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 wasn't an African American 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 Wiley White 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 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. George White probably first