Butler was raised in then-segregated
Orange Heights, Florida. He served in combat during
World War II and after returning to the U.S., worked as a nurse In 1971, he was elected by the City Commission to serve as Gainesville's first African American mayor since
Josiah T. Walls during
Reconstruction. He resigned in February 1972, three weeks before the end of his term, after
The Gainesville Sun broke a story that he had pled guilty to a $9 mail embezzlement charge in 1959 (receiving probation) when he lived in Atlanta Soon after, the Florida Bureau of Pardons reviewed his case and restored his civil rights. until the 1980s, when he moved to
Newark, New Jersey to work at a
Veterans Affairs nursing home and hospital; he eventually became the hospital's head psychiatric nurse. He was a
Methodist. ==See also==