A former congressman stepped in as the guest speaker for a Black History Month celebration at a church in Greenville with a message rooted in the faith, education and determination of African Americans to get involved politically.
Days before Sycamore Hill Missionary Baptist church’s 2024 Black History Month celebration, their scheduled guest speaker, Val Demings, suddenly fell ill. Demings is a former congresswoman and police chief from Orlando, Fla.
Retired U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, the eight-term District 1 representative from Wilson, said that he was more than honored to fill in when leadership from the church reached out to him.
Over 200 people attended the annual event at 9 a.m. on Saturday. This year the church’s theme was “We’re Only as Good as Our Service,” and Butterfield went through a condensed timeline to illustrate what that service looked like through black history.
Butterfield said that in 1830 there were 3,000,000 enslaved people of African descent in the South, around 300,000 in North Carolina, 12,000 in Edgecombe County, 8,000 in Martin County, and 8,000 in Pitt County.
The North Carolina legislature became concerned that there was an effort to teach the enslaved to read and write because then they would want their emancipation, so the North Carolina General Assembly passed laws in 1830 and 1831 prohibiting the teaching of enslaved people to read or write, as well as free blacks from preaching. The laws reinforced the institution of slavery.
After the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery in North Carolina in 1863, Butterfield said that free black people had nothing except for the clothes on their backs, and the first thing they began to do was build churches and educate their youth.
The church became foundational to the growth, education and upward mobility of the black community, and between 1865 and 1910 the first black colleges in North Carolina were established.
Butterfield said that in 1900, a literacy test was added to the North Carolina Constitution, restricting African Americans from participating in the electoral process. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act passed during the civil rights movement in 1965 that that real change began for North Carolinians.
Henry E. Frye ran for the North Carolina legislature in 1965. He would be the first black since Reconstruction elected to the state House in 1968. He later became the state’s first black chief justice. He was in the audience and later recognized.
He sought elected office in 1968 with a civil rights activist, desegregator and dentist from Charlotte, Reginald Hawkins, who ran for governor, and Eva Clayton, who ran for Congress. Clayton would go on in 1992 to be the first Black person to serve in Congress since the reconstruction.
Butterfield said that the reason these three people ran for office was to educate, to stimulate, and to energize the African American community to get involved politically now that the Voting Rights Act had been passed, and that citizens should never forget the blood, sweat, and tears of their ancestors and all that they endured for North Carolinians to be where they are today.
The North Carolina A&T State University Choir performed three selections during the celebration and the church honored its 2024 Trail Blazers:
Portia Willis, first African American woman to hold the At-Large seat on the Greenville City Council.Dr. Alma C. Cobb, former USDA deputy assistant secretary and first African American woman to be elected to serve as commissioner in Farmville.Ivory Mewborn, first African American Mayor of Ayden.Rosie Thompson, ECU basketball hall of famer and first and only woman at ECU to have her jersey number retired.The Rev. Renee Robinson, director of special investigations with the North Carolina department of public Safety.Justice Henry E. Frye, the first African American to be elected to the North Carolina General Assembly in the 20th century and North Carolina’s first African American chief justice.
After the program, the church invited everyone to their dining hall for fellowship for a late breakfast of eggs bacon, sausage, sweet potato biscuits and cheese biscuits.
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