HIGHWAY MARKER NAMED FOR VA. ICON
Evelyn Butts fought against state poll tax
NORFOLK — Evelyn Butts helped eliminate the poll tax from state and local elections, registered thousands to vote and upon her death in 1993 was called in a Virginia Senate resolution “one of the most influential political leaders of the last three decades.”
But in her hometown of Norfolk, there’s been little evidence of her work aside from a street named after her in her former Oakwood neighborhood.
Officials are starting to change that. The Virginia Board of Historic Resources recently approved the dedication of a new historical highway marker for Butts. Its location within the city hasn’t been decided, though.
“Evelyn was at the forefront, was a champion of rights and she has just not in my opinion been recognized for the contributions she has made,” said Norfolk Mayor Kenny Alexander, who wrote a dissertation about Butts that he’s turning into a book. “This marker certainly is another testament to (her) life and legacy.”
Butts, a seamstress, challenged in court Virginia’s poll tax, which had passed in the commonwealth in 1876. It charged citizens annually for
registering to vote and disproportionately impacted Black and poor residents. The federal poll tax had already been invalidated, but continued on the state and local levels.
The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966, which overturned the tax.
But Butts’ activism didn’t start or end with that most famous accomplishment.
“Evelyn didn’t rest after the poll tax,” Alexander said. “She actually got to work. She got things done.”
was born in Norfolk on May 22, 1924, the third of six children.
Her father had moved from Edenton, North Carolina, to find work during World War I, according to “Fearless,” a book written by her daughter, Charlene Butts Ligon.
When Evelyn was young, the family briefly moved to New York, where one of her sisters died from tuberculosis. In 1934, however, they moved back to Norfolk. Her mother died of the same illness shortly after returning.
The family lived in Oakwood, then part of Norfolk County, and Evelyn attended a Blacks-only school that had no twelfth grade. After giving birth to her first child in 1939, she felt “deep shame about getting pregnant before she was married,” Ligon wrote in the book. Evelyn did not return to finish high school.
She soon met and married Charlie Butts, a steelworker 17 years her senior. When her husband went to fight in World War II, she rode the streetcar to upscale department store Ames and Brownley to work in the kitchen, Ligon wrote.
Charlie returned in 1945 with a Purple Heart and a disability from shrapnel wounds in his back. Evelyn became a seamstress, working from her home.
She also joined the Oakwood Civic League, helping push for paved roads and connection to sewer lines in the community. “She found her voice,” Ligon wrote.
Her role as an activist picked up steam after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which found public school segregation unlawful.
Butts had joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and took part in efforts around the region to defeat Jim Crow laws.
Ligon said in a recent interview with The Virginian-Pilot that she remembers her mother going to picket local grocery stores that wouldn’t hire Black people for certain higherpaying jobs. Ligon was 12 when they went to Old Dominion University ’s Foreman Field to protest segregated seating at football games.
Ligon also recalled heading to court between third and fourth grade for the case of Beckett v. Norfolk School Board, which challenged the city’s Massive Resistance to school integration.
Her mother testified at some point during the case, she said.
The restrooms in the court building were segregated.
In 1963, Butts and her attorney, Joseph A. Jordan Jr., filed their first lawsuit against Virginia’s poll tax. It was dismissed, but they filed another the next year.
It was eventually combined with a similar case out of northern Virginia and became Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. In 1966, the Supreme Court sided 6-3 with the plaintiffs.
“Voter qualifications have no relation to wealth nor to paying or not paying this or any other tax,” justices wrote in their decision. Such taxes “invidiously discriminate.”
Butts had been there in Washington earlier that year for the court arguments, wearing a black coat and dress she’d sewn herself, according to Ligon.
Evelyn Thomas
Butts’ victory seemed to energize her.
She’s credited with registering thousands of new voters within a six-month period, which helped lead
Back in Norfolk,
to the election of the city’s first Black council member of the century: her attorney, Jordan.
Alexander, who is the city’s first Black mayor, said he owes Butts “a debt of gratitude.”
“Had it not been for Evelyn Butts, there would not be a Kenny Alexander as mayor.”
Over the ensuing decades, Butts held positions in the Democratic Party and on various city boards and commissions, including the Redevelopment and Housing Authority. She helped with the original Waterside project, Ligon said.
But she was always a volunteer, never paid for her extensive work, Ligon noted.
“She was the one who would speak up” for her community, Ligon told The Pilot.
“She needed to be there to shake them up.”
Her opinion mattered. In the hospital just months before she died, a white Republican office-seeker came to her asking for an endorsement, according to Ligon.
In 1993 at the age of 68, Butts died and was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery. The state senate adopted a resolution honoring her for her many accomplishments.
Two years later, the city renamed Elm Street to Evelyn T. Butts Avenue.
Alexander said he was there for the street renaming decades ago. He felt drawn to look into Butts’ life for a dissertation a few years ago, in part because he could not find any scholarly work that had been done on her.
His study of her is about “not only what she means to me but how important she is to the history of our country, and of course our state, and especially our city.”
Butts’ highway marker
is one of 10 that came through a Black history month contest Gov. Ralph Northam announced earlier this year.
Schoolchildren across the state proposed ideas for markers related to African American history. That’s different from the usual process of filing an application through the historic resources department, said highway marker program manager Jennifer Loux.
The suggestion for Butts actually came not from anyone in Hampton Roads, but a student in Stafford County, Loux said.
Several other markers will rise in southeastern Virginia as well, including one in Hampton for Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician who performed crucial calculations for missions such as the first orbital and manned spaceflights.
Another in Williamsburg will be dedicated to Gowan Pamphlet, a Baptist preacher who in the 1770s led clandestine religious gatherings of enslaved and free African Americans.
In James City County, one will go up for Angelo, an enslaved woman likely from the West African kingdom of Ndongo who arrived at Point Comfort in 1619.
The Department of Historic Resources makes clear that its markers are not put up to honor their subjects, but rather to educate and inform about the person.
“In this regard, erected markers are not memorials,” the department wrote in a news release.
Ligon said she’s proposed U.S. 58 and Church Street, near the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, as a possible location for the marker. She said Butts had worked on the MLK project before she died.
Ligon wants her mother’s legacy to be “that she worked to move her community forward and that she stood for equal rights for all.”
She noted that it was just earlier this year that Virginia officials removed the poll tax and other Jim Crow-era relics from its books. It’s more relevant than ever, with an election coming up, to reflect on her mother’s passion for voting rights, she said.
Asked once about how she’d become such a prominent public figure, Butts said, “I just have feelings for other people,” according to Ligon’s book.
“I feel for others, and their circumstances, and always try to help them when they are having problems,” Butts said.