Interview with G.K. Butterfield

Background: George Kenneth (G. K.) Butterfield was born in 1947 in Wilson, North Carolina. In this excerpt from a 1993 oral history interview, Butterfield described African Americans’ attempts to vote and to elect Black candidates in Wilson before the federal Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. His recollection focused on his father, an immigrant from Bermuda and a dentist. In addition to literacy tests that excluded African American voters, patterns of segregation further limited black political power. In 1930, approximately sixty-two hundred African American residents lived in Wilson: Butterfield estimated that merely forty were registered to vote. Following the example of activists in his family, Butterfield became an advocate for voting rights. After finishing law school, he went to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and later became a judge. In 2004, eleven years after this interview, Butterfield won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing North Carolina’s First Congressional District.

My father came to Wilson in 1928. . . . It was very difficult for blacks to get registered during that time. Those who wanted to register found it difficult to register because of impediments in the registration process, such as the literacy test, and it was so subjective the registrar had to pass upon your qualifications and it was done very arbitrarily.  And of course, the majority of the black community did not want to register for fear of reprisal from the majority community.  But the few blacks who did want to register were dissuaded or actually denied the right to register. . . . I recall my father telling me that it was considered a real accomplishment if you were permitted to register to vote.  That many whites would permit blacks to register as a favor to certain blacks to extend the privilege to them and not to others was to make the one being allowed to register to feel that he had a special place in the community, and it was really used as patronage or some type of device that was supposed to make you indebted to those who made it possible for you to register.  And so forty people were registered in ’28. . . . [My father] was permitted to register because he was a professional and they thought he would be a good addition to the “good old boy” club.  And once he became registered, then he began to ask questions as to why the masses of the people could not register to vote, and that caused quite a stir in the community. . . . He was very active in voter registration, and as time went on barriers did begin to fall.  He and others would take citizens up to the courthouse and they would sit up the night before and rehearse the Constitution because they would have to read and write the Constitution.  And they would rehearse the night before and they would get up to the courthouse and some would pass and some would not.  Even educated blacks were denied because it was just the whim of the registrar.  But some were registered to vote, and as time went on, the numbers began to increase. . . .

In 1953, my dad decided to run for the city council.  We called it the Board of Alderman. . . . The city of Wilson was small at the time.  It was divided into six wards . . .[which] were drawn irregularly in such a fashion that the black community could never have a majority in any of these six wards.  That was very purposely in the way it was designed. . . . But my dad and my uncle worked very diligently in Ward Three trying to bone up voter registration.  And sure enough, in 1953, my dad ran for the seat in Ward Three. . . . and there was a tie vote between him and the white candidate.  A tie vote.  And to break the tie, both names were put into a hat and a young child pulled out a name and he was victorious.  And so he was the first black ever elected to a public office, an elective office, in eastern North Carolina.  And I think the third in the state. . . .  Then in ’55 he ran for reelection and won reelection.  No one felt that he would win reelection . . . but what the power structure didn't know was that there was a white fellow running for mayor named John Wilson who was a long shot. . . . [He] went to my dad and said, look, fellow, you know, if you can get the Negro community to support me for mayor and if I am elected, then I will appoint you as the chairman of the most powerful committee on the city council, on the Board of Alderman.  So they cut a deal.  A political deal.  And the Negro community at that time, the Negro community supported John Wilson and he became the mayor. . . .

And my dad was named chairman of the Finance Committee, which was, I mean, it was unheard of for him to be on the board much less the chairman of the most powerful committee on the board, and he was chairman.  And back then, budgets for municipalities had to be approved by the legislature.  And so it was always customary for the Finance chairman to take the budget to the legislature for approval.  And so when the budget was adopted that year for the city, my father had to take it to Raleigh to the legislature for approval.  And he walked in with a million-dollar budget. . . .  They didn't like him being in Raleigh in the legislature because it was a lily-white environment, and for this man to come up with a million-dollar budget from a rural eastern North Carolina tobacco town was just unheard of.  The budget was approved, but then there was a determination on the part of the majority community to defeat him and to make it impossible for any black to get elected to the Board of Alderman.  So what happened, in 1957… there was a vote at one of the Board of Alderman meetings to change the system from a ward system to an at-large system.  It was not on the agenda.  It hadn't been discussed in a working session.  It came as a complete surprise to my daddy….whoever made the motion, made a motion to eliminate wards, go to at-large, and not only to go to an at-large system, but to make it illegal for any voter to cast a single-shot vote.  It's what they called an anti-single-shot law.  You had to vote for a full slate or else your vote would be thrown out, and mathematically that is a device for suppressing minority voting strength. . . . Where blacks may have been 45 or 50 percent of Ward Three, when they had to run at-large, we may have been 15 or 20 percent of the registered voters of the at-large system, which made it impossible to win.  And so he ran again in ’57 and was defeated.  Terribly defeated . . . and so we went without black representation on city council from ’57 onward, up until the midseventies.  Even though blacks would run each year [they] couldn't win.

Source: G. K. Butterfield, interviewed by Paul Ortiz, October 15, 1993. Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South collection, Special Collections Library, Duke University.