Notable Alumni – G.K. Butterfield

G. K. Butterfield

George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. (born April 27, 1947) is an American lawyer and politician who served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina’s 1st congressional district from 2004 to 2022. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected in a special election after the resignation of Frank Ballance.

His district was in the state’s northeastern corner, which included all or parts of 19 counties. A longtime advocate of civil rights, Butterfield was appointed an associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court by Governor Mike Easley in 2001, retaining the position until 2003. He was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and served as its chair from 2015 to 2017.

In November 2021, Butterfield announced that he would not run for re-election in 2022.

G. K. Butterfield was born and raised in the then segregated city of Wilson, North Carolina. Butterfield came from a prominent black family with a long history in North Carolina. Both of Butterfield’s parents were mixed-race Americans. His maternal grandfather, Rev Fred Davis, was a child of a former slave (Judah Davis) and a white man (Joe Davis).[4] His mother, Addie, taught elementary school for 48 years in some of North Carolina’s poorest communities. She was keenly focused on ensuring that her students learned to read.

Butterfield’s father, G. K. Butterfield Sr., was an immigrant from Bermuda. As a graduate of Meharry Medical College, he practiced dentistry for 50 years in the poor, segregated community of East Wilson. In the late 1940s, he helped found the Wilson Branch of the NAACP in order to register black voters in the county. In 1953, he became the first African American elected to the city council in Wilson and the first black elected official in eastern North Carolina since Reconstruction.

Butterfield graduated from Charles H. Darden High School in Wilson. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in political science and sociology from North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a historically black university. During his time at NCCU, Butterfield was active in voter registration activism, including coordinating voter registration drives in Durham and organizing a student march from the State Capitol in Raleigh to the Wilson County Courthouse to draw attention to the importance of voter registration. After completing his bachelor’s degree, Butterfield attended the NCCU School of Law, receiving a Juris Doctor degree in 1974.