Kim closing it's nuclear testing facility has nothing to do with Trump. It's that Mount Paektu super volcano that could cause "WORLDWIDE devastation.

"Kune Yull Suh, a professor of nuclear engineering at Seoul National University, warned last year that further tests could threaten to cause a volcanic eruption at Mount Paektu, which is about 100km away. 

On Saturday, Kim announced North Korea would close its nuclear testing facility and suspend nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests – a move welcomed by US president Donald Trump as “big progress” – and which comes ahead of a planned summit between the leaders in late May or early June."

MORE AT:

North Korea nuclear test site has collapsed and may be out of action – China study
Report builds on evidence that site is unstable after sixth nuclear test and puts Kim Jong-un’s pledge to no longer use site in a new light

Justin McCurry First published on Wed 25 Apr 2018 20.40 EDT

"British scientists visit North Korea's Mount Paektu 

The deadly Mount Paektu, which straddles the borders of North Korea and China, is responsible for one of the deadliest eruptions in human history, and scientists fear that it could blow again. 

Nearby nuclear weapons testing from the Kim Jong-un regime could trigger an eruption as rumblings could upset lava beneath the surface, scientists have previously stated. 

Now, new studies show that the eruption could eject far more sulphur into the atmosphere than previously thought, which could devastate life on Earth. 

Mount Paektu once underwent one of the most devastating eruptions in history in 946AD when it erupted so powerfully that it formed a five kilometre caldera at its summit and produced enough ash that it even showered Japan – almost 1,100km away."

MORE AT:

ERUPTION WARNING: North Korean supervolcano could blow and cause WORLDWIDE devastation

A HUGE volcano in North Korea could be on the brink of erupting, and if it does, the explosion could be so severe that it would cause devastation around the entire globe, scientists have warned.

By Sean Martin 

PUBLISHED: 06:11, Thu, Jan 19, 2017 | UPDATED: 07:26, Thu, Jan 19, 2017

Pennsylvania Net Neutrality bill PA HB2062-"As Net Neutrality Officially Ends, States Rush to Pass Workarounds"

With portions of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) net neutrality repeal order officially taking effect earlier this week, some states are facing pressure to get workarounds up and running. 

Nearly two dozen states are not wasting time. Since the FCC voted in December to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order, 28 states have introduced bills that require Internet service providers to adhere to some of the net neutrality provisions that were previously enforced by the FCC, reports the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

Of this group, only Oregon and Washington state have had success in passing net neutrality laws.

MORE AT:

Map: As Net Neutrality Officially Ends, States Rush to Pass Workarounds
Portions of the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality repeal order officially began to take effect Monday, as more than two dozen states aim to find workarounds to the FCC’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order.

Dawn Kawamoto
/ April 25, 2018

   

Omar was the leader of Obama 2008 at the Coatesville, PA office "INNOVATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: A VENTURE CAFE EXPERIENCE APRIL 30, 2018-Omar Woodward Executive Director, GreenLight Fund."

Cocktails & Capital: Investing in Social Impact, sponsored by Cozen O’Connor

                                                                  Omar Woodard, Executive Director, GreenLight Fund

                                                                  Annarie Lyles, President, Investors Circle, Philadelphia

Omar was the leader at the Obama 2008 office in Coatesville, PA

INNOVATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: A VENTURE CAFE EXPERIENCE, POWERED BY QUORUM
April 30, 2018

http://sciencecenter.org/engage/innovation-for-social-change-a-venture-cafe-experience-powered-by-quorum 

"Social needs can’t be addressed by maintaining the status quo. Change requires a holistic exploration of the people, policies and issues surrounding a problem – and a willingness to think beyond existing circumstances.

Innovation for Social Change will focus on the people invested in movements and will take a deep dive into the ideas and businesses developing scalable, systems-changing solutions.

This event is part of Philly Tech Week 2018 presented by Comcast. 

3:30 p.m.- Registration

4:00 p.m.- Social Action Panel

                                           Margaret Berger Bradley, Director of Investment Partnerships, BFTP 

                                           Evan Brandoff, Chief Executive Officer, LeagueSide

                                           Brian Linton, Founder & CEO, United by Blue

                                           Gabriel Mandujano, Founder and CEO, Wash Cycle Laundry

                                           Judy Wicks, Founder, White Dog Café

                                           MODERATOR: Nathan Render, Director of Operations, Venture Cafe Global Network

5:15 p.m.- Breakout sessions

                                           Cocktails & Capital: Investing in Social Impact, sponsored by Cozen O’Connor

                                                                  Omar Woodard, Executive Director, GreenLight Fund

                                                                  Annarie Lyles, President, Investors Circle, Philadelphia

                                           Office Hours

6:15 p.m.- Networking

Additional presenters TBA"

***

WE WILL NEVER FORGET THIS:

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Coatesville Election Photos

Photos by Kathleen Hood

Trump’s wars, will they be based on the Anti-Immigration Novel “Camp of the Saints?

It's easier to track, KKK, skinheads & Nazis. You don't need to scour news articles or internet chatrooms. 

White supremacist extremists are front page news across the United States about every day. You can find white supremacist extremist elected public officials in local, state and national government. 

The problem is the KKK, skinheads and Nazis are becoming so ordinary and acceptable that a few Republican’s are now openly pro-Nazi. 

My uncles killed Nazis. They especially hated the SS. They would be appalled at what is now ordinary GOP politics.

***

"Sooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept," according to the President.

What exactly does he mean by "breeding concept?" It appears to be a new addition to his rhetoric on immigration. He doesn't appear to have used it before on Twitter or in recent public remarks on sanctuary cities. 

FROM:

Trump blasts 'breeding' in sanctuary cities. That's a racist term.

Analysis by Z. Byron Wolf, CNN
Updated 10:10 PM ET, Wed April 18, 2018

"Trump's recent immigration push came after spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida with present and former Fox personalities, including Sean Hannity and former Fox News executive Bill Shine." 

"Notably, these Trump influencers have apparently been devouring The Camp of the Saints, a right-wing immigrant fear fantasy novel which has surfaced on Fox News in recent days—including on Tucker Carlson's show," D'Antonio wrote, referring to the interview Monday on Tucker Carlson Tonight.  

 MORE AT: 

At Mar-a-Lago, Trump hears from immigration hardliner 

By Kevin Liptak, CNN White House Producer
Updated 8:29 AM ET, Mon April 2, 2018

"The book was published in 1973, and a synopsis describes it as depicting the "destruction of Western civilization" through a mass immigration to France and the West. The Southern Poverty Law Center has condemned the novel as a "favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement." 

The Camp of the Saints saw a return to the best-seller list in 2011 and has come into public awareness once again after being cited during a Fox News interview on Monday.  

MORE AT: 

Is Trump's Military Strategy Based on Anti-Immigration Fantasy Novel 'Camp of the Saints'?

By Chantal Da Silva  On 4/4/18 at 6:32 AM

Southern Poverty Center:

A French novel, The Camp of the Saints, has become the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US. Published by The Social Contract Press, the book is revered by American white supremacists. 

If you like "The Americans" FX series this it the real thing.

A friendship between Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov—a Soviet general and Dillon’s father.  

"At the height of the Cold War, the Russian offered the CIA an unfiltered view into the vault of Soviet intelligence. His collaboration helped ensure that tensions between the two nuclear superpowers did not escalate into a shooting war."

Spies in the Family: An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship That Helped End the Cold War  – May 9, 2017
by Eva Dillon  (Author)

"Although I see Donald Trump as a forest fire...Forest fires allow things to grow that couldn't grow before." James Comey

"Although I see Donald Trump as a forest fire. He will do great damage to our norm. Forest fires allow things to grow that couldn't grow before. I see kids getting energized. It's inspiring to see kids in the wake of Parkland, out there getting involved. I see all parts of civil society the media the courts, even Congress, starting to get off it's rear end."

FROM:
FULL UNCUT INTERVIEW LATE SHOW stephen colbert

If Not Now, When? 

Punishing and demoralizing as this regime has been, the teachers stood up. Though the urge to write “finally stood up” is there, no one should underestimate the courage and desperation it takes to do just that. Moreover, this moment of resistance to an American world of austerity overseen by plutocrats is not as surprising as it might seem. 

We live in the era of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In their starkly different ways each of them is symptomatic of our moment -- in Trump’s case of a pathological condition, in Sanders’s of the possibility of recovery from the disease of acquiescence and austerity. In both, you can see the established order losing its grip. Even before the Sanders campaign, there were signs that the winds were shifting, most dramatically in the Occupy Wall Street uprising (however short-lived that was). Today, thanks in part to the Sanders phenomenon, millennials who were especially drawn to the Vermont senator make up the most pro-union part of the general population. 

Atmospheric change of this sort was abetted by elements closer to the ground. Irate teachers in the red states were generally either not in unions at all or only in union-like institutions with little power or influence. So they had to rely on themselves to mold a fighting force, an act of social creativity which happens rarely. When it does, however, it’s both captivating and inspiring, as the West Virginia uprising clearly proved to be in a surprising number of other red states. 

Class matters as does its history. West Virginia wasn’t the only place where striking or protesting teachers entered the fray well aware and proud of their state’s long history of working class resistance to the predatory behavior of employers. In the case of West Virginia, it was the coal barons. Many of the strikers had families where memories of the mine wars were still archived. 

Kentucky, most memorably “bloody Harlan County,” where strikes, bombings, and other forms of civil war between mine owners and workers went on for nearly a decade in the 1930s (requiring multiple interventions by state and federal troops), can say the same. Oklahoma, even when it was still a territory, had a vibrant populist movement and later a militant labor movement that included robust representation from the Industrial Workers of the World (the legendary “Wobblies”), a tradition of resistance that flared up again during the Great Depression.

Arizona was once similarly home to a militant labor tradition in its metal mining industries. Its grim history was most infamously acted out in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917. At that time, copper miners striking against Phelps Dodge and other mining companies were rounded up by deputized vigilantes, hauled out to the New Mexican desert in fetid railroad boxcars, and left there to fend for themselves. Those mine wars against Phelps Dodge and other corporate goliaths continued well into the 1980s.

Memories like these helped stoke the will to resist and to envision a world beyond acquiescence and austerity. Under normal circumstances to be proletarian is to be without power. Before capital is an economic category, it’s a political one. If you have it, you’re obviously so much freer to do as you please; if you don’t, you’re dependent on those who do. Hiding in plain sight, however, is a contrary fact: without the collective work of those ostensibly powerless workers, nothing moves.

 This is emphatically the case with skilled workers, which after all is what teachers are. Discovering this “fact” and acting on it requires a leap of moral imagination. That this happened to the beleaguered teachers of so many red states is reflected in the esprit de corps that numerous accounts of these rebellions have reported, including the likening of the strikes to an “Arab Spring for teachers.”

And keep in mind that many other parts of the modern labor force suffer from precarious conditions not so dissimilar from those of the public school teachers, including highly skilled “professionals” like computer techies, college teachers, journalists, and even growing numbers of engineers. So the recent strikes may portend similar recognitions of latent power in equally improbable zones where professionals are undergoing a process of proletarianization.

An imaginative leap of the sort those teachers have taken bears other fruit that nourishes victory. Instead of depicting their struggles as confined to their own “profession,” for instance, the teachers today are fashioning their movement to echo broader desires. In Oklahoma and West Virginia, for example, they have insisted on improvements not just in their own working lives, but in those of all school staff members. Oklahoma teachers refused to go back to school even after the legislature granted them a raise, insisting that the state adequately fund the education system as well. And everywhere these insurgencies have deliberately made common cause with the whole community that uses the schools -- parents and students alike -- while repeatedly expressing the desire that children not be sacrificed on the altar of austerity.

Nothing could be more at odds with the emotional logic of austerity and acquiescence, with a society that has learned to salute “winners” and give the back of the hand to “losers,” than the widening social sympathy that has been sweeping through the schoolhouses of red state America. 

Class dismissed? It doesn’t look like it.

SEE:  

Class Dismissed Class Conflict in Red State America 

By Steve Fraser

Trump wants to be mob & KKK. But the Mafia doesn't do KKK.

Trump’s a wannabe mobster. Roy Cohn, Trumps other lawyer was also Paul Castellano’s lawyer.

Constantino Paul "Big Paul" Castellano (Italian pronunciation: [kastelano]; June 26, 1915 – December 16, 1985), also known as "The Howard Hughes of the Mob" and "Big Paulie" (or "PC" to his family), was an American mafia boss who succeeded Carlo Gambino as head of the Gambino crime family in New York, the nation's largest Cosa Nostra family at the time. The unsanctioned assassination of Castellano in 1985 by John Gotti sparked years of instability for the Gambino family.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Castellano

Early in the 1930s what would become the Mafia international organized crime understood the KKK undermined their business.

"Cohen, the president’s current personal attorney, might have been hurt by Trump’s comments. He has already demonstrated fierce loyalty to his client, fulfilling Trump’s most important qualification. In vituperative messages left for reporters, and other threats to perceived enemies, Cohen has also replicated his near-namesake’s penchant for bullying. 

Cohn used his vast connections, and a compliant media, to maneuver behind the scenes. Cohen doesn’t have that luxury. His client is now the president. He’s on a much bigger stage, the stakes are much higher and the media is paying attention 

Even if Trump thinks Cohen is not as good of a henchman as Cohn, Cohen has demonstrated a willingness to push the boundaries of professional conduct on his benefactor’s behalf. And, like Cohn, that may one day come back to haunt him... 

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover recommended Cohn to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who was about to conduct investigative hearings to root out alleged communists in the federal government. Like Trump, McCarthy was notoriously prone to dramatic exaggeration, and sometimes outright fabrication. He was quick to impugn the motives and character of those with whom he disagreed, and to promote conspiracy theories. 

With Cohn at his side as chief counsel, McCarthy rose to prominence as the nation’s pre-eminent witch-hunter, making Cohn a hated figure among liberals ever since. But McCarthy went too far when he started attacking the U.S. Army for harboring communists. The Army-McCarthy hearings, broadcast on television, exposed Americans to Cohn and McCarthy’s troubling tactics and outright lies. In 1954, McCarthy’s Senate colleagues censured him and his political career nose-dived. 

But Cohn survived. In fact, he thrived. He returned to New York to establish a private practice, utilizing his political ties and pit bull personality to represent high-profile clients, including Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, mobsters John Gotti, Tony Salerno, Paul Castellano and Carmine Galante, Catholic Cardinal Francis Spellman and media moguls Rupert Murdoch and S.I. Newhouse. 

Rather than try cases, Cohn mostly pulled strings, funneled cash, insulted his adversaries and tapped his connections to reporters, gossip columnists, politicians and judges to intimidate people from bringing lawsuits against his clients. All along, he made sure that his own name appeared in the press as the city’s most influential fixer. And as a celebrity himself, he was regularly seen at the hippest nightclubs and power broker parties, including those he hosted at the Upper East Side townhouse where he worked and lived. A registered Democrat, he primarily supported Republicans and informally advised Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but when it came to influence-peddling, especially in heavily Democratic New York City, he was nonpartisan. 

In 1973, when he first met Cohn at Le Club, a members-only Manhattan disco, the 27-year-old Trump was still working for his father’s outer-borough apartment empire, trying to infiltrate the Manhattan real estate world and celebrity social scene. He told Cohn that the Justice Department was suing him and his father for systematically discriminating against prospective black tenants. The government had a solid case, but Cohn advised Trump to fight back and tell the government to “go to hell.” Cohn orchestrated a press conference at the New York Hilton where Trump announced that he was countersuing the government for $100 million, claiming that the Justice Department has used “Gestapo-like tactics” by making false and misleading statements against him and trying to force him to rent apartments to welfare recipients... 

Over the years, Trump has said Cohn exhibited the characteristics that he most admires. “If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy,” Trump told The Associated Press. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Trump told writer Tim O’Brien. “He brutalized for you.”

Trump did not repay that loyalty. In 1984, Cohn became ill and began treatment for AIDS, claiming that he had liver cancer. Trump quickly kept his distance from Cohn and dropped him as his lawyer. 

Even the ruthless Cohn was shocked by Trump’s betrayal. 'I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,' Cohn told Trump biographer Wayne Barrett. 'Donald pisses ice water.” 

MUCH MORE AT: 

CITY & STATE NEW YORK

Michael Cohen is Trump’s new Roy Cohn

The lawyer might one day regret emulating his near-namesake. 

By PETER DREIER 

APRIL 10, 2018

Politico writes “The Tragedy of Paul Ryan” entirely leaving out the rise of white nationalism & Koch brothers.

The “Beltway Press” ignores the rise of white supremacy in the Republican Party. It’s the primary reason why the “Beltway Press” is continuously wrong when they predict politics.

Here in the City of Coatesville we got an early taste of Republican Party white supremacy when “The Saha Farm” & John Birch Society Chapter Leader Pat Sellers drummed up The “Daily Local News” and local political support for Sellers racist views. 

They caused the people of Coatesville AND local business in Chester County to vote against their self interest.

We elected a “Bloc of Four” Coatesville City Council that would put Richard Legree in charge of the Coatesville Police Department and try (but fail) to construct a gas fired electric generation plant in Coatesville. SEE:

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

CrakPowerVille Did PA Rep. Hennessey have a role in the Coatesville Power Plant Plan?

***

The final result of the JBS takeover of Coatesville was arson fires. 

When he was a Federal Prosecutor Tom Hogan said to me, “Coatesville was ready to turn over and then these new guys (bloc of four) came in.” 

If the revitalization of Coatesville went as planned it would nearly end Coatesville’s coke business and present job opportunities for residents other than the drug business. I believe there are powerful politically connected people who do not want Coatesville’s position as the drug depot for Chester County, PA to change and will do anything they can to stop the revitalization of Coatesville.

MORE AT: 

Saturday, February 11, 2012

“Cook Cokeville”

Now after Donald Trump’s white supremacy takeover of the Federal Government Trump will bring “Fire and Fury” to the earth.

***

Back in 2004, before the Coatesville Dems Blog began, I stood up to warn the Chester County Democratic Committee about Pat Sellers and the rise of white supremacy in the local Republican Party. I think all but a few people ignored me. 

Without mentioning her allegiance to the PAC, Sally is also asking voters to retain her as a Republican committeewoman in the April 22 election. Kelly Geiger, her Chester County Action counterpart in Malvern, also of sweet smile and disarming manner, is also running for committeewoman. She, too, is the image of moderation and leaves Chester County Action out of her resume and talking points. 

Sally, Kelly, Gwenne Alexander, Mike Nichols, Bill Donohue and others are typical of hundreds of thousands of Christian Right extremists across the country who are trying to control both parties. So far they have failed with the Democrats, but have succeeded wildly in controlling the Republican Party at the grassroots, committeeperson level. Thus the recent changes in the Supreme Court and a president who claims to talk with God. 

Although rarely mentioned, committeepeople of both parties are critical to American politics; they select and recruit candidates for local elections, kind of like planting seeds. By planting and fertilizing their own seeds in the American lawn for the past 20 or 30 years, the Christian Right has already dramatically reshaped the Republican Party, even though they make up only 27 percent of it, and are working on reshaping the Democratic party. 

As a soon-to-be-retired Republican committeeman (and not running for reelection), let me hasten to state this: the Christian Right has the right (no pun intended) and duty to give voice and votes to their ideas and ideals. That is the strength and nobility of our system. 

But democracy depends on open, honest debate, not secrecy and subterfuge. And you can't have open debate if the other side won't even identify themselves, much less divulge their real ideas and ideals. One example: Willistown Committeewoman Kathy Bond's 2006 campaign expenses were reimbursed by Chester County Action. Neither she nor any candidate financed by Chester County Action disclosed this to a single voter. Another example: Sally, along with Kathy Bond pushed Norman McQueen into the chairmanship of their local committee a few years ago. In spite of assuring moderates on the committee that he was not aligned with the Christian Right, Norman filled every vacancy he could with Christian Right friends. Rather than even propose a Republican moderate for school board, he offered no candidate, ensuring a Democrat the position.

MORE AT:

Weeds in the American lawn

By Henry BriggsMar 26, 2008

gwennealexander
Published on Mar 11, 2014
Candidates speak at the Action Breakfast in January 2014:

Posts Tagged ‘Gwenne Alexander’

Christian Mafia-What do Congressman Joe Pitts and the West Chester Republican school board candidates have in common

"Bannon supporters wonder whether his populist wing of the Republican Party has already run out of time to maintain influence in this year’s midterm elections."

MORE AT:

Monday, January 8, 2018

The “Populist” or racist White wing of the Republican voters are their only dependable voter base.

I believe that there is a quiet war going on among Eisenhower Republicans and extremist leaning Republicans in Chester County. Unfortunately I believe that Extremist Republicans now hold a majority in the Chester County Republican Committee.

MORE AT:

Sunday, May 31, 2009

QUIET WAR

The Tragedy of Paul Ryan - POLITICO Magazine

When empty, our stores in Coatesville look like 368 (Casey Neistat) does now. Ask Benari Poulten. Benari organized the Kerry for President Campaign Headquarters in Coatesville. Something like “enterprise center” at the Coatesville Train Station, >hip

When empty, our stores in Coatesville look like 368 does now.  Ask Benari Poulten. Benari organized the Kerry for President Campaign Headquarters in Coatesville. 

This is something like the Walnut Street Labs ideas for the Coatesville Train Station, but bold, hip & internet video production centered. 

"The first floor of this station is going to be both a waiting room and an entrepreneurial center.

It will be built in the way that other floors can be put on top of it. If Harry and I succeed and we get our multi-modal grant, which is a very different kind of grant to get, if we get it we will be able to offer people to do the other floors with 70% state funding and 30%, from naturally, from themselves." Senator Dinniman:

MORE AT:

Friday, February 20, 2015

Train Station Meeting Coatesville, Methodist Church Jan. 29. 2015 OVERVIEW

IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHO CASEY NEISTAT IS:

IT'S COMING:

"But by the end of next year, developers say, the corner will host commercial properties as part of the $21 million “Coatesville Gateway” project, and there are also plans for apartments. 

Despite the vacant storefronts, in the last 15 years real estate appreciation in Coatesville has well out-paced that of Philadelphia’s collar counties, according to state figures. 

The Tax Equalization Division estimated that in 2016, total real estate value in the city was $355.1 million, up from $191.3 million in 2002. The rate of appreciation was 60.3 percent, compared with 40 percent in all of Chester County; 28.4 in Bucks; 42.3 in Montgomery; and 42.6 in Delaware. 

But the Coatesville Gateway project is the downtown’s first viable development in the last decade, said Sonia Huntzinger, economic development administrator for the city, and “'he first domino to fall in what we expect to be transformational change throughout downtown Coatesville.”

MORE AT:  

Coatesville? Will Chesco city be the next hot spot? 

Updated: JULY 24, 2017 — 9:29 AM EDT 

by Michaelle Bond, Staff Writer Twitter icon @MichaelleBond | Mail icon mbond@phillynews.com

The Sutton family. An example of a Black family not enslaved. Coatesville's Ingrid Jones' Uncle is Percy Sutton. "White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil." -Martin Luther King Jr.

"White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. That is one thing that other immigrant groups haven't had to face." Martin Luther King Jr. -Interview with Sander Vancour (NBC) 1968





Percy Sutton is the most famous member of a Black family of free Blacks held back by racism but not held back by the economic chains of American slavery.

What Percy Sutton did might be considered normal for a Jewish American, Italian American or Irish American. 



Ingrid Jones, former Coatesville City Councilperson, former employee of Senator Andy Dinniman. Ingrid sat in front of Hillary & Bill Clinton at her Uncle Percy Sutton’s funeral.

"Mr. Sutton sometimes recalled how his father would not let his children play in a segregated San Antonio park on the one day of the year that they were allowed in — on June 19, the anniversary of Texas’s implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation. 

But Mr. Sutton also remembered something else he had learned from his father: 'Suffer the hurts, but don’t show the anger, because if you do, it will block you from being able to effectively do anything to remove the hurts.”

Early life, military service, education, and family 

Sutton was born in San Antonio, Texas, the youngest of fifteen children born to Samuel Johnson ("S.J.") Sutton and his wife, Lillian. 

His father, an early civil-rights activist, was one of the first blacks in Bexar County, Texas, and used the initials "S.J." for fear it 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.^[2] 

Sutton's siblings included G. J. Sutton, who became the first black elected official in San Antonio,^[3] and Oliver Sutton, a judge on the New York Supreme Court. 

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. Ironically, 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 clearly had resources, a sense of adventure and determination during a time when many African-Americans were extremely limited in options. 

His family was committed to civil rights, and he bristled at prejudice. 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.^{[citation needed]} 

He joined the Boy Scouts of America and attained the rank of Eagle Scout in 1936 and was recognized with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award as an adult. Sutton stated that scouting was a key factor in shaping his life.^[4] Percy and Leatrice Sutton married in 1943. He later took up stunt-flying on the barnstorming circuit, but gave it up after a friend crashed. 

During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer with the Tuskegee Airmen – the popular name of a group of African American pilots who flew with distinction during World War II as the 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He won combat stars in the Italian and Mediterranean theaters.^{[citation needed]} 

Sutton attended ^{[clarification needed]} Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas; the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama; and the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia without receiving a degree. He went on to attend Columbia Law School and then Brooklyn Law School.^[2] 

Legal, business, and political career 

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.^{[citation needed]} 
Sutton's civil-rights advocacy took him even further in the minds of many. Being jailed with Stokely Carmichael and other activists endeared him to the Harlem community and showed many that he was willing to place himself in harm's way for his client's sake.^{[clarification needed]} 

Sutton was a longtime leader in Harlem politics, and was a leader of the Harlem Clubhouse, also known as the "Gang of Four". The Clubhouse has dominated Democratic politics in Harlem since the 1960s. His allies in running the Clubhouse were New York City Mayor David Dinkins, U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, and New York Secretary of State Basil Paterson – whose son, David Paterson, became New York Governor in 2008. He also was a life member of the  Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

He was a member of the New York State Assembly in 1965 and 1966. On September 13, 1966, he was elected Borough President of Manhattan, to fill the vacancy caused by the appointment of Constance Baker Motley to the federal bench.^[5] He served in that post until 1977, when he ran for the Democratic nomination for New York City Mayor against Bella Abzug, a former U.S. Representative; U.S. Representative Herman Badillo; incumbent New York City Mayor Abraham Beame; New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo; and U.S. Representative Ed Koch; Koch won the nomination and the general election. 

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."^[6] 

In 1971, Sutton cofounded the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation which purchased New York City's WLIB-AM, the city's first African-American-owned radio station.^[7] 

Sutton served in the New York City Police Department Auxiliary Police during the late 1970s.^[8] 

Sutton produced It's Showtime at the Apollo, a syndicated, music television show first broadcast on September 12, 1987. 

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Percy Sutton

"Dream to a Nightmare" MLK full interview with Sander Vancour (NBC) 1968: