Sutton, Percy Ellis

Impact on the world

Serving as Malcolm X's personal attorney from the mid-1950s until his 1965 assassination and representing more than 200 civil rights defendants arrested during 1963-64 Southern marches, Sutton built parallel careers in politics and media: elected Manhattan Borough President in 1966, he became New York's highest-ranking Black elected official and held the seat for a record eleven years, while co-founding Inner City Broadcasting in 1971 with his brother Oliver, which grew from a single station into 19 outlets nationwide. His 1981 purchase and revival of the storied but financially collapsing Apollo Theater, where he produced the long-running syndicated TV series “It's Showtime at the Apollo,” helped anchor Harlem's broader economic revitalization; he received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1987 and was posthumously inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2024, having also mentored future New York City Mayor David Dinkins and Reverend Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns.

Life & background

Born November 24, 1920, in San Antonio, Texas, the youngest of fifteen children of a formerly enslaved father, Samuel Sutton, who became a segregated high school principal, and a mother who was also a teacher, Sutton stowed away on a train to New York at age twelve and was beaten by police at thirteen while distributing NAACP leaflets. He became an Eagle Scout, served as a Tuskegee Airman intelligence officer in World War II and again in the Korean War, and earned his law degree before opening a Harlem practice with his brother Oliver in 1953. He lost eleven elections over a decade before winning a New York State Assembly seat in 1964, ran unsuccessfully for New York City mayor in 1977, and remained a behind-the-scenes power broker in Democratic politics for decades afterward; he died December 26, 2009, in New York City at age 89.

Sources

1. Black Enterprise; New York State Bar Association Hall of Fame; Museum of UnCut Funk