Booker T. Washington, whose famous 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech is the basis of our series “Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are: Renovating IN Gary, IN, was an investor in the Equitable Industrial Association. The Association included other prominent Black American investors including Paul Laurence Dunbar and George Henry White.

White was the leading investor and namesake of the town Washington cofounded, Whitesboro, New Jersey. Founded in 1901, the unincorporated community now has a population of 2,588.

White was an attorney who had moved to Philadelphia after serving as the last Black congressman representing  North Carolina's 2nd congressional district as the formerly enslaved were being disenfranchised.  (An issue that has not gone away:  Lawsuit claims new NC districts discriminate against minority voters.)

POH Podcasts recently interviewed Vincent Spaulding, Project Leader of the George Henry White Memorial Health & Education Center in Bladen and Columbus Counties, North Carolina. Spaulding talks about how he used his architecture and community organizing skills honed in middle-class Washington, DC and “divine intervention” to turn a 120-year-old farm house into a community center in his and White’s home county. The Center is the only memorial to White in his birth county.