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.

[1] 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.

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.

[5] In 1874, White started studies at Howard University, founded in 1867 in Washington, D.C. as a historically black college open to men and women of all races.

In addition, he worked for five months at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had visitors from around the world, and got to see something of its thriving black community, some of whose ancestors had been free since shortly after the American Revolutionary War, when Pennsylvania abolished slavery.

He also read the law, studying it in the city as a legal apprentice under former Superior Court Judge William J. Clarke, who had become a Republican after the war and founded a newspaper.

[17] In 1880, White ran as a Republican candidate from New Bern and was elected to a single term in the North Carolina House of Representatives.

The Republican president William McKinley carried many on his coattails, but White also benefited because a Democratic-Populist fusionist candidate had drawn off votes from Woodard.

In a period of increasing disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, he was the last of five African Americans who were elected and served in Congress during the Jim Crow era of the later nineteenth century.

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.

[20] 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.

[20] 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.

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.

[24] A month later, as the House was debating issues of territorial expansion internationally, White again defended his bill by giving examples of crimes in the South.

[20]Following the actions of North Carolina Democrats in 1899, who passed a suffrage amendment to the state constitution to disenfranchise blacks, White chose not to seek a third term in the 1900 elections.

[25]White delivered his final speech in the House on January 29, 1901: This 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.

North Carolina Democrat A. D. Watts announced: George H. White, the insolent negro... has retired from office forever.

No African-American North Carolinian was elected to Congress until Eva Clayton and Mel Watt won seats in the House of Representatives in 1992.

[27] In 1906 the White family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city with a well-established African American community, then experiencing significant growth due to the Great Migration.

In 1912, White was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress from Pennsylvania's 1st congressional district, following the death of the incumbent congressman.