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. 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. His bill 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.) He 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. White used the power of his office to appoint several African-American postmasters across his district, with the assistance of the state's Republican senator, Jeter C. Pritchard. They were able to make patronage hires, as did other 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 White, and claimed he was justifying