Henry Plummer Cheatham

Born: December 27, 1857 in Henderson, North Carolina

Died: November 29, 1935 in Oxford, North Carolina

United States Representative, 1889-1893

Republican from North Carolina

• Cheatham served two terms as representative for North Carolina’s Black majority “Black Second” District. For most of his time in Congress, Cheatham was the only African American Member.
• Born a slave in Granville (now Vance) County, N.C., and Cheatham gained his freedom in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. 
• Cheatham attended North Carolina's first college for African Americans, Shaw University Normal School in Raleigh, and became the principal of the North Carolina’s Plymouth Normal School.   
• In 1887, he founded an orphanage for Black children in Oxford, North Carolina (still in existence and now called the Central Children's Home of North Carolina), and in 1888, he made his first bid for Congress.
• Cheatham did not get reelected but returned to Washington, D.C. in 1897 when President William McKinley, a Republican and a former colleague in the House, appointed him recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. 
• In 1907, Cheatham became the superintendent of the North Carolina Colored Orphanage at Oxford and for the next 28 years, he expanded its facilities and surrounding farmland. At the time of his death, on November 29, 1935, the orphanage housed 200 children. He was 77 years old. 

Henry Plummer Cheatham

1902

Twentieth Century Negro Literature Collection

Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division

NYPL Digital Collections: Hon. H. P. Cheatham