Percy Ellis Sutton (November 24, 1920– December 26, 2009) was an American political and business leader. An activist in the Civil Rights Movement and lawyer, he was also a Freedom Rider and the legal representative for Malcolm X. He was the highest-ranking African-American elected official in New York City when he was Manhattan borough president from 1966 to 1977, the longest tenure at that position.[2] He later became an entrepreneur whose investments included the New York Amsterdam News and the Apollo Theater in Harlem.[1]
Early life, military service, education, and family
Sutton was born in San Antonio, Texas, the youngest of fifteen children born to Samuel Johnson Sutton and his wife, Lillian.[3]
His father, an early civil-rights activist, was one of the first black civil servants a teacher and school administrator in Bexar County, Texas, and used the initials "S.J." for fear his first name, Samuel, would be shortened to Sambo. In addition to being a full-time educator, S.J. farmed, sold real estate and owned a mattress factory, funeral home and skating rink.[4]
Sutton's siblings included G. J. Sutton, who became the first black elected official in San Antonio, and Oliver Sutton, a judge on the New York Supreme Court.[5]
At age twelve, Percy stowed away on a passenger train to New York City, where he slept under a sign on 155th Street in the Harlem neighborhood of the Manhattanborough of the city. His oldest sister, Lillian Sutton Taylor, who was 20 years his senior, was attending Columbia Teacher's College at the time. His oldest brother, John Sutton, a food scientist who had studied under George Washington Carver, and also in Russia, was living in New York at the time Percy arrived there. His family was committed to civil rights, and he bristled at racism. At age thirteen, while passing out leaflets in an all-white neighborhood for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was beaten by a policeman.[6]
During the 1950s and 1960s, Sutton became one of America's best-known lawyers. He represented many controversial figures, such as Malcolm X. After the murder of Malcolm X in 1965, Sutton and his brother Oliver helped to cover the expenses of his widow, Betty Shabazz.[10]
In June 1961 Sutton and Mark Lane were arrested for breach of the peace in Hawkins Field, Mississippi after they attempted to use a white-only bathroom together.[11]
In his race for mayor, Sutton surprised his liberal political base when he turned temporarily to the right. He assailed the rising crime rate, as he termed the situation "a city turned sick with the fear of crime". He attacked criminals for "cheating, stealing, and driving away our families and our jobs."[18] His candidacy was fatally injured by racial backlash that followed the looting and arson during the New York City blackout of 1977, directly precipitating his retrenchment from politics:[19]
"It was an especially cruel fate for ... Sutton, a master builder of color-blind alliances, who had long been tapped most likely to become New York's first black mayor. (New York magazine titled a May 1974 Sutton profile 'Guess Who's Coming to Gracie Mansion?'")[20][21]
John C. Walker,The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones at Tammany 1920:1970, New York: State University New York Press, 1989.
David N. Dinkins, A Mayor's Life: Governing New York's Gorgeous Mosaic, PublicAffairs Books, 2013
Rangel, Charles B.; Wynter, Leon (2007)And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since: From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress. New York: St. Martin's Press.
↑Mahler, Jonathan (2005). Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning: 1977, baseball, politics, and the battle for the soul of a city (1sted.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp.232–234. ISBN0-374-17528-4. OCLC56057911.
↑Mahler, Jonathan (2005). Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning: 1977, baseball, politics, and the battle for the soul of a city (1sted.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p.232. ISBN0-374-17528-4. OCLC56057911.
