George Butterfield, Jr. interview recording, 1993 October 15
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| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Butterfield, I wonder if we could start off with you telling me where you grew up, what town you grew up in, and when you came to this town. | 0:08 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Lifelong resident of Wilson, North Carolina. Grew up in the heart of the Black community in Wilson. I was born in '47 and have been here since, except for college and law school and military. | 0:24 |
| Paul Ortiz | Can you talk a little bit about the neighborhood and community that you grew up? | 0:42 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Well, it was small, it was poor. It was a closely-knit community. We knew each other, for the most part. Most of the inhabitants of the community were laborers. Not many people held blue collar or white collar jobs, and most of them worked in the factories, tobacco factories, or worked for White families as in-home servants. Very few had desk jobs or jobs that required an awful amount of education. Very few teachers, very few professionals. Most people were just working class people. It was a completely segregated community. There was very little, if any, interaction between the Black community and the White community, except in work related areas. Schools were segregated. Social life was segregated, public accommodations, segregated, even waiting rooms in doctor's offices and hospitals were segregated. Blacks couldn't go to the White hospital. There was a Black hospital which was understaffed and underfinanced. It was an awful situation, but we made it the best we could. | 0:48 |
| Paul Ortiz | How many people were in your household? Can you talk a little bit about your family? | 2:26 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | I was an only child, which was an exception back then. Generally, there were several children in a household, but I happened to be an only child of two parents, so three of us lived in a household together. I was blessed by being from a family that was middle class. My dad was a dentist for 50 years in this community and quite involved in the political and civic life of the community. My mother was a teacher and she taught in the public schools for more than 40 years in this community. She's now deceased. He's still living in a nursing home. He's 93. I'm 46. So three of us were in a household, middle class family, but we lived in the heart of the Black community. We were probably the most affluent family in the neighborhood, but I want to caution you our affluence by no means made us rich or wealthy, but just in comparison to the surrounding community, we were more blessed, but we were not rich people, but we did have things that others did not have. | 2:31 |
| Paul Ortiz | Do you remember your grandparents? | 3:59 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | No. My dad was from Bermuda, came to the States during World War I and volunteered for the army so he could enhance the likelihood of him succeeding in life. And so I never knew his parents. His mother died in 1935 and his father died before then. So I knew neither one of those. On my mother's side, she being from Wilson, her mother died in 1915 at a very young age, and my grandfather on my mother's side died in 51. Now I do remember him ever so slightly, very little. | 4:02 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did your parents ever tell you stories, especially your mom, did your mom tell you stories about her parents? | 4:48 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Oh, yes. Both of my parents were sensitive to the need to preserve history, even though they didn't document a lot of things. They passed past history along orally and to me. And as we would drive places and go places and sit around the house, I would hear story after story about the old days, and I remember much of what was told me, and I have a need to want to now preserve it in some written form for future generations. | 4:59 |
| Paul Ortiz | Do you remember some of the stories? | 5:39 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Oh, there are dozens. Dozens of stories. I'm not sure. I could just sit here and just go through them one at a time. But as my memory is refreshed, I may remember a few. Oh yes, I remember many stories. My father came to Wilson in 1928. He finished dental school in '27, worked in Henderson for a year and came to Wilson in '28. And he told me when he came to Wilson, there were 40 Blacks registered to vote in Wilson. 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. | 5:42 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | But the few Blacks who did want to register were dissuaded or actually denied the right to register. And there were only 40, I'm told, in 1928 who were actually registered to vote. Many of those were Republicans, incidentally. It was a privilege. It was considered, if you were Black and you were permitted to—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 40 people were registered in '28. | 6:55 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | My dad came in and he was approached by several middle class Blacks with the idea that they would try to fix it so he could register to vote, that if they could pull it off, he should consider it an honor and a privilege, and that it would be an exclusive club that he would belong to. And he should not rock the boat and try to change it, but they would lobby certain people to get him registered. And so he 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 did not register to vote. And that caused quite a stir in the community. But from that day until the day he became incompetent in 1979, when he had his massive stroke, he was always a thorn in the side of the White community and the establishment. | 8:12 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | 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 they would rehearse the constitution because they would have to read and write the constitution, and they would rehearse it the night before, and they would get up to the courthouse and some would pass and some would not. And 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. And he and my mother's brother, who was politically involved, spearheaded the voter registration movement. So much so that in 1953, my dad decided to run for the City Council. We called it then Board of Alderman. And that's a story within itself. | 9:23 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And I've got documentation close by somewhere that I can show you. But the city of Wilson was small at the time. It was divided into six wards. We now call them election districts. It was divided into six wards, and the wards were irregular in shape. And when they were first devised, and we don't know the year that they were devised, we haven't been able to document that. Even with a great amount of research, we haven't documented exactly the year. But nevertheless, they were drawn irregularly, in such a fashion that the Black community could never have a majority in any of these—either of these six wards. | 10:26 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | That was very purposeful in the way it was designed. And one ward, Ward 3, for example, was about two blocks wide, sort of like the 12th congressional district now, from Gastonia down to Durham, very irregular. I listen to the criticism now of the 12th congressional district, and that was the ward system in Wilson many years ago and no one criticized it. At least from the media, it was not criticized. But the ward was two blocks wide and about two miles long. And I've got pictures of it somewhere. And the whole purpose of it was to ensure that the Black community never could reach a majority within the ward. I got to sneeze. | 11:08 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Excuse me. This is my allergy season. But my dad and my uncle worked very diligently in Ward 3 trying to bone up voter registration. Excuse me again. And sure enough, in 1953, my dad ran for the seat in Ward 3, a Board of Alderman seat in Ward 3 and there was a tie vote between he 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. | 12:00 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And I think the third in the state, maybe fourth in the state. Maybe it's at my office, but I've got some documentation on that now. I think Winston-Salem may have been first; Durham, second; Fayetteville, third; maybe Raleigh, but maybe not. And then we were next, fourth or fifth. He was fourth or fifth elected in the state. So he was elected in '53 from the ward. That was unheard of, unheard of. He was the only one out of six. I have a picture of his swearing in ceremony in '53. And then in '55 he ran for reelection and won reelection. No one thought that he would win reelection. But what happened—That's his campaign card in 1953 for the third ward. And that's a different shot there with his glasses on. | 12:52 |
| Paul Ortiz | Wow, interesting. | 14:03 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And let's see if I've got something else. I'm supposed to have his picture getting sworn in. It's upstairs. I have it here in the apartment. I don't have that right-handed, but it's close by. But 1955, they thought they could defeat him in Ward 3 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. And John Wilson, who incidentally lives right there. That's his house right there. But the pendulum has now swung, and he's now ultra, ultra ultra-conservative. He has that problem. But anyway, he lives right there. He was running for mayor and went to my dad and said, "Look, fellow, 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, Negro community supported John Wilson and he became the mayor. | 14:04 |
| Paul Ortiz | And he was a Republican? | 15:26 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | No, it's nonpartisan. This is nonpartisan. 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. | 15:26 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And back then the 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 $1 million budget. He presented the first $1 million budget for this city in whatever year that was, '50. The legislature meets in odd-numbered years, so that would've been '55, and of course it was approved. 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 $1 million 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. | 15:42 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | So what happened in 1957, the election was scheduled for May of '57, and in February, I suppose of '57, 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 dad. He's sitting there on the board one night and all of a sudden at the close of the meeting, somebody raised their hand. "Yes." He said, 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 is what they called an anti-single-shot law. | 16:44 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | You had to vote for a full slate, else, your vote would be thrown out. And mathematically, that is a device for suppressing minority voting strength because even under at-large systems, if we single-shot voted, then we could enhance our vote. It could become more potent because we weren't sharing votes with White candidates. So single shot was a device that we used for years in at-large systems, so they adopted not only in at-large system, but an anti-single-shot vote law out of surprise. | 17:41 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Of course, it had to be approved by the legislature. It was taken to the legislature by the local representative of that time, and it passed as a local bill in the legislature. And all of a sudden we went from a district method of election to an at-large method of election, plus an anti-single-shot provision, which made it impossible, impossible. Where Blacks may have been 45% or 50% of Ward 3, when they had to run at-large, we may have been 15% or 20% 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 he came in last or near last, maybe last. And so we went without Black representation on City Council from '55—from '57 onward up until the middle '70s, even though Blacks would run each year, couldn't win. | 18:20 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so in '59, our pastor, who was actively involved, decided to challenge legally the anti-single-shot provision of the law. And that case went all the way to the US Supreme Court in Watkins vs City of Wilson, and the US Supreme Court upheld the lower court's decision. And that was since the plaintiffs, Blacks—And he was also president of NAACP, Reverend Watkins was. Of course, my dad was very active. That since the plaintiffs could not demonstrate that the election result would have been different had there not been the anti-single-shot provision that they had failed to prove their case. And the US Supreme Court agreed. But 10 or 15 years later, the courts struck down the anti-single-shot law. But we were just before our time. | 19:24 |
| Paul Ortiz | When your father began helping people register to vote, was that in the 1940s? | 20:27 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Yes. | 20:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was that something he was doing by himself, or was it part of an NAACP action, or both? | 20:36 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Both. NAACP had his hand in it. NAACP was a small group of people, and so it would be both, but it was the minister, and my father, and one or two other people who really spearheaded it. | 20:45 |
| Paul Ortiz | Well, obviously by the mid '50s, a lot of Black people were voting but not a lot. | 21:11 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Not a lot, not a lot. I suspect in the '50s, 20% of the eligible Blacks were registered, one out of five. | 21:20 |
| Paul Ortiz | And this was basically a local effort to register? | 21:35 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Yes, yes. No outside influence at all. | 21:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | So when you grew up, did you remember—I mean, now do you remember some of these things happening when you grew up? Did you feel different from political activity? | 21:46 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Yeah, I remember a lot because it was risky. It was risky to one's family, to one's own health and safety to get involved in political matters. And so my father was hated by a lot of people. We received hate phone calls from people identifying themselves as the Klan from time to time. But that didn't dissuade him and never did my mother become discouraged. My mother was not a leader. She was not out front like my father was, but she was supportive of his work. But yes, I remember a lot of what was going on. After the political efforts were, after the US Supreme Court shot down our lawsuit, then the focus moved then to public accommodations. The same group of men then decided to integrate the baseball stadium here in Wilson. You came by just a few minutes ago, and we had a minor league ball club called the Wilson Tobs, T-O-B-S, Tobs being an acronym for our abbreviation for tobacco. | 22:02 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And Blacks who went to the ballgame had to sit in a very decrepit, rundown, bullpen behind first base, while the grandstand, which was the ballpark proper, was very beautiful and very large, and it was covered to protect you from the elements. But the Black section was just a little, maybe 20 by 20 bullpen down first base line, and that's where Blacks had to sit in order to watch the game. Of course, the ball teams were all White, and so my father and others decided to integrate the ballpark, and that was a big thing around here. I can't even express to you how significant that was in this community now that we are 30 years later, 40 years later. But that was a big thing. | 23:25 |
| Paul Ortiz | That was in the mid '50s? | 24:22 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Yes, that was in the late '50s. That was after the challenge, the US Supreme Court was turned down. They lost that battle, so they had to move to another front, and the ball stadium became the focal point and they were refused admittance to the ballpark. | 24:24 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And it became a big, big scandal, a big issue in the community. I was young, and so I was not involved with it, even though they would take me along as a little boy occasionally. But eventually, they were seated at the stadium. They had meetings with the owner of the team, and finally they were admitted into the stadium. But most of the Blacks preferred to go back to the bullpen out of habit, out of fear, of just not wanting to get involved in controversy. Most Blacks continued to sit in the bullpen, and we were there for a purpose. We were there to integrate, not necessarily just to look at a ball game. So we sat in the stadium, and as we would sit there, there would be names called from all around, and men would be eating peanuts, and they would throw the shells down and hit us with the peanut shells, but no overt violence. | 24:46 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | So I remember that quite well. That was in the late '50s. And then the focus shifted to lunch counters. In '61, when the students at A&T began their sit-in at Woolworth's, that began to spill over down here. And my father and a group of men, and of course I went along as a little boy, tagging along. We went to the lunch counters, couldn't get served, went to the lunch counter, couldn't get served. And what happened after that, I don't know, but I know there were a series of meetings between management of the department stores and the Black leaders. And next thing I knew, they were integrated. And we went and sat down one day and had dinner. And so that succeeded. | 25:46 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And then the focus became getting Blacks employed in some of the factories around here that were all White, and also getting Blacks on at the telephone company. The telephone company was all White, the telephone operators, et cetera. Met with the president of the phone company and he said, "Yes, I'll take some of your girls, sit them down for interviews and I'll see what I can do." So the Black leadership then sat down with young Black women and educated them and prepared them for the interview. Now, they would do it for several nights before the interview, trying to get them acclimated to how they should behave, and one or two girls got put on as operators. This, we are now in the early '60s. | 26:35 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And then by that time, I was coming of age and had a keen interest in continuing the fight. And so I stepped forward as a student along with a fellow named Toby Fitch, who was my best friend. We lived here in the community together. He was one year older. You may recognize the name. He's now the majority leader in the House of Representatives and the state legislature. But Toby and I were high school schoolmates. He was a year ahead of me. And we started the student protest. And a year before we tried to start the student protest, another student had the same idea, and he went about it wrong, it proved. He went to the principal of the high school and said, "Look, I've been reading in the paper what's going on in Greensboro, Raleigh, and Durham. We'd like to do the same thing here in Wilson." | 27:27 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And the principal who was a creature of the establishment and not anti-establishment, the principal directed the student to forget it, to, "Don't dare start any type of sit-ins or confrontation in the community." That that would not be a good idea. So that student left it alone. Then I came along a year or two later with the same idea, but instead of going to the principal, whom I knew would be against it, a delightful man, but not wanting to start any trouble in the community, I went to my father and to my minister, who was the president of NAACP. So we started a student chapter of the NAACP and I became the president of it, and we started the student movement in Wilson, and it caught on like wildfire. It really mushroomed into a major, major movement in Wilson. And our target was the movie theaters. At the time, Blacks had to sit upstairs at the movie theaters and Whites would sit downstairs. The price upstairs would be slightly less than the price down. | 28:27 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And we would try to gain admittance to the movie and we would be denied, and we would protest. Every Sunday afternoon after church, we would call for a mass demonstration. And it just mushroomed into a major, major movement. I mean, so much so that the downtown area of the city would have to be closed off every Sunday afternoon because of the traffic and the people and the potential for violence. And we must have had three, four, maybe 500 students, even adults. Most of us were students participating in the march. There were three movie theaters in Wilson. | 29:40 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | One didn't admit Blacks at all, the other two admitted Blacks upstairs. And so we would protest two and sometimes the three movies. We had a route that we would take to march past their businesses, and we would carry signs and we'd sing freedom songs. And there were dozens of police or maybe a dozen police stationed downtown, and that was our movement. And we continued and we continued until we finally got the movie theaters to desegregate. But even after they desegregated, most Blacks still continued to sit upstairs just out of habit, but at least the opportunity was there to sit in either place. | 30:21 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so that was the next thing along the way. And then we focused on the recreation center, which is now about five blocks from here, a White recreation center. And it was unheard of for a Black to even think of going to the White recreation center. It was Sunset Recreation. In the Black community, we call it White Rec. R-E-C for recreation, White Rec. We still call it the White Rec, those from our generation, even though more Blacks go there now than Whites. We went to the White Rec and went in and they closed it. "No, you're not coming in here." "Yes, we are." "Nope." We closed the basketball courts, put chains on the door and said, "Go." Then we decided to go to the swimming pool, which was out back. We'd go to the swimming pool, try to pay our 10 cents to get in. It was either 10 or 15 cents. | 31:16 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | "No, you're not coming in here. Not coming in here." And when we would persist, they would actually close the pool, one time, drained the water out of the pool to keep us from coming in. And one day the recreation director came out and pulled us to the side and said, "Look, let me reason with you for a few minutes. Please let me just reason with you. I like you people. I hate doing this, but, and I know the day is coming when we will have to integrate the pools, but please allow Raleigh to integrate first. Let's get the Capitol city to integrate, and then we will feel better about doing it in Wilson." And we said, "No, we're not waiting for anyone to integrate. We want it now". And he said, "Well, you're not going to get it now." We'd go back a week later and they'd call the police and the police would tell us to leave. | 32:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | What day of the week were you, Sunday? | 33:04 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | No, Saturday. Well, this was summertime, so it could have been during the week. I'm sorry, I can't give you a specific day. | 33:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | That wasn't after church? | 33:17 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | No, this was not an after-church deal. And so finally, out of the clear blue one day, they decided to integrate the pools to allow us to come in and so that no longer became a challenge. And then we decided to go around to some drive-in restaurants. Back then, it was real popular to drive up to a restaurant. And you have curb service, and the waiter or waitress would come out to your car and take your order. And they would come out and see Colorado Blacks and they'd turn around and walk away and they wouldn't serve you. So we had that problem. I went to a drive in one day, had a car full of people on my dad's brand new Cadillac, and this fellow got in his car one day and just accelerated and ran right into us, just intentionally rammed his car into our car. Of course, some years later I ran into the same guy in the military. We ended up in the army together some years later. And so now, by that time we were in the mid '60s and I left here in '65 going on off to college. | 33:18 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And then I finished college in '71. I had a two-year interruption for military. But when I came back in—I went to college from '65 to '68. I was in service from '68 to '70, got out of service March of '70, didn't have to be back in school until September of '70. So when I hit town on March 24th of '70, I was told to come to a mass meeting that night at the Episcopal Church, that the Black community was trying to find some people to run for public office. We had a Board of Education race, City Council race. They were trying to drum up some candidates. | 34:32 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so I went to the meeting that night, March 24th, 1970, and they drafted two people to run for Board of Education and one for county commissioner, not City Council, getting my dates mixed up now. Two for Board of Education, one for county commissioner. That was it. And then I was drafted to be the campaign manager. I just gotten out of the army that morning. The next thing I know, I'm in a political campaign, and no Blacks had been elected since my father was defeated in '55, this was in '70. | 35:15 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And sure enough, one of my candidates won, one out of the three, won for the Board of Education. And then at-large, it was the city Board of Education. Two ran for city Board of Education, one won and one lost. But the one who won got all the Black votes and just enough White votes to allow him to win. And then he served on the city Board of Education for years. The city board then merged with the county board, and he drew something like a six or eight-year term without having to be elected, stayed on the Board of Education for years and years, and then he ran for county commissioner and won. | 35:54 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Narrowly won, but won. Then I filed a suit against the county to change the method of electing county commissioners from at-large to districts, filed the lawsuit, got the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to finance it, and to actually run the lawsuit. Even though I get credit for it, they really did most of the work, and we won that suit. And it's now a landmark in voting rights law, Haskins vs Wilson County. And I've got a whole out of paraphernalia on that. Got it right here in my closet. | 36:41 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so now we have three Blacks on the board out of seven board of county commissioners. And the chairman of the board is Black, who is the same one who I was his campaign manager for back in the old days when he ran for Board of Education. He's now the chairman of the county commissioners here. And so that was in 1970 that he first got involved. And then in '75, we recruited a retired Black principal to run for the City Council Board of Alderman because we hadn't had anyone since my dad ran. And we selected a man to run named MM Daniels, and we all got behind him. Then all of a sudden, the White community decided they had a different idea and they got another Black to run, and their Black candidate beat our Black candidate, which caused a little problem in the Black community. And of course, he's still on the City Council today. | 37:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | Can you tell me a little bit about the school that you went to as a child? What kind of school it was? Did your mother teach at the same school? | 38:21 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | No, we basically had two schools. We had an elementary school, which is 1 through 6, and a high school, which was 7 through 12. In the city system, we had basically two elementary schools and one high school. Then as time went on, we had three elementary schools and a high school. And of course, the students who lived outside of the township went to county schools. And there were three Black schools in the county, but they were called consolidated schools, which meant 1 through 12. So for Blacks outside of Wilson Township, there were three schools, 1 through 12 inside the township, 1 through 6, and then 7 through 12. There was a city school system and a county school system. | 38:31 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | The city school system was a little bit more affluent than the county school system. Back in the old days before I can remember, but I was told about it, the big issue around here was transportation to and from school, bus transportation. White children rode school buses. Black children had to walk to school. This was back in the '30s. A group of people got together, went to Board of Education and said, "Look, we want our Negro children to ride school buses." And the county superintendent said, "As long as I'm the superintendent, no nigga will ride a bus to school." | 39:30 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so the Black children had to walk and White children would come down with school buses. And that was the system for many years. And how it changed and when it changed after, I don't know. Of course, the city system didn't have a lot of busing because we were all close to our schools. We could walk to school. And that was a big, big deal around here, transportation to school. And then Black teachers got paid less than White teachers. I don't have much documentation on that, but my mother used to tell me, often, White teachers would receive more in pay than Black teachers. | 40:15 |
| Paul Ortiz | How about the quality of the school? Do you have recollections about what was it like to go to school in the situation? | 40:58 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | The quality of the plant or the facility? | 41:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | Of the facility and teaching as well? | 41:15 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | As far as the buildings were concerned, they were not as well constructed as the White schools, but it was not a large gap between the two. The Black high school was built first in 1924, and I've got a brick and a piece of wood from it upstairs in my closet. The first Black school was built in '24, and then several years later, they built another building. And then in 1959 or '60, they built a new addition to the school. And that was a pretty decent addition. Big auditorium, big gymnasium, nice cafeteria, well-planned classrooms. It was above average compared to other cities. I give the board credit for doing that. | 41:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | And now what year was that? | 42:19 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | The last addition to the high school was in '59 or '60. Yeah, they may have moved in in '60. | 42:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | Looking back, do you think that might have been in response to Brown vs Board? | 42:31 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | No. But I'm not certain about that. Because Brown vs Board was in '54. People around here didn't pay much attention to Brown vs Board. I mean, it didn't exist. I mean, it just didn't exist. Integration in this town really did not take place until '65 or '66. Fitch, the same fellow I was talking about a minute ago. My childhood friend, my college law school classmate, and then my law partner, and now my best friend, we've been together a long time. His sister named Patricia—Well, the Black leadership got together back then and decided, "All right, now it's time to try to force integration of the public schools. So what we are going to do is to go out and find a handful of talented Black children to attempt to go to the White school." | 42:40 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And they look for the cream of the crop because when they got there, they wanted them to represent the Black community well. And so they were really handpicked and they were coached and told how to act and how to conduct themselves. And so a handful was selected in '65, and they enrolled in Fike, the White high school in the fall of '65 and actually integrated the schools. And of course, I was away in college that year, but they were not welcomed on the campus, but it was uneventful. They graduated and now she's a lawyer in another part of the country. | 43:47 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | As far as the faculty was concerned, we had very dedicated teachers who were serious about their work, concerned about their children, concerned about the future of the children they came into contact with, and really gave it all that they had and tried to educate. And it worked, for the most part, it worked, even if the children didn't become scholars, they became decent law-abiding citizens with a work ethic and respect for others. And we don't have that today, unfortunately. And teachers were held in very high esteem in the Black community. They were role models, they were revered, respected. Just like when I go to a church now as a judge, I get a lot of attention. They want me to stand up, they want me to say something, they say nice things about me. And same thing back then, when new Black teachers came into town, they were just given a lofty position within the community. They didn't get paid a whole lot, but they had a lot of respect. | 44:30 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did your mother talk about her experiences as a teacher? | 45:57 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Oh, yes. I can't give you the years. I guess I could guess at it if I thought about it long enough. But the White superintendent of the city school system slapped a Black teacher in this town. And as a result of that, Blacks went on strike in the school system. Teachers withdrew, students withdrew, abandoned the school system and— | 46:01 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Okay. I was saying that probably in the early forties, and I'm not certain on the date, but the superintendent, obviously White, of the city school system slapped a Black teacher. And there was a lot of indignation in the Black community over that. And as a consequence, parents pulled students out of the classroom and many teachers withdrew from the system and started a separate private school for the purpose of educating Black children. And I don't know how long that lasted, but obviously it came to an end after a while. But that was a big thing at the time. | 0:02 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And let me also say before I forget it, that public education in Wilson for Blacks only went through either the seventh or eighth grade up until 1924. Before 1924, only seven or eight years of school was all that one could obtain. And if your family was of means whereby you could go further, then you would be sent off to what was referred to as boarding schools for the purpose of continuing your education. | 0:41 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so around here, the middle class Black families who could afford further education would send their children to Shaw, in Raleigh—Would send their children to Shaw University in Raleigh, and then they would get a high school education. Then in 1924, high school was introduced in Wilson, and Blacks then could get up to 11 years of education. You could graduate from high school then with an 11th grade education. | 1:22 |
| Paul Ortiz | What were some of the central institutions in the Black community when you joined? | 2:07 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Church, schoolhouse. School was a meeting place. Sometimes we would have meetings there and weren't supposed to do it. I think like NAACP youth meetings. We weren't supposed to meet on the school campus, but we did. Teachers knew it, and they would close their eyes to it and go in another direction. Institutions. Basically the church and the school. That's it. | 2:16 |
| Paul Ortiz | What church did your family attend? | 2:48 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Jackson Chapel, First Baptist Church. My grandfather, my mother's father, was a minister until 1951, even though I don't remember him. And he was not politically involved. And then new pastor came in '51. He stayed until just a couple years ago. And he was quite involved. Quite involved. He was my father's greatest ally. | 2:51 |
| Paul Ortiz | That's interesting. When I've talked to people about political activities and churches in those days, there was some ambivalence on some of the churches to be involved. | 3:20 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Precisely, but not my church. My church was an activist church. It led the way. Other Black churches were just the opposite. | 3:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | What were some other activities in the church? Did the church play a big part in your family's life? | 3:45 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | It did, it did to a certain extent. First of all, it was the spiritual center of our lives as far as political purposes. We would congregate, we would gather for our mass meetings in the church. We would always have a meeting in the church the night before any election, we called them mass meetings. And at that mass meeting, we would discuss the election and decide which candidates to support. That was a pretty big thing. And my church would always host such a meeting. | 3:55 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Plus, my church would host the meetings of the NAACP. When we did demonstrations, we would always gather at my church and we would draw the picket signs using the stationary of the church and church supplies. So the church was right there out front. My church was. But most of the Black churches, you're right, would take a hands-off approach to politics and protests. And that continues to be the case today. | 4:36 |
| Paul Ortiz | I wonder if we can move from the political to the personal once more. Who made the decisions in your family when you were growing up? | 5:21 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | They were joint decisions. I had a very unique situation. My mother was mentally ill during much of my childhood, even though the public didn't know it as such. People close to the family knew it. Even though she was able to continue to function as a teacher, at home, she suffered from paranoia, paranoid schizophrenic problems. And so because of that, she could not make the decisions and would not make the decisions that had to be made often. And so my father ended up being both mother and father to me as a child. | 5:37 |
| Paul Ortiz | What about medical care? What types of medical facilities existed for Black people at the time? | 6:16 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | We had basically two local Black physicians. Each was in a solo practice. Their medical resources were limited. If they needed lab work done or an x-ray done, they would have to send you to another location to get it done. But they were good men. They worked hard and they served their patients as best they could. As far as institutional care, there was, up until 1964, a Black hospital referred to as Mercy Hospital, which was understaffed and underfunded, and was just a second rate hospital. But nevertheless, that was the hospital for Black citizens, and the only hospital for Black citizens. | 6:27 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | There was no rescue squad. Back then, if you needed to be transported to a hospital in an emergency situation, you would call the funeral home that supplied to both Black and White. You would call the local funeral home, and they would send out an ambulance, which also doubled up as their hearse, to pick you up and take you to the hospital. And of course, Black funeral homes would transport Black patients, and White funeral homes, White patients. And I saw a case one time where a White funeral home was called and got to the scene and found out it was a Black patient and turned around and went back, and did not render assistance. | 7:28 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | I remember that quite well. That was in '63. I was driving for an elderly minister at the time as a chauffeur. His wife, I would take her out daily to the bank and places, and she got out one day and fell, broke her hip. White funeral home was two blocks away. Someone called the funeral home, the ambulance came down, saw that she was Black, and turned around and went back. | 8:11 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so healthcare. In '64, we had a public hospital to be constructed. And at that hospital, it was a very beautiful hospital, but Blacks were segregated by room, Blacks in one room, White to another. And I found this out doing my research for the voting rights case, HEW, Health Education Welfare, came down and inspected the hospital and found out that it was segregated by race, wrote a letter to the hospital, this is a public record, telling them that they were violating federal law, and if they didn't correct the problem and admit patients to rooms regardless of race, that federal funds would be withdrawn. | 8:41 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | The hospital called an emergency meeting of the board of trustees. And incidentally, there was a Colored man on the board of trustees. I don't even give him the credit as being a Negro or Black. I mean he was just a person of color who did not represent any of the interests of the Black community whatsoever. Hines was his name. William Hines, now deceased. Mr. Hines was on the board. And I don't know what was discussed at the board meeting, but at the conclusion of the meeting, the minutes reflect that Mr. Hines made a motion that a telegram be sent to the Department of Health Education and Welfare, informing them that we did not segregate on the basis of race. And that if Blacks and Whites were in separate rooms, it was because they wanted to be there. | 9:33 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Letter went off, another letter came back from HEW saying, we've received your letter. That's insufficient, that's inadequate. You'll still segregated, and we will be cutting off your federal funds in very short order. Called another meeting, voted on it. And finally, they were forced to integrate the rooms at the hospital, but Feds had to make a grandstand before that happened. So as a result of that, then Blacks and Whites ended up in the same rooms together at the hospital. Nash General Hospital over in Nash County got around the problem by building a new hospital with all private rooms. There are no semi-private rooms in Rocky Mount. All rooms are private. And people have forgotten it now, but the reason was to get around integration. | 10:28 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so healthcare was terrible. There were two clinics staffed by White physicians, Carolina General Clinic and Wilson Clinic. And Blacks could go to those clinics to see White doctors. But the rules were different. You had to sit in a very, very, very small room, having just bunched up together, with very poor ventilation. You couldn't see out of the room very much. It was just maybe an 18-inch by 18-inch hole that the receptionist would talk to you through, you were called by your first name, "John James, come on, Doctor so-and-so will see you now." Whereas Whites had this spacious, beautiful waiting room with plants and windows and the like. | 11:29 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Excuse me again. And so I recall that. Black patients would always be last. I had the same uncle that I told you was active in voter registration with my father, my mother's brother, was involved in a tragic car accident in 1949. He was on a bicycle, and a motorist struck him on the bicycle. He was taken to the Black hospital. And my family called a White doctor to come down to see him. The White doctor said, "I will be there." This is like 11 or 12 o'clock in the morning. White doctor said, "I'll come." Didn't show up. | 12:30 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Several hours later, they called the Black doctor. And the Black doctor said, "Well, you have called the White doctor first, and I don't want to offend him." And the Black doctor and the patient were fraternity brothers. They were friends. And of course he may have been upset because he wasn't called first, but he refused to go see his friend because the White doctor had been consulted first, and didn't want to hurt his feelings. So he refused to see my uncle. So they kept waiting on the White doctor. | 13:13 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And several hours later, I mean like eight or 10 hours past the accident, he came in, and checked him, and left. And a couple hours later he died. That was in '49. And I don't know if the reason for it was because he had been an agitator in the community for voter registration, and they just didn't want to give him medical attention. Regardless of whether that was the motive or not, he didn't receive proper attention. And he died from internal bleeding. Something which today would be very routine. But he died right in Mercy Hospital, 1949. | 13:45 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | So medical care was not really available at the same level as it was to White patients. So most Blacks consulted Black doctors, and they could not pay Black doctors what White doctors were making. And so Black doctors ended up being the providers of free medical care. And most of the patients had high blood pressure and things like that, problems that poor people generally have. And so Black doctors really couldn't prosper, even though they were perceived as being rich men, they couldn't prosper. | 14:34 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And they made house calls. It was nothing for Dr. Cohen, who was one of the doctors, to go around at night from house to house with his little bag and see elderly patients. Couldn't get paid for it. But that began to change in '65, when the new hospital was built. | 15:22 |
| Paul Ortiz | What kind of values would you feel your parents imparted to you? | 15:44 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Most of it was unspoken. It just happened. It was transferred to your siblings by example. And I was talking the other day with someone about that. Most of our teachings were just learning over a period of time by example. And no one ever usually would sit down and say, "This is what you do and this is what you don't do." Even though that would happen occasionally, we just knew not to do certain things, and to do certain things. | 15:54 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | We did not disrespect persons in authority, at least directly. We may complain behind their backs, but we would never disrespect authority. I remember one boy in elementary school named Ralph Parker, who disrespected a teacher. And he threatened to hit her one day. And that was such a big deal with us. We just couldn't believe that Ralph had threatened a teacher. But now it's commonplace. Teachers get threatened every day by students. But family values were transferred by example. | 16:28 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And the times that we lived under. Everything was segregated, no one had money to speak of, children didn't have cars. If anything, you used your parents' car, and you had to be home at a certain hour. At our high school, no children drove cars to school. And then one did drive a car to school, it was a parent's car, and it was only for a day. Something special was going on. And in the White high school parking lot, there may have been 30 cars, which was still a small number. But we obeyed. We were obedient because we were expected to be obedient. | 17:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | We think about values now of course, when we hear from the family, but you talked about values being taught school, how about in the neighborhood? | 18:06 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Oh, yes. We were a community, and we knew everyone on the block. And so we acted as a community. And it was a community of parents. Other families ensured for your safety, and ensured that you carried yourself in an honorable way. And if you didn't, they would correct you, and they would let your parents know, and you get corrected at home. So there was a lot of interaction between adults in the community, and we knew each other and we trusted each other. So the whole community raised the child. | 18:17 |
| Paul Ortiz | What did you and your family do for shopping? | 19:09 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Did very little shopping except for groceries. We went to the A&P store and the Colonial store. They went to two major supermarkets. All White cashiers. As far as department stores, we used the dime stores, the 5 and 10, we called them. Rose's. Well, Rose's came along later. Woolworth department stores. But we didn't do a lot of shopping. We really didn't. We didn't have the Walmarts and the Radio Shacks. We had Belk's. We would shop at Belk's. And all of these stores were in the inner city, downtown Wilson. And those who considered themselves of means would have the audacity to go to Raleigh and shop. That was a big thing, to go to Cameron Village in Raleigh and shop. | 19:16 |
| Paul Ortiz | Do you ever remember taking long trips to Raleigh or other places when you were [indistinct 00:20:26]? | 20:21 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Oh, yes. I came from a traveling family. My family liked to travel. That was my dad's hobby, if you will. He loved to travel, and I travel with him, and have very fond memories of trips. And plus, he was a dentist, and he would attend all of the dental conventions. And then he was active in his fraternity. He would go to all of his fraternal conventions and NAACP conventions. And then he integrated the North Carolina Dental Society, which was the White dental group. And he felt that it was important to go to their meetings. And so we did an awful amount of traveling. | 20:26 |
| Paul Ortiz | What was it like to travel back in the old days? | 21:11 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | In the old, old days, we would have to stay in rooming houses. We would go into a town, we would find the Black community, and we would find the local boarding houses, and that's where we would stay. Hotels were unheard of for Black people. That was basically in the south and in the Midwest. In the northern cities, there were selected hotels that would overnight Black guests. Selected hotels. Not all of them, but selected ones. And so when we would go to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, we could find a hotel. If we went to Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville, Tennessee, we would have to find a boarding house. | 21:14 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | When we needed to eat, we couldn't just pull up to a restaurant and eat. We would have to come off of the highway and drive into town and find the Black community and find the local Black cafe, and eat and talk for a few minutes, and get back on the highway and continue on. | 22:06 |
| Paul Ortiz | How would you find where the boarding houses existed? Was there a network? | 22:27 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | When you live in the south, and have been in the south all your life, you can find it instinctively. Right now, when I go into a strange county to hold court, never been there before, I can go straight to the courthouse. And have never been there before. Southern towns are laid out in the same fashion, basically. And you can use your senses in sensing where you are and where you're not. | 22:36 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And if you keep driving, and you can see the quality of the housing decreasing, and blight setting in and abandoned cars and people hanging on the streets, and then you can begin to see Blacks, you're getting close to the Black community, and you can just go right in and find it. You may have to stop and ask someone, "Where's the boarding house?" And you may be a block or two from it, but it wasn't hard to find. You could find it instinctively. | 23:04 |
| Paul Ortiz | And Will said in those days, were there Black-owned businesses? | 23:31 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Yes, yes, yes. There were more Black-owned businesses per capita then than they are now. Back then we had two drug stores, today we have none. We had two medical doctors, today we have none. We had a variety store, not as big as a Woolworth, but we had a variety store. Today we have none. We had restaurants back then, have a few now. Beauty parlors and barbershops have always been here. But yes, we had some good thriving Black businesses back then, because for the most part, Blacks had no other place to go except to patronize a Black business. | 23:38 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | White drugstores didn't welcome you, but the Black drugstore did. And so you patronized the drugstore that welcomed your business. And plus, back then Blacks were more community-minded. They saw the need to support each other. But now it's different. We don't see the need to support each other economically. | 24:38 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And I understand it a little, but right now, I will go two or three miles out of the way to get a tank of gas, for example, from a Black-owned Exxon station, instead of going to one five blocks down the street, which is White-owned. But I'm not fanatical about it. And if I'm late going somewhere and I need some gas, then I'm going to get it where I can get it. But if I've got the afternoon, I will drive across town to get me a tank of gas, even if I have to pay two or three cents more per gallon. Just the idea of supporting Black-owned businesses. | 25:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | So there was a consciousness of doing that in those days? | 25:38 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Yes. And less now. Oh, yes. Well, there was a consciousness, and then in some cases there was no alternative but to support Black businesses, because you weren't welcome in other places. Black doctors, even though technically you could have gone to a White doctor, you may sit there all afternoon waiting to be served. Black doctors could be served in an hour. But so much has changed and so much has not changed. | 25:41 |
| Paul Ortiz | What were the signs and symbols of Jim Crow in Wilson? | 26:10 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Railroad track. We have a railroad in Wilson, and the railroad has always been the line of demarcation between Black Wilson and White Wilson, between East Wilson and West Wilson. That railroad has been the proverbial dividing line. And when you crossed that railroad, you could tell that you were in another world. | 26:17 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | I served on the Board of Adjustment one time here in the city, and a nightclub was trying to open up on Nash Street in downtown Wilson. And the lady came up and she said, "Please don't give this place a permit to run a nightclub. I would never have dreamed of a nightclub being on Nash Street. Please protect our Nash Street." There've been nightclubs on Black Nash Street as long as I can remember. But she didn't even think of that as Nash Street. Nash Street to her began at the railroad and came in this direction. | 26:43 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | But I said, "Just a minute. You said there has never been a nightclub on Nash Street?" "There has not. I've been here since 1915. There has never been a nightclub on that street, and I don't think it needs to start now." I said, "Ma'am, you are wrong. "Dew Drop Inn? You ever heard of the Dew Drop In? You ever heard of Midtown Lounge? You ever heard of the Stoplight Grill? These are clubs that are on—" "Oh, oh, oh, oh, I know what you mean." then she was embarrassed. | 27:17 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so that railroad has always been, and I've got a picture of that. I can go right to that, I believe. The Legal Defense Fund did a brochure on Wilson, and it featured the railroad track. Well, why don't you put that on pause for a second? And street corners, early in the morning, if you needed a job for the day, you would congregate on the street corner in certain places. And farmers, White farmers, would come by and pick you up and take you out to their tobacco field for the purpose of harvesting tobacco. We called it cropping tobacco, but it was really harvesting tobacco. And so to go down the street early in the morning, you'd see old and young Blacks just sitting on the corner waiting for the truck to come by to pick them up. | 27:45 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | There was also Black women basically who worked domestically. They called it in service. So if you ever hear a person say, "I worked in service," to outsiders who are not familiar with the terminology, you wouldn't know what that meant. But in service meant I work in service with a family, serving the family. And so you'd have a lot of rich White women every morning driving into the Black community to pick up their maids. | 28:49 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And they wouldn't allow their maids to sit in the front seat of the car. They would have to sit in the back seat with them. There were a few progressive minded White female employers who would let their maid sit in the front, but most of them had to sit in the back. But whenever the husband would bring the maid home, without exception, the maid would have to sit in the back seat, because no White man wanted to ever be seen with a Black woman sitting in the front seat of his car with him. So invariably, the maid would be in the back. So that was a symbol in the Black community. You don't see it now like you used to. | 29:21 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And I'm sure there were other symbols that I just don't think of. | 30:00 |
| Paul Ortiz | What kind of things did you do in your youth for fun? [indistinct 00:30:18]? | 30:11 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | House parties. We would assemble at a grill. There was just a very small grill that served hamburgers and cheeseburgers and hotdogs and beer. We would assemble at this grill. That was the meeting place. We would go to the movie, and we would go to a drive-in movie. We had a drive-in movie, where you would stay in your car, put a speaker on your window and look at this big screen outside. But Black cars would be in the front of the movie, and Black cars would've to park in the back. There was a Black entrance and a White entrance to the drive-in movie. And so we would go to the movie. There was no such thing as going out to dinner. There just wasn't. | 30:17 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And then Hardee's came along in the early sixties. It was called Chip's then, C-H-I-P-S, and we would go to Chip's and get ten cent hamburgers. That later became Hardee's. That was a big thing, to be able to go to Chip's and get french fries and hamburger and a soda. | 31:12 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | But we didn't do a whole lot for recreation. We would play softball, baseball. I went away one summer and came back with a tennis racket. And had it one day, and all the children in the neighborhood came over to look at it that. They'd never seen a tennis racket before, didn't know what tennis was. | 31:35 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | We would watch some television, but television was not entertaining back then as it is today. Watch very little television. But then Blacks started getting on television, and that was a big thing. "Oh, a Black person is going to be on television tomorrow night." And so the whole community would be watching for Diahann Carroll or Flip Wilson or whoever, Sammy Davis Jr. The early pioneers in television. That was a big thing. You'd sit up waiting a long time to just glimpse a Black. Of course, you had the Amos and Andy program, which was a joke back, in the early fifties. | 31:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did you perceive it in the early fifties as a joke? | 32:43 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | No, not like I do today. It was not funny back then, but it was not as repulsive as it is today, when I think about it. We'd look at it and we'd laugh a little bit, but it was not that funny. | 32:51 |
| Paul Ortiz | You mentioned some of the pioneers, Black people who were television early on. Do you have any heroes during those days? Role models? | 33:19 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Black role models or just role models? | 33:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | Black role models. | 33:35 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | No, not during my day. In 1970, I did a study of role models for young Black children. I've got it upstairs now in my file cabinet. I did it for a sociology class, and most of the Black children interviewed identified Mary Tyler Moore. No. Was it—Some White. If you don't mind, I'll go get it. I can put my hands right on it, I think. | 33:37 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 34:10 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Yeah. Okay. | 34:10 |
| Paul Ortiz | The civil rights movement, and when the action phase of the civil rights movement got started, do you remember seeing images of it on television? | 34:27 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Yes, yes. The hoses and the dogs and all that? Yes. Oh, yeah. | 34:38 |
| Paul Ortiz | What was the Black communities' impression here of now? | 34:46 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Empathy. Empathy was the main sentiment. We never got those nasty scenes in Wilson, so it didn't come home. It was in Birmingham and Selma and other places. But it never rose to that level of violence here, because we would always have a delayed movement in Wilson. It would always start somewhere else. And as it would be waning at another place, then we would pick up on it. Yep. There was a little volunteering after King got killed, but I was not living here then, so I was not a part of it. | 34:53 |
| Paul Ortiz | What did you think of Reverend King as a young person growing up? | 35:51 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Oh, I revered. Yeah, he was my idol, thought the world of him. He was due in Wilson on the day he was killed. He was due in this community for a voter registration drive on the day he was murdered. He had canceled out two days before and decided to go to Memphis for the march in Memphis. But he was scheduled here. They had him chartered in on a plane. They'd already picked the route that he was going to travel, and the streets that he was going to conduct voter registration on. That was in April of '68. | 35:56 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | In June of '68, we had a big election scheduled. People have forgotten this now. We had a Black running for governor of North Carolina in '68 named Reginald Hawkins. He was a dentist who was a friend of my father's from Charlotte. He's still living. Reginald Hawkins was running for governor, and he was a very articulate politician, and he was causing a lot of stir, a lot of debate in the gubernatorial contest. And he was running. No one thought he would win, but he was making a Jesse Jackson-type showing. He was getting some attention. | 36:29 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | We also had a young Black woman running for Congress in the Second Congressional District against an incumbent named LH Fountain. Her name was Eva Clayton. You recognize that name? She's now the congressman from this district. She just got elected, but she ran the first time in '68, and got 42% of the vote, and lost. And when they did redistricting last year, this is now a Black congressional district that we are in now, and she is now the congressman serving in Washington right now. | 37:07 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | But anyway, after King got killed in April of '68, after he was murdered, then I started a voter registration drive to try to get people on the books to come out and support Hawkins and Clayton. And I led a group of students, all of the students from Wilson who lived in Durham, where I went to school, we all got together and decided we would walk home to Wilson and dramatize publicly the need to register to vote. | 37:44 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And so then we said, "No, Durham is too far from Wilson. We'll walk from Raleigh to Wilson, from the State Capitol to the Wilson County Courthouse." So in 1968, we walked from the State Capitol in Raleigh to the Wilson County Courthouse. And I walked upstairs on the second floor, which is one floor beneath where my office is now, and I registered to vote for the first time. And it was in every newspaper in the state. It was big. It took us two and a half days to walk it. And we were trying to focus attention on the need to register to vote. And of course, both of our candidates lost. | 38:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | What kind of reaction did you get from the county authorities or the Sheriff's Office? | 38:54 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Polite when we got there. We were out of there in five minutes. They didn't want any trouble. There were only about 10 or 12 of us, and most of them were really not Wilson County residents that walked. There was just three or four of us from Wilson that were in the march. But we walked all the way from Raleigh to Wilson. I can't believe it, two and a half days. But that was a voter registration drive. | 39:00 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | But King had just been killed. And that was '68. That must have been May of '68. King was killed in April. I led the march in May. The election was in, I may have led the march in late April, because I went to his funeral in Atlanta, when I came back from his funeral, that's when we did it. And then I got a draft notice to go into the Army the next month, and got drafted out of college to go off. | 39:28 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | So King was our man. He was our idol. And even though Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown and others came along, I never relented in my support of the philosophy of Martin Luther King. I just couldn't accept the militant and the violent and philosophy of Carmichael, even though many of my colleagues were gravitating toward the militants, and away from King and others. I stayed with the King philosophy, and glad that I did. | 40:02 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | But then there was those who were to the right of King, like Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, who were too moderate for me. And then the Stokely Carmichaels were too militant for me. But King was my cup of tea, and I admired him. Great man. | 40:45 |
| Paul Ortiz | Even in his stance for Vietnam War? | 41:10 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | That's something I didn't understand at the time. I really didn't have an appreciation for the war issue. And so I adopted his position because I respected him, but I really didn't understand Vietnam until well into the Vietnam crisis, before I could really understand what it was all about. But if King said it, I supported him. He said he was opposed to the war, and I was opposed to the war, plain and simple. But I did understand his domestic positions and his race positions clearly. | 41:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | And we can go back. Think about seven or eight years prior, there was a lot of NAACP activity in Monroe, North Carolina. And it was led by—person by the name of Robert Williams. | 41:59 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Did he go to jail, go to prison? | 42:21 |
| Paul Ortiz | He actually ended up fleeing the country. | 42:23 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | That's right. | 42:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | And do you remember that? | 42:28 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Vaguely. It was on 60 Minutes a couple years ago. Yes, vaguely. But no details. | 42:29 |
| Paul Ortiz | So that didn't make— | 42:37 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Monroe is in another media market. To us, Monroe, North Carolina is like Selma, Alabama. It's just another world. Yeah. No, I don't remember much about it, but yeah, I do remember Williams. But that's all. | 42:38 |
| Paul Ortiz | That's a personal curiosity of mine, how news of that traveled, especially because that was an NAACP chapter. Because that was, I know, [indistinct 00:43:10.] | 42:54 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Right. | 43:10 |
| Paul Ortiz | As well, that was involving slightly different philosophy than Wilkins or King. | 43:10 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Right. We had a church that get bombed over in Elmer City in the sixties, but I don't remember much about that, which is in Wilson County. | 43:17 |
| Paul Ortiz | Speaking of news, how did the Black community get the news? | 43:30 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Black newspapers, the Afro-American newspaper, the Carolinian, Black-controlled media, and Walter Cronkite. And who was his predecessor? Edward R. Murrow. The old pioneer. But we have a local paper there, Wilson Daily Times. Magazine, Jet Magazine. | 43:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | Well, when you think about the community now as opposed to growing up, what are some of the continuities and contrasts? | 44:15 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Black community in Wilson now is in disarray. Violence, crime, hopelessness. It all abounds now in the Black community. During my generation as a youngster, we didn't have a lot of tangible things, but we had hope. We had hope, we had a work ethic, we had a desire to change our condition. Now, hopelessness has set in, and people have, for the most part, thrown up their hands. And those who have been able to escape the ravages of the inner city and the Black community have escaped. And those who haven't had the wherewithal to escape have succumbed to it. | 44:35 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Poverty is entrenched in the Black community. You now have third and fourth generation of poverty, of welfare dependency, a lot of children being born to unwed mothers, and the mothers are getting younger and younger. There's not a desire in the community to support each other. So we have an awful problem in the Black community, and many of our social ills grow out of economic conditions. Housing is blighted in the inner city, among those who haven't escaped. It's just total blight. | 45:33 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | When it said, "If you don't stop, we're going to take your job." And so they've had to cease their involvement. | 0:01 |
| Paul Ortiz | So your—[indistinct 00:00:16]. | 0:08 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | The inner city Black community, the heart of the Black community, has not gotten better at all. It has gotten more desperate, more destitute, more blighted. And houses that were functional 30 years ago are now dilapidated. | 0:28 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Contrast in continuity. The inner city Black community has actually gone backwards. Houses that used to be functional and livable are now just dilapidated shacks and people are continuing to live in them. One improvement, when I grew up, the streets were mostly dirt streets. And because of a lawsuit that was filed when we first started practicing law, that changed and the city was forced to pave all of the streets. There were 23 miles of unpaved streets in the Black community when I started practicing law. And less than a mile in the White community, less than two miles in the White community of unpaved streets. The lawsuit was filed, which my law firm had a hand in, but we really didn't do the work. An outside group did the work, but we got the credit for it, and now streets are paved. | 0:51 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | So in terms of street paving, that has improved, but now housing in the traditional Black community has gone to pot. You must have a hundred or more houses that are now boarded up, just dilapidated shacks. They're health hazards. They're havens for drug addicts and for vandals and vagrants. We really didn't have that. We didn't have mansions when I came along, but they were functional houses. They were clean and they were kept up and people were proud of them. But now the Black community's just gone. Now, I'm talking about those who haven't escaped the walls of poverty. Those of us who have been blessed and have been able to escape, we have different circumstances. | 1:51 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | And it's okay to escape. It's okay to arrive and to accomplish, but we have a responsibility to reach back and to help others, and that's one of the frustrations of my job as a judge. I cannot get involved in controversial political issues. That is not becoming of a judge. In fact, it's forbidden. So that's one of my frustrations in my work that I cannot go to a city council meeting and to argue for something or against something or county commissioner meetings, board of education. I'm forbidden to do that. And for years, the community depended on me to be their spokesman on controversial issues, and now I've got to take a backseat and there was no one left to fill the void. I didn't know that what I was doing was so valuable, but there has been no one else who could take my place. And that's not my arrogance or ego, that's just fact. | 2:43 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | There are people who have tried to do what I used to do, but they don't have the education to articulate and to strategize and plan their position. They do it out of ignorance, and they get to a city council meeting and get terribly embarrassed because they're just wrong. They can't defend their position. But when I raised an issue, I've done my research, and plus I had the intelligence to articulate my position and very seldom would I find myself unable to defend. | 3:45 |
| Paul Ortiz | So you're talking about the change in the character of leadership and the Black community. I wonder, I'm very curious now. A question just popped up in my mind, it's not part of our survey, but as a judge, you must have some opinions about the philosophies and the methodologies of Thurgood Marshall compared with the philosophies of Clarence Thomas now, who has kind of taken that mantle of the Supreme Court. Can you talk about that? | 4:24 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | There's no comparison between Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. There's just no comparison between the two men. Thurgood, his agenda was community based and was about protecting the rights of the downtrodden and those who had been deprived for many, many years. Clarence Thomas is of a different breed and there's just no comparison. | 5:07 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | Marshall was in law for the express purpose of using law to lift up those who had been oppressed. That was his mission. And I admit to you, that's my mission in the legal profession. I practiced law for 13 years before I went on the bench. And even though I tried to make money, the thrust of my law practice was to shake up the system and to make it different and to make it more responsive to the needs of people. Marshall was the same way, and Black lawyers of yesterday were that way. And many of today's lawyers are that way, but you have some now who are not about the business of the community. They're treating the law practice simply as a business, as a source of earning money. And certainly that's a part of it, but they've lost their perspective or have never had the perspective of the Black community. | 5:35 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | But Clarence Thomas is the new breed. He's in law just as a vocation and as a source of earning a livelihood and adding intellectually to the great debates of our time, but he's not about the business of lifting up those who have been oppressed. And it can be done without violating the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. And he was chosen by the conservative political wings of the Republican Party to fill this position, and he's playing a role that furthers the interest of someone else. And so I don't support Clarence Thomas too often in his views. Thurgood Marshall was a wonderful man and I've got a file on him at the courthouse. I know that's not here, but every time I clip an article on Marshall, I'll see one, I'll clip it and give it to my secretary and she'll file it away. | 6:36 |
| Paul Ortiz | When you were in law school, were people like Walter White, Marshall, were those people your role models when you were in law school? | 7:47 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | I didn't hear Walter White as a law student. I heard about Walter White from my parents. He was their Martin Luther King. He was their Thurgood Marshall back in the old days. And Walter White to them was like Martin Luther King is and was to me. Walter White came to Wilson before I was born. And I'm told that when he passed, back then he was going from Washington, DC to Birmingham, Alabama and had to come through Wilson. And he had an old friend in Wilson, I guess the college mate, and spent the night with him. In fact, his son is still living and has a picture of that visit to Wilson. But he was a great man and he spoke on a Sunday night when he arrived, and the whole Black community turned out to hear his speech. | 7:56 |
| George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. | But no, I didn't hear of Walter White in law school. But Thurgood was obviously a very prominent figure in Black legal circles. | 8:48 |
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