Butler Roland Wilson (1861–1939) was an attorney, civil rights activist, and humanitarian based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Wilson was a founding member and president of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Wilson attended Atlanta University, a historically black college, where he was captain of the varsity baseball team and was voted class orator.

Mary Wilson became a well-known activist in her own right; she was a founding member of the Women's Service Club, NAACP Boston branch.

[1] In 1887, after both George L. Ruffin and his son died, Wilson opened his own criminal law practice at 34 School Street.

Former Massachusetts Attorney General Albert E. Pillsbury, who was opposed to racial restrictions, resigned in protest over the issue in 1913.

Lewis and Wilson successfully lobbied the state legislature for an amendment expanding the reach of existing anti-discrimination law to include barber shops and other public places.

[1][3] In 1913, acting on behalf of the NAACP, Wilson and fellow attorney Clement G. Morgan persuaded the directors of Boston's YMCA to change its discriminatory swimming pool policy.

The following year, he led a successful campaign to remove a songbook containing racial epithets from Boston's public schools.

[1] Wilson was one of the main leaders of a spirited but unsuccessful effort to ban the race-baiting film The Birth of a Nation from Boston theaters.

He led a delegation of NAACP members to Mayor James Curley's office in 1915, and urged state legislators to support the ban.

[8][10] Similar bills were passed in some Southern states, considered then part of the eugenics movement as a progressive effort to improve ethnic stock.

In 1917 he was appointed by Republican Governor Samuel W. McCall to the board of appeals on fire insurance rates, a post he held for the rest of his life.

[1] In 1915 he addressed a meeting of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government; the other speakers were Julia Lathrop, director of the U.S. Children's Bureau, and playwright Marion Craig Wentworth.

[15] Early in his career, Wilson was instrumental in getting the city to erect a monument to Crispus Attucks and the other victims of the Boston Massacre.