 After that, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1972 and none from North Carolina until 1992.Born into slavery in 1857 in what is now Henderson, North Carolina, Cheatham had an enslaved mother and a white father who was rumored to be a prominent local man during the 1850s.After the Civil War and emancipation, he attended the first public schools for black children in Vance County, established by the state legislature in the Reconstruction era.