Our History: Featured Alumni/ae: Webb, Edwin Y., 1896

Congressman from North Carolina; Judge, U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina

Edwin Yates Webb was born in Shelby, North Carolina on May 23, 1872. He attended Shelby Military Institute and then Wake Forest College, graduating in 1893. He studied law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was admitted to the bar in 1894, practicing law in his hometown of Shelby. After completing postgraduate work at the University of Virginia Law Department, he was named to the Wake Forest College Board of Trustees in 1898 and served a two-year term as a trustee of North Carolina Agricultural and Mechanical College (now North Carolina State University) from 1899 to 1901.

Elected the chair of the local Cleveland County Democratic committee in 1898, White was temporarily chairman of the state convention in 1900, was elected to the North Carolina Senate the same year, and ran for Congress successfully in 1902. While in Congress, he chaired the Committee on the Judiciary and was one of the managers for the impeachment proceedings against U.S. Commerce Court Judge Robert W. Archbald. He served ten terms in Congress, from March 4, 1903 to November 10, 1919, when he resigned to accept an appointment by President Woodrow Wilson as a Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. White continued to serve as a district judge until his retirement on March 1, 1948. He died in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1955.