Percy Sutton

Percy Ellis Sutton was born on the twenty-fourth of November 1920 at San Antonio, Texas, the youngest of fifteen children of Samuel Johnson Sutton — the principal of the Phillis Wheatley High School at San Antonio and a former Buffalo Soldier of the 24th Infantry Regiment — and Lillian Smith Sutton, a domestic-science teacher.

He was placed at six at the Phillis Wheatley Elementary School at San Antonio and at fifteen at the Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College in Prairie View, Texas. He served the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War as an intelligence officer of the 332nd Fighter Group — the Tuskegee Airmen squadron — at the Italian theatre of operations in 1943 and 1944, rising to captain at the war’s close.

He took the LL.B. at the Brooklyn Law School at New York in 1949 on the G.I. Bill and the LL.M. at the Columbia Law School in 1955.

He opened his own law practice at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, Harlem in 1953 — at the corner across from the Theresa Hotel — and served as the personal attorney to Malcolm X (placed in this archive) and the Nation of Islam from 1962 until Malcolm’s assassination of the twenty-first of February 1965. Sutton signed Malcolm’s death certificate at the Audubon Ballroom and arranged the Harlem funeral at the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ.

He was elected on the second of November 1965 a member of the New York State Assembly from the 73rd District at Harlem and served the Assembly from 1965 to 1966.

He was elected on the twenty-second of September 1966 in special election to the office of Manhattan Borough President — the Borough’s first Black president — and held the office for the following eleven years across three full terms, from 1966 to 1977.

He co-founded with his brother Oliver Sutton, Hal Jackson and others on the first of June 1971 the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation at New York — the first Black-owned American urban-radio network. Inner City Broadcasting acquired in 1972 the New York AM-1190 WLIB and in 1974 the New York FM-107.5 WBLS — at the time the principal Black-format radio station of New York. Sutton was chair of the corporation from 1971 to 2002.

Inner City Broadcasting acquired in 1981 the historic Apollo Theatre at 253 West 125th Street, Harlem — at the time in derelict condition — and restored it for reopening on the third of May 1985. The Apollo Theatre Hall of Fame was established by Sutton and Inner City Broadcasting in 1983.

He died at Manhattan on the twenty-sixth of December 2009 of complications of heart failure, at eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the founder of Inner City Broadcasting.