Henry Plummer Cheatham (December 27, 1857 – November 29, 1935) was an educator, farmer and politician, elected as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1889 to 1893 from North Carolina.

He was one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South in the Jim Crow era of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as disfranchisement reduced black voting.

[1] After the Civil War and emancipation, he attended the first public schools for black children in Vance County, established by the state legislature in the Reconstruction era.

With the financial aid of a white friend, Robert A. Jenkins, Cheatham attended Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he graduated in 1883.

He encouraged the establishment of institutions for African Americans, such as the Colored Orphan Asylum in Oxford in 1883 and the founding of state normal schools for the training of black teachers.

)[4] During the campaign, Cheatham was reported by North Carolina papers to have allegedly told black voters that Simmons and President Grover Cleveland would re-enslave them.

In a period of disfranchisement of blacks in the South, Cheatham was one of five African Americans elected to Congress during the Jim Crow era of the late nineteenth century.

[9] In 1896, he competed for the Republican nomination for the district against his brother-in-law, George Henry White, who won as the next (and last) late nineteenth-century black congressman from North Carolina.

Cheatham, a friend and ally of Booker T. Washington, was criticized for standing by McKinley, as the Republican administration did little to offset the rising tide of Jim Crow racism and segregation in the South.

New state constitutions were passed in the South from 1890 to 1908 that disfranchised black citizens for more than half a century, but their provisions generally survived US Supreme Court review.