George Henry White’s Farewell Address to Congress was delivered to the House of Representatives on January 29, 1901. White was a two-term Republican congressman from North Carolina’s Second Congressional District (known as the Black Second because of its large African American majority). During his years in the Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Congresses, he had been the only black man among 357 representatives and 84 senators from 42 states. On the day White spoke, his legislative service was drawing to a close because he had chosen not to run for a third term in the November 1900 election, a decision he had made known in a speech on June 30 of that year. In consequence, he would leave the House of Representatives on March 4, 1901, the last African American to serve in Congress in the three and a half decades following the Civil War. Because of changes in the southern political landscape, there was little likelihood that another African American would soon succeed him.