President Lincoln’s Cottage is proud to partner with the Armed Forces Retirement Home (AFRH) for our annual Black History Month Program. This year's program will feature Congressman G.K. Butterfield Representative of North Carolina’s 1st District and Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The Black History Month Theme for 2020 speaks to the ongoing struggle on the part of both black men and black women for the right to vote. This theme has a rich and long history, which begins at the turn of the nineteenth century, i.e., in the era of the Early Republic, with the states’ passage of laws that democratized the vote for white men while disfranchising free black men. Thus, even before the Civil War, black men petitioned their legislatures and the US Congress, seeking to be recognized as voters. Tensions between abolitionists and women’s suffragists first surfaced in the aftermath of the Civil War, while black disfranchisement laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries undermined the guarantees in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for the great majority of southern blacks until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Through voting-rights campaigns and legal suits from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s, African Americans made their voices heard as to the importance of the vote.
Program:
* Welcome: Billy Bowen
* Invocation: Chaplain John Goodloe
* Introduction of Guest Speaker: Erin Carlson Mast
* Guest Speaker: Congressman G.K. Butterfield
* AFRH Coin: Susan Bryhan, AFRH Administrator
* Spoken Words: Faye M. Dixon
* Larry Rubin
* Song Selection: John Lott
* Conclusion: Billy Bowen
About Representative Butterfield
Congressman G. K. Butterfield is a life-long resident of eastern North Carolina. Raised in Wilson, Congressman Butterfield spent his formative years attending Charles H. Darden High School and worked tirelessly in the Civil Rights ...More...
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