REP. G. K. BUTTERFIELD (D-NC)
George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. (born April 27, 1947) is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for North Carolina’s 1st congressional district since 2004. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected in a special election after the resignation of Frank Ballance.
His district is located in the state’s northeastern corner, stretching from Durham to Elizabeth City; it includes all or parts of 24 counties. A longtime advocate on behalf of civil rights, Butterfield was appointed to be an Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court by Governor Mike Easley in 2001, retaining the position until 2003. He is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and served as its chair from 2015 to 2017.
GK Butterfield was born and raised in the then- segregated city of Wilson, North Carolina. Butterfield came from a prominent African American family with a long history in North Carolina. Both of Congressman Butterfield’s parents were mixed race Americans. His maternal grandfather, Joe Davis, was a child of a former slave, Judah Davis, and a white man. Congressman Butterfield’s mother, Addie, taught elementary school for 48 years in some of the poorest communities in North Carolina. Mrs. Butterfield was keenly focused on making sure her students learned to read–a right that was denied to many Blacks in the South. [4] Congressman Butterfield’s father, Dr. G. K. Butterfield Sr., was an immigrant from Bermuda.[5] As a Graduate of Meharry Dental College, Dr. Butterfield practiced dentistry for 50 years in the poor, segregated community of East Wilson. In the late 1940s, Dr. Butterfield helped found the Wilson Branch of the NAACP, in order to register Black voters in the county. In 1953, Congressman Butterfield’s father became the first African American elected to the city council in Wilson, and the first Black elected official in eastern North Carolina since Reconstruction.
