George H. 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, which was 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.