Sutton, 90, aided 9 at LR Central

Marched with King in 1965

ATLANTA — Ozell Sutton, a longtime civil rights activist who was associated with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has died, his daughter said Sunday. He was 90.

Alta Sutton told The Associated Press that her father died at Saint Joseph Hospital in Atlanta on Saturday. She said the family had celebrated his birthday nearly a week ago.

She said her father “went peacefully.”

“He was a wonderful husband and father,” she said. “They don’t make daddies like him. He was a gem, a rare pearl. He was such a tremendous force. He lived a great life.”

Ozell Sutton, who was born in Arkansas, marched for equal rights alongside King in Selma, Ala., in 1965 and was present at the Memphis hotel where King was assassinated in 1968.

In 2012, Sutton earned a Congressional Gold Medal as one of the first black Americans to serve in the United States Marine Corps. He was also director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Relations Service in Atlanta until he retired in 2003.

Sutton also served as the general president of the national service fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. He worked for Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller and as the director of the Governor’s Council on Human Resources.

In 1950, Sutton, a Gould native, made history of his own when he became the first black reporter in the state to be hired by a whiteowned newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat.

Sutton said in a 2012 interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the Arkansas Gazette was more popular in the black community than the Democrat, and “the Democrat hired me because they wanted to reach the black community.”

He said he was a student at Philander Smith College in Little Rock at the time, and “I didn’t know anything about journalism. They told me as long as I can write and spell, I could have the job. I was very good at writing term papers, so they saw that and hired me.”

Sutton said he felt his presence made a difference in Little Rock journalism because of his ties to the black community. But he also said he felt “lonely” in the newsroom as the only black reporter.

“I just got the kind of reception you got in those days as a black man,” Sutton said. “No one talked to me, but I decided to make it anyway. And I did. I became a reporter.”

He worked at the Arkansas Democrat for seven years, covering a wide range of stories.

“I didn’t have a regular beat,” he said. “I did pretty much whatever they wanted me to do.”

By the time Central High School began enrolling black students in 1957, Sutton had left the Democrat and was working as a Little Rock activist.

He stood proudly on Central High’s campus when the nine black students known as the Little Rock Nine entered the school for the first time. Until then, segregation laws barred black students from Central.

“I was stationed as a decoy at another door,” Sutton said. “We were trying to fool the mob of people, hoping they would gather at the door we were at instead of the one the nine students were going into. Once the mob found out we were decoys, they took it out on us.”

Alta Sutton said her father was a gregarious character who was a musician and physics major.

“It’s seems like the longer you have them, the harder it is to let them go,” she said of her father. “He’s run the race and he has served.”

Information for this article was contributed by John Worthen of the