George Henry White – Anti-Slavery Bill
By
John C Abercrombie
George Henry White was born December 18, 1852, in Rosindale, North Carolina. Rosindale is in Bladen County. His natural mother was a slave, and his father Wiley Franklin White was a free person of color with Black, Scots Irish Ancestry. His father is believed to have purchased their freedom. It is necessary to keep in mind that during slavery the status of a child (slave or free) followed that of the mother and therefore were under law considered to be owned by the mother’s owner.
As such, there may be records that show Wiley Franklin White as a Black person owning slaves. Often, they were still “enslaved” on record because there was the possibility of them being stolen and sold as slaves by slave catchers, but having papers often prevented this invasion of the family as a unit.
In 1857 George’s father Wiley White married a young local woman of mixed race and the granddaughter of Benjamin Spaulding. They were the descendants are a large extended family whose roots lead back to Colonial America
Benjamin Spaulding born in 1773 was of mixed-race background, born into slavery in Duplin County, NC. His wife Edith Delphia Freeman Spaulding born in 1786was a Native-American of Waccamaw and Cape Fear Indian ancestry from Bladen County, NC. The couple had nine children: William, Emanuel, Armstead, John, Iver, Ann Eliza, Benjamin Jr., David, and Henry.
Benjamin was legally freed in 1825 by manumission papers filed in Columbus County, NC courts. Earlier census records and land deeds in indicate Benjamin was considered free for many years before that date.
Manumission consists of papers filed in a court indicating the freeing of a particular person who can no longer be enslaved.
Benjamin and Edith acquired land and a mill in Farmers Union, NC becoming skilled farmers and turpentine distillers. With their extended families the couple helped establish a free, independent, and self-sustaining community with a school and church on their land prior to the U.S. Civil War. Post-Civil War the family entered politics as well, with their son John Spaulding being elected as the first county commissioner of color in Bladen County, NC in 1868.
Born into slavery as the son of a slave mother and a white plantation owner, Benjamin 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.
George White probably first attended an “old field school”, paid for by subscription. After the American Civil War, the Reconstruction era state legislature established the first public schools for black children in the state. At Welches Creek in 1870, White met the teacher David P. Allen, who encouraged him. Allen moved to Lumberton, where he established the Whitin Normal School. White studied academic courses there for a couple of years, including Latin, and boarded with Allen and his family. He saved money by running the family farm for a year for his father. Wiley White left the family for Washington, D.C., in 1872 and worked for nearly two decades as a laborer at the Treasury Department.
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.
As you read posts here, keep in mind that in the 1800s the Republicans were the primary party of most Blacks and were opposed by the Democrats who fought most equality-based legislation tooth and nail. It is important to look at the person as opposed to the party.
In 1880, George Henry White ran as a Republican candidate from New Bern (NC) and was elected to a single t erm in the North Carolina House of Representatives. He fought for passage of a law creating four state Schools for Blacks to train as teachers. In 1881 he was appointed principal of one of the schools in New Bern. He encouraged students to go into the field of teaching.
White returned to politics being elected to the North Carolina Senate in 1884. In 1886 he was elected solicitor and prosecuting attorney for the second district, a post he held until 1894.
White’s brother-in-law Henry Plummer Cheatham was elected to the United States House in 1890.
In 1896 and 1900 White was a delegate to the Republican National Conventions. He was elected to the United States Congress representing the predominately Black Second District in 1896, defeating the White Democratic incumbent Frederick A Woodard. The legislature repealed some laws used by the Democrats to restrict Black voting and with a Black voter voting at 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. No African Americans were elected to Congress from North Carolina until 1992.
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 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.
During his tenure, White worked for African American civil rights and consistently highlighted issues of justice, relating discussions on the economy, foreign policy, and colonization to the treatment of Blacks in the South. He supported an effort for reduction legislation derived from the 14th Amendment, to reduce apportionment of Congressional delegations in proportion to the voting population that states were illegally disenfranchising. He challenged the House in 1899 and again after the 1900 census to proceed with reduction legislation.
He proposed legislation based on reducing representation based on the total state illiteracy rates. This bill garnered much discussion but was finally tabled.
White appointed several Black postmasters across his district. This was using patronage hires as others did in the appointment of postmasters.
Following the Wilmington coup of 1898 in North Carolina, White and two dozen other representatives from the National Afro-American Council met with McKinley and unsuccessfully pressed him to speak out against lynching. 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. An editorial by Josephus Daniels in the February 2 issue of the News and Observer responded with personal attacks against George Henry White, and claimed he 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.
At this point, we see one of the prime examples of the race card being played by Southern White “gentlemen”, evoking concern that the mitigation that they had been guilty of for so long, involving attacks on Blacks was in jeopardy. The thought of someone having the same privileges as them terrorized them to their very core.
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.”
Should not a nation be just to all her citizens, protect them alike in all their rights, on every foot of her soil, in a word, show herself capable of governing all within her domain before she undertakes to exercise sovereign authority over those of a foreign land—with foreign notions and habits not at all in harmony with our American system of government? Or to be more explicit, should not charity first begin at home?
This shows the hypocrisy of our nation.
Following the actions of North Carolina Democrats in 1899, who passed a suffrage amendment to the state constitution to disenfranchise blacks, White chose not to seek a third term in the 1900 elections. He told the Chicago Tribune, “I cannot live in North Carolina and be a man and be treated as a man.” He announced plans to leave his home state and start a law practice in Washington, DC at the end of his term. White also blamed the continued newspaper attacks on his character, claiming that these had ruined the health of his wife.
“I am certain the excitement of another campaign would kill her…My wife is a refined and educated woman, and she has suffered terribly because of the attacks on me”.
White delivered his final speech in the House on January 29, 1901:
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 on behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people; faithful, industrious, loyal, rising people – full of potential force.
According to legend, each Phoenix lived for 500 years, and only one Phoenix lived at a time. Just before its time was up, the Phoenix built a nest and set itself on fire. Then, a new Phoenix would rise from the ashes. Both the Greeks and Egyptians associated the Phoenix with the sun.
On March 4, 1901, at the moment that White’s term formally ended, White legislators in Raleigh celebrated. Stating “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.” It is shameful that people elected to represent all have this short term, non-inclusive mentality. This is the reason that the divide exists. It is time for men and women of honor of all races to speak up! We can’t be free until all are free and have access to all that we stand for.
Between the attempt to pass anti-lynching by George Henry White and the documented lynching of upwards of 4,000 Blacks in America, on March 8th, a span of over 120 years, the United States Senate passed the Emmett Till Anti-lynching act.
We need more people like George Henry White, willing to stand up for what is right!
We need more people willing to continue the fight until it is done!
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GEORGE HENRY WHITE (1852-1918) | Black History
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Book
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George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (Southern Biography Series)
Although he was one of the most important African American political leaders during the last decade of the nineteenth century, George Henry White has been one of the least remembered. A North Carolina representative from 1897 to 1901, White was the last man of his race to serve in the Congress during the post-Reconstruction period, and his departure left a void that would go unfilled for nearly thirty years. At once the most acclaimed and reviled symbol of the freed slaves whose cause he heralded, White remains today largely a footnote to history. In this exhaustively researched biography, Benjamin R. Justesen rescues from obscurity the fascinating story of this compelling figure’s life and accomplishments.
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Ancestry Kits
While many are reluctant to uncover their ancestry, most find someone to be proud of. They are afraid because they have been subjected to the false representations in our history books that paint a dreary picture of our ancestors and contributions. Like a mighty tree, we are a product of our roots and have nothing to fear.
The kits below can start you on your journey and below that is a book to start you with information on how to get the most out of your search. Treat yourself or give as a gift. Show pride in your discoveries!
ABH – Ancestry DNA Kit
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Book – Black Roots by Tony Borroughs
Black Roots: A Beginners Guide To Tracing The African American Family Tree
Trace, document, record, and write your family’s history with this easy-to-read, step-by-step authoritative guide.
Finally, here is the fun, easy-to-use guide that African Americans have been waiting for since Alex Haley published Roots more than twenty-five years ago. Written by the leading African American professional genealogist in the United States who teaches and lectures widely, Black Roots highlights some of the special problems, solutions, and sources unique to African Americans. Based on solid genealogical principles and designed for those who have little or no experience researching their family’s past, but valuable to any genealogist, this book explains everything you need to get started, including: where to search close to home, where to write for records, how to make the best use of libraries and the Internet, and how to organize research, analyze historical documents, and write the family history.
This guide also includes:
-real case histories that illustrate the unique challenges posed to African Americans and how they were solved
-more than 100 illustrations and photographs of actual documents and records you’re likely to encounter when tracing your family tree
-samples of all the worksheets and forms you’ll need to keep your research in order
-a list of the traps even experienced researchers often fall into that hamper their research
Black Roots
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Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality
There has been no more noble fight in all of history than the one guaranteeing equal rights for formerly enslaved people.
So how did America forget the Black congressman and a Civil War veteran president to ensure that all those Union soldiers hadn’t died in vain — and more importantly, that the words on those Reconstruction Era amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing rights to the freedmen, weren’t just ink on the page, laughed at by marauding lynch mobs?
In this episode, we meet this overlooked odd couple with Benjamin R. Justesen who brings us Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality. Justesen writes, “William McKinley’s role as a sincere friend and benefactor of African-Americans may be one of the best-kept secrets in American political history.” He also introduces us to the inspiring Congressman White, whose skill as an orator — and later as the founder of Whitesboro, New Jersey — is the stuff of legend.
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Book
Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality
In Forgotten Legacy, Benjamin R. Justesen reveals a previously unexamined facet of William McKinley’s presidency: an ongoing dedication to the advancement of African Americans, including their appointment to significant roles in the federal government and the safeguarding of their rights as U.S. citizens. During the first two years of his administration, McKinley named nearly as many African Americans to federal office as all his predecessors combined. He also acted on many fronts to stiffen federal penalties for participation in lynch mobs and to support measures promoting racial tolerance. Indeed, Justesen’s work suggests that McKinley might well be considered the first “civil rights president,” especially when compared to his next five successors in office. Nonetheless, historians have long minimized, trivialized, or overlooked McKinley’s cooperative relationships with prominent African American leaders, including George Henry White, the nation’s only black congressman between 1897 and 1901.
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Echo Dot
These products are great for reading books even Kindle books and one of my favorites. Use the link below to see the assortment
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Celebrating Black People in America – George Henry White
The Town of Carrboro hosted a virtual program to commemorate the 120th anniversary of George Henry White’s historic farewell address to Congress. The online event was held from 6 to 8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 1, 2021.
After serving in the North Carolina State Legislature, George Henry White represented the State of North Carolina in the United States House of Representatives for two consecutive terms from 1897 to 1901. Congressman White was a leader in the introduction and the fight for anti-lynching legislation.
https://youtu.be/xqgAqNcYpDc
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Book
Devolution And Black State Legislators: Challenges And Choices in the Twenty-First Century (Suny Series in African American Studies)
by Tyson King-meadows (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
Part of: SUNY series in African American Studies (54 books)
ABH – Revolution and State Legislators
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Gift Cards
For all occasions
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Congressman George Henry White finally honored where he was born
George Henry White introduced the first anti-lynching bill in Congress.
In the late 1800s, the North Carolina native and Republican served two terms as the nation’s only elected black representation in Congress until 1901. Years would pass before another black person was elected. And it would take several decades later for White to finally be honored in Bladen County, NC; his birthplace. TV Journalist Tim Pulliam first uncovered the story in 2010 and followed up ten years later to reveal the landmark now bearing his name.
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Book
The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty
“A cohesive picture of an extraordinary figure. . . . The issues raised by Bruce’s life and career resonate today, making Graham’s book not just a history but a revealing commentary on race and class, and on their inordinately powerful force in shaping our lives today.”—Chicago Tribune
Spanning more than a century, Lawrence Otis’s illuminating biography is a fascinating look at race and class in America, witnessed through the life of Blanche Kelso Bruce—the head of America’s first black dynasty and the first black U.S. senator. Otis reveals how Bruce rose from slavery to achieve power and prestige in the aftermath of the Civil War. With his wife, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia physician, he would break social and racial barriers—a legacy continued by their children until scandal destroyed the family’s wealth and stature. Filled with triumph and tragedy, Otis’s riveting book brings into focus an important yet little-known segment of our nation’s past.
ABH – The Sentor and Socialite
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Try Amazon Fresh
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George Henry White – Standing Up for Civil Rights
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Schomburg – The man who built a library
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We have seen in the story of George Henry White and the difficulty in passing legislation to protect people from hate crimes. It is shameful that it took over 120 years as this shows the importance that America places on protecting all citizens, or the lack thereof. While we can’t change the past, we all can work to make the present and future live up to the expectations that we hold so dear!