of Congress, and descriptions and arguments for them both (these two bills were one regarding the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company and one regarding his anti-lynching bill).


White's impromptu farewell address took up "four pages of the Congressional Record " (emphasis in original), at the end of which the record says there was loud applause.
Read the full text of George White's farewell address here
Read excerpts from George White's speech here
 
Fun Facts:

  • George White was "the child of a free, mixed-race turpentine farmer in Columbus County. [He] was born in Rosindale, Bladen County, on December 18, 1852. No details are available regarding his birth mother, who may have been a slave and appears to have died shortly after her son’s birth."

  • "George Henry White’s first public speech came at an Emancipation Day gathering in the small coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina". (emphasis added)

  • "When White passed the state’s rigorous bar examination, personally administered in those days by the members of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, he was the state’s only black candidate in a class of 32. He then established a small practice in New Bern, becoming one of a half-dozen African American attorneys in the state." (emphasis added)

  • "By the fall of 1880, White had...emerged as a formidable political candidate, winning election on the Republican ticket as a member of the North Carolina House from Craven County. He later served one term as a Republican in the state Senate (elected 1884) from Craven County, before serving two terms (1887-1894) as the nation’s only elected black prosecutor, representing the state’s so-called 'black second' district."

  • "White was married four times and widowed three times." (emphasis added) One of his daughters, Beatrice Odessa White, who was born in 1891, died a short year later in 1892, and was buried in New Bern, North Carolina.

  • "[White] won his first term in the United States Congress from the Second Congressional District, after defeating his brother-in-law, former Congressman Henry Plummer Cheatham, for the party nomination in 1896." (emphasis added)

  • "Reelected to Congress in a three-way race in 1898, White was the nation’s only African American Congressman for four years, gaining national recognition as a vocal defender of civil rights and political equality for his race, and serving as a state delegate to two national Republican conventions, in 1896 and 1900." (emphasis added)

  • Sometime after 1901, George White left North Carolina due African-American disenfranchisement and co-founded Whiteville (also called Whitesboro), an all-black community located near Trenton, New Jersey.

  • "George White devoted the last two decades of his life primarily to two significant business activities, as president of Philadelphia’s first black-owned commercial savings bank and as the founder of a land development company in southern New Jersey." (emphasis added)

  • "In 1912, [White] briefly attempted a comeback to Congress in an unsuccessful quest for the Republican nomination in a special election in Philadelphia’s First District." (emphasis added)

  • "In 1916, [White] was selected as Pennsylvania’s first black alternate state delegate to the national Republican convention in Chicago". (emphasis added)

  • "In 1917, a year before his death, [White] was appointed as an assistant city [lawyer] in Philadelphia. He died at his home there on December 28, 1918." 
 
Click on the video below to watch as Bernard George presents excerpts from George H. White's 1901 speech.
Did you miss any of the #VRABlackHistory series articles?
Go to VotingRightsAlliance.org to view them all!

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HAPPY BLACK HISTORY MONTH!


From the Transformative Justice Coalition and the Voting Rights Alliance


We hope you enjoy our #VRABlackHistory Series 2025 with the theme:

"Facing Extremism: How Our Ancestors Successfully Fought For Our Rights and #WeWillToo"


Please note, if you'd like to opt out from only the upcoming daily Black History Month Voting Rights Alliance #VRABlackHistory series, please email carnwine@tjcoalition.org. Unsubscribing at the bottom of this email unsubscribes you to all Transformers, not just from this special February Series.


The Transformative Justice Coalition and the Voting Rights Alliance, in honor of Black History Month, are continuing the annual tradition of our daily special series devoted to sharing the legacies and stories of the sheroes, heroes, and events in the fight for Black suffrage. This series was created in 2017 and will introduce many new articles this year. In addition to these daily newsletters all February long, this series also incorporates daily social media posts; an interactive calendar; and, website blog posts to spread the word broadly.


This year, the Voting Rights Alliance’s #VRABlackHistory Series will take readers through the most difficult fights for our African-American voting rights- and how we won.


Feel free to publish on your social media outlets and teach these lessons, with credit given to the Transformative Justice Coalition. Please let us know if you do share the series so we can publicly recognize and thank you. Be sure to send any publications to carnwine@tjcoalition.org so we can repost!


Others can sign up for the daily articles at VotingRightsAlliance.org. 


The 2025 #VRABlackHistory Series #WeWillToo Edition will connect our history to modern times to show just how our ancestors beat the odds. Every day, this series will detail in chronological order the fights for Black suffrage, and will feature articles on the Fugitive Slave Laws and the parallels to the present day mass deportation raids conducted by ICE; the fight for same day voter registration; how our ancestors worked with hostile presidencies and courts to achieve rights; how Juneteenth has been used to mobilize voters; the amazing achievements of the Reconstruction Era; why birthright citizenship began and how the 14th Amendment has been interpreted throughout history; how DEI initiatives started in the 1860's; the 15th Amendment; how we achieved the first anti-lynching laws in Georgia and how lynching was used to suppress the vote; how we moved past the Jim Crow Era; how Black youth mobilized to lower the voting age to 18; how the Tuskegee Airmen went on to fight for voting rights after their service; how boycotts were used to fight for voting rights; the "Souls To The Polls" voting initiatives of the Black churches in the 1950's- 1990's; how Black people fought for voting rights for disabled people; how Black people fought for equal access to the ballot for the LGBTQIA community; how the Brunswick, Georgia community banded together after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 to vote out their District Attorney; the history of voting rights for Black women and how Black women continue to vote and lead voter efforts at amazing rates; how we have historically used the Black press to fight for our right to vote; and, more.


Our ancestors faced much greater opposition than we do today, even as we face a new hostile federal Administration- and they persevered. The sentiment felt by some African-Americans post-election is to sit back, sit out, and a general feeling of frustration and hopelessness. This Series targets those feelings: we can win! This Edition of the Series is also a tribute to all of those fighting back, especially against efforts to ban DEI and our history. “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” – so let us learn from our history, our beautiful, strong, resilient, Black History.


Did you miss any of the #VRABlackHistory series articles?

 

Go to VotingRightsAlliance.org to view them all!

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