George Henry White

George Henry White was born on the eighteenth of December 1852, near Rosindale in Bladen County, North Carolina. His father, Wiley Franklin White, was a free man of color of African and Scots-Irish ancestry who labored in the turpentine camps and later served as a justice of the peace during Reconstruction. Some evidence suggests George was born into slavery, though the record is not conclusive. From these uncertain beginnings he reached for education with uncommon resolve, attending an old-field school, then Whitin Normal School, and graduating from Howard University in 1877.

Returning to North Carolina, White taught school in New Bern and read law under former Superior Court Judge William J. Clarke, gaining admission to the state bar in 1879 among the first handful of Black attorneys in North Carolina. He built a thriving practice and entered Republican politics, winning a seat in the state House in 1880 and the state Senate in 1884. Elected solicitor of the Second Judicial District in 1886 and reelected in 1890, he served as the only Black prosecutor in the nation for eight years.

In 1896 White won North Carolina's Second Congressional District, taking his seat in 1897. He was the sole African American in Congress during his tenure and introduced the first federal bill to make lynching a crime. When a state constitutional amendment disfranchised Black voters, he declined to seek reelection, and his term ended on the fourth of March 1901. His farewell words prophesied a people's return.

He would be the last Black congressman from the American South for twenty-eight years. White moved to the North, practiced law, banked, and co-founded Whitesboro, New Jersey, dying in Philadelphia on the twenty-eighth of December 1918. Let his name stand as a lantern kept burning through a long and deliberate darkness.