By The Editors

Percy Ellis Sutton, a son of Texas and of Harlem whose remarkable achievements in several different fields of endeavor helped fuel the twentieth-century progress of black Americans, was eulogized yesterday as “a role model in living color of what it means to be both great and good.

“He was our Chairman of justice, peace, compassion, courage, integrity and love,” the Reverend Doctor James A. Forbes, Jr., the former Senior Minister at Riverside Church, declared to the huge throng who had gathered in the cathedral’s capacious sanctuary on the western edge of Harlem.

They had come to pay tribute to an individual whose civic contributions as lawyer and civil rights activist, elected official and political power broker, entrepreneur and role model to the life of Harlem, New York City and the nation seem almost unending. The Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke of them as “points of light” from “an authentic renaissance man.”

Sutton died December 26 in a Manhattan nursing home. Although he had been in declining health in recent years, his death still shook many New Yorkers – the line of people waiting in the frigid cold to attend the 11:00 a.m. service stretched for nearly two blocks.

Their collective sadness was also reflected in the strained voices of some of those who spoke of him from the church’s pulpit.

David Dinkins, who in 1989 became the first black Mayor of New York City, was one.

He was a close friend of Sutton for more than half a century and, along with Sutton, Representative Charles B. Rangel, and Basil Paterson, the former state senator and New York Secretary of State who is the father of the present Governor, David A. Paterson, exercised significant political influence far beyond Harlem’s and New York City’s boundaries. Dinkins began his brief remarks strongly.

He called Sutton “our counsel, our conscience, our champion” and noted that Sutton himself in 1977 had been the first black politician to mount a serious campaign for the New York Mayor’s office – paving the way for his own successful candidacy twelve years later.

“Had there been no [Percy] Sutton,” he declared, “there would have been no Mayor Dinkins.”

But the longer Dinkins spoke, the more laden with emotion his voice became, the more it seemed on the edge of breaking. At one point, referring to the fact that the four Harlem-based chieftains were often called “The Gang of Four,” he said plaintively, “We, who were once the Gang of Four, are now Three.”

Attallah Shabazz, the eldest of the six daughters of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) and his wife, the late Dr. Betty Shabazz, riveted those present when, in a voice laced with grief, she paid homage to the man who had become the family’s attorney and friend in the early 1950s, “before my father was nationally known.

“It’s not enough that people say he was the attorney for my father,” she said adamantly. “He put his chest in front of my family (when the family was threatened with violence). He was always present when others wouldn’t come near us, and ever after my father departed this earth, he was always there.”

“Forgive me my anguish,” she said at one point, “because it’s an unbearable loss.” But she also urged those listening to not “waste a moment of his memory. Every time you inhale or exhale, make a pledge to yourself to carry on his work.”

The Reverend Al Sharpton, in the closing eulogy, reinforced that message, asserting that Sutton was “the quintessential African-American leader of our time.”

Sutton, Sharpton said, did not succumb to “the grasshopper complex” of accepting the societal barriers constraining black Americans. “He never stopped climbing mountains. What people see now as level ground,” he said, referring to the progress black Americans have forged, “were mountains that Percy Sutton had to climb.”

The full cross-section of Sutton’s life and work seemed to be represented in the cathedral.

There were the prominent figures from the world of politics: among them, U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY); Rep. Carolyn Maloney, (D-NY); Basil Paterson and Rangel, both of whom spoke. David Paterson, who has said that Sutton was one of his mentors, could not attend the service because he had to deliver his administration’s State of the State address to the New York State Legislature in Albany. U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. also spoke, reading a letter of tribute from President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. But Holder, a native New Yorker, also spoke for himself, saying that “Without (Sutton), there would be no me. I and other generations of African-American lawyers stand on his still-broad shoulders.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in citing a lengthy list of Sutton’s achievements, said “If there are 8 million stories in the Naked City, Percy must have lived half of them,” before announcing that the city would re-name a large public school complex in Harlem for him.

Yet, for all the well-known figures from politics and government, journalism and the arts, business and entertainment, the ceremony most often had the tone of an intimate family gathering.

That was due in no small measure to the gentle reminiscences of several members of his own family and the larger Sutton clan. But that was the dominant tone of his close friends who spoke as well. They confirmed what the Rev. Sharpton would later say – that what made Sutton so significant was not just his friendships “with the VIPs down front, but with the ordinary folk up in the rafters, too.”

At the midpoint of the ceremony, the Rev. Forbes announced that Stevie Wonder, who had not been listed on the ceremony’s program, had flown in overnight from the west coast and asked permission to pay tribute to Sutton in his own way. Sitting at the piano, Wonder, a personal friend of the Sutton family, said he wanted to thank Percy Sutton “for the blessing he has given us,” and then sang in a soaring voice a poignant rendition of one of his many compositions, “As.” Its refrain is, “I’ll be loving you always.”