Charles Rangel was walk ing along 125th Street, past the drugstores and shopping centers some said would never be, when a woman stopped him, crying uncontrollably over the death of Percy Sutton.
“Did you know Percy?” Rangel asked the woman.
“No,” she said. “But he knew me.”
Percy Sutton knew everybody.
He knew the man who ran the bank and the woman who got the loan. He knew the developer who built the high-rise apartment building and the tenant struggling to pay the rent.
“Percy made everyone feel like he was somebody,” said Rangel, whose congressional upset of the legendary Adam Clayton Powell was orchestrated by Sutton.
“Not just Malcolm X, not just Nelson Mandela, but that guy in the street, too.”
Sutton, 89, a former Manhattan borough president and urban radio executive, was friends with Malcolm X long before it was fashionable.
Friends and family who paid tribute to Sutton at a four-hour funeral at the historic Riverside Church said he stood by Malcolm’s side when even other civil-rights leaders were keeping their distance.
“Before the losses and before the trauma, when people would not be near us, he put his chest out for the Shabazz family,” Malcolm’s oldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, told the packed church.
“Even after my father’s departure from earth, he, with all due respect, kept his promise to my father.”
That promise was to love and look out for his friend’s children as if they were his own. It was a promise he made to all the children of Harlem.
Though he became known as “The Chairman” because of his leadership at Inner City Broadcasting, Sutton wasn’t above getting on his hands and knees to scrub floors at the Apollo Theater after rescuing the landmark from the junk heap.
The Rev. Al Sharpton recalled how a then-79-year-old Sutton insisted on being arrested during a civil-disobedience demonstration to protest the fatal police shooting of an unarmed immigrant, Amadou Diallo.
This was after donating airtime and money to the fight for justice.
“Even though he was a multimillionaire and a media mogul,” Sharpton said, “he lay down in front of the police station and let them cuff him for a West African he never knew.”
In a service highlighted by a Stevie Wonder performance and a salute from Sutton’s brethren in the historic Tuskegee Airmen, the most fitting tribute came from his granddaughter Sierra, who shared words from the poet Maya Angelou:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”