George H. White's final speech.

I've been reading up on local history: one book on politics in North Carolina and another on residential patterns in Charlotte. The decade that really grabs me is the 1890s, when a Republican-Populist coalition, representing small farmers, mill workers, and African-Americans actually managed to beat the Democrats, who represented the state's large farmers and businessmen. By broadening voting laws, the coalition made it possible for a good number of African-Americans to be elected as officials. At the high tide of this movement — 1896 — George H. White won a congressional election and became the only African-American in the House of Representatives. He won reelection in 1898.

But 1898 was also the year that the Democrats orchestrated a massive white supremacy campaign and recaptured the machinery of North Carolina politics. Determined to hamstring the opposing party, they followed the rest of the south in deliberately disenfranchising black voters by means of a the poll tax and the literacy test. Representative White realized he couldn't win after this law passed and declined to run for reelection in 1900.

I found his final speech to Congress in UNC's Documenting the American South online collection. It's a remarkable and moving speech. The most quoted section is the closing:

This, Mr. Chairman, 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 in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people--rising people, full of potential force.

Mr. Chairman, in the trial of Lord Bacon, when the court disturbed the counsel for the defendant, Sir Walter Raleigh raised himself up to his full height and, addressing the court, said:

“Sir, I am pleading for the life of a human being.”

The only apology that I have to make for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness, and manhood suffrage for one-eighth of the entire population of the United States.