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Biography · Politics & Public Life

Henry P. Cheatham

1857–1935

United States

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Biography

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. After that, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1972 and none from North Carolina until 1992.

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Biography text · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source checked 2026-10-20

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