As part of the CPTV original documentary "The 60s in Connecticut," we are posting the full length interviews of subjects interviewed for the project. Producers spent over a hundred hours conducting these interviews including this one of Butch Lewis.
Butch Lewis served in Vietnam, co-founded the Hartford Black Panther Party, and experienced first hand the social changes of the 1960s. “The whole 60s was a learning and growing era.”
As a young man, Butch Lewis joined the army and became a member of a recently racially integrated unit. He remembers the horrors of war and what it was like to return to the United States after being in Vietnam. He struggled not only with society’s negative reactions against returning soldiers but also with a Veterans Association that was vastly unqualified and unprepared to handle the mental trauma that was caused by serving in Vietnam.
Mr. Lewis talks about the Black Panther Party and the realities and misconceptions that surround it. “We knew kids were going to school hungry. And if you go to school hungry, it’s a problem...” he says, explaining the origins of the Black Panther’s Breakfast for School Children program. Leaders of the party were required to read two newspapers a day and understand the changing political and social environment.
From Freedom Riders to Black Panthers, Afros to voting rights, Butch Lewis talks about life in the 1960s and how things have changed. See Mr. Lewis and many others in the CPTV orginal documentary “The 60’s in Connecticut.”