A “Rising People, Full of Potential Force”
In 1900, George White declined to run for re-election. As the last Black Member remaining in Congress, he anticipated defeat in any contest held following the widespread efforts to disenfranchise Black voters in North Carolina. On the eve of his departure from the House, White reflected on his imminent exit.
This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people—rising people, full of potential force.
No African-American lawmaker served in the U.S. Congress for nearly three decades following the end of Representative White’s House career on March 3, 1901. The length and persistence of this exile starkly conveyed the suffocating effect of Jim Crow, the brutal system of racial segregation imposed by law and by custom upon African Americans in the South.129
By the time Oscar De Priest of Illinois was elected to the House in 1929—becoming the first Black Representative elected in the twentieth century—a cohort of historians led by Columbia University professor William Dunning had popularized an interpretation of Reconstruction that criticized the motives and actions of the Republican Party and employed racist stereotypes to undermine the role of African Americans in government during this period. Black Members of Congress were marginalized in this story, framed as unsophisticated puppets of Republican Party functionaries or corrupt and ineffective lawmakers subverting American democracy. This interpretation prevailed for much of the twentieth century, even as African-American activists, politicians, and scholars refuted the so-called Dunning school.130
In fact, this struggle to set the historical record may have begun on the House Floor. In an 1879 speech, Joseph Rainey alluded to the argument of a northern journalist, James S. Pike, whose 1874 book, The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government, denounced Black participation in government as a wrong turn for the nation and laid the groundwork for Dunning’s interpretation. For Rainey, this was part of a coordinated effort by “the old leaders” to eliminate the transformative record of Reconstruction.131
Another Reconstruction-era Black Representative, John Lynch, published several works during his long lifetime that criticized the writing of White historians who portrayed Reconstruction in erroneous terms. In his 1913 book, The Facts of Reconstruction, as well as several articles in the Journal of Negro History, Lynch offered pointed critiques of this literature and touted the achievements of Black officeholders. In 1935—four years before the nonagenarian Lynch died—W.E.B. Du Bois, the African-American scholar and activist, issued one of the most thorough refutations of the Dunning school in his classic work, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois also praised the Black Congressmen who served during these pivotal decades, highlighting their speeches on the floor and their valiant efforts to legislate. “The words of these Black men,” Du Bois concluded, “were, perhaps, the last clear, earnest expression of democratic theory of American government in Congress.”132
In February 1890, before the seating of John Langston and Thomas Miller and the election of George Murray and George White, a story in the Washington, DC, newspaper the Evening Star chronicled the lives of the Black Representatives and Senators elected since 1870. The Leavenworth Advocate, a Black newspaper in northeast Kansas, culled the basic facts from this article to produce a similar story in its spartan pages a few weeks later. Writing for a Black audience, the Advocate celebrated two decades of Black electoral achievement, lamented the isolation of the then lone Black Member of Congress, Henry Cheatham, and hoped Langston would be seated. Published to remind readers of the promise and possibilities of Reconstruction, the article also documented the inestimable loss in Black-American representation that was the product of discrimination, violence, and corruption—a concerted effort to prevent the election of Black Members of Congress. “Had we had justice,” the Advocate declared, “there would have been more.”133
Next Section: Exile, Migration, and the Struggle for Representation
Footnotes
129Justesen, George Henry White: 291–294; Congressional Record, House, 56th Cong., 2nd sess. (29 January 1901): 1638.
130“Introduction: The Changing Image of Black Reconstructionists,” in Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era, ed. Howard N. Rabinowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982): xi–xxiv; Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (Dec. 1982): 82–100; William Archibald Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1907): 213; James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, vol. 7 (New York: MacMillan Company, 1906): 169.
131Congressional Record, House, Appendix, 45th Cong., 3rd sess. (3 March 1879): 264; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin Press, 2019): 153.
132Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction; John R. Lynch, “Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes,” Journal of Negro History 2, no. 4 (Oct. 1917): 345–368; “More About the Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes,” Journal of Negro History 3, no. 2 (Apr. 1918): 139–157; W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1998): 629.
133“Colored Solons,” 8 February 1890, Evening Star: 7; “ ‘Colored Solons’ Who Have Served in Congress,” 22 February 1890, Leavenworth Advocate (KS): 2.