The racial situation of the early twentieth century was presaged by the last black-dominated local government in the nation being swept away in the Wilmington, North Carolina white riot of 1898, and by the last nineteenth-century black member of the U.S. House of Representatives, George White of South Carolina, leaving Congress in 1901, a victim of vicious black exclusion politics. Three years into the new century, Booker T. Washington—the most powerful black man in America, who had urged blacks to eschew politics in return for social peace—would be attacked by W. E. B. Du Bois for aiding and abetting whites in their oppression of blacks. The turn of the century found blacks increasingly urbanized and competing with lower-income whites for jobs and living space. This process of change occurred as whites defined the Progressive era as one of Anglo-Saxon superiority and hegemony. Blacks attempting to escape the racism of the old order encountered it in the new, the results being nearly three decades of riots between the races.