Samuel Johnson Sutton was born in Virginia in 1863, the son of an enslaved person. He operated a gold mine in Mexico and later moved to San Antonio to become an educator. He and his wife Lillian had a dozen children, all who went to college and established distinguished careers.
Samuel and Lillian Sutton and their children and grandchildren succeeded, all at a time of extreme racism and segregation in the South.
The family's stories will be shared with San Antonio at an event titled “Black Brilliance: The Story of the Sutton Family” on Tuesday at the Carver Library.
The interview below is with two participants in the event, Charles Clifton Andrews, Jr., 84, retired radio executive and former Bexar County archivist, and Alexander Carver Sutton, Jr., 76, a psychotherapist and retired business owner. They are first cousins and the grandsons of Samuel and Lillian Sutton.
More information about the event is at the end of the interview.
Sutton: Our legacy started with my grandfather (Samuel J. Sutton) in Richmond, Virginia. And he was born into slavery. And then when his parents were able to marry, when slavery ended, they moved to Richmond, Virginia. My grandfather, he grew up in Richmond and ended up traveling. He went to Mexico, New York, other places, to leave Richmond. He kind of had to leave. So he left Richmond and ended up in San Antonio and Seguin, actually teaching at a college in Seguin, Texas, called Guadalupe College.
My grandmother (Lillian V. Sutton) came from New Orleans — the Carrollton section of New Orleans. She had siblings, and she was the youngest girl of the six. Her brother, he was a minister who took a job at Second Baptist Church as a pastor there, one of the first pastors they had. And she came along [to Texas], and she ended up attending Guadalupe College. She met my grandfather, who was one of the teachers there. They got together, married, and moved to San Antonio.
So that's the origin story that I know. Charles. You want to add more?
Andrews: Before she left New Orleans, she was one of the first students, I think, at Dillard [University in New Orleans]. And while we spend a lot of time talking about my grandfather, Samuel Jason [Sutton], the real rock in the family was Lillian V. Sutton, our grandmother. [She] was quite a woman, quite a woman. She had 15 children and adopted two additional ones. So she had a total of 17 children. But grandmother was sweet, she was quiet, but she was strong, man. I think you'll agree with that, Money (Andrews’ nickname for Sutton).
Sutton: Yes, I will. She was very much about children. I mean, I kind of grew up under her apron, so to speak. She was about serving [the] community. She helped start Ella Austin Children's Center [in San Antonio], which was an orphanage for Black and Hispanic kids, and [she sat] on a number of different boards. She was part of an organization of women, young African American women who basically helped start social services for the Black community on the East and West Side.
And this group of women that she was part of were very, very influential in a number of areas.
But even as she got older, she helped my dad, for instance, to help set up a camp for underprivileged kids in Seguin. Like I said, like Charles says, she was a very powerful woman, in the background a lot. But our grandfather was a very powerful man in his own right.
Andrews: One of the things that Grandmother did — and we always referred to her as “Grandmother.” Our grandfather, we referred to as “Lav,” because I understand he got that nickname because one of the children could not pronounce the word “love,” which was my grandmother's name for my grandfather, and said “lav” instead of love.
And one of the things that Grandmother did was she had what was called a sewing circle. This was a group of Black women, many of whom were the housekeepers and maids for prominent San Antonians. And when a person had a problem with one of those San Antonians, i.e. didn't pay the money back on time, they would come to the sewing circle and explain what their problem was. And the woman who was that individuals’ housekeeper/maid would go and talk to him about it and get some relief. And that was one of the little things that Grandmother did as such.
And Lav was an entrepreneur. He had a mattress factory, funeral home, skating rink, in addition to his being the principal of the school here in San Antonio — Douglas — where they went to the 11th grade. Then when they built Wheatley High School, he became the principal of Wheatley, and somebody else became the principal of Douglas, which turned into a junior high school. He was a farmer.
He had cattle and horses and all kinds of things out on Sinclair Road. He was, I think, one of the first Black persons to serve on a grand jury here in Bexar County.
Martinez: You're talking about the Suttons being such an accomplished family, establishing businesses. And this is at a time, we're in the South, here in San Antonio. And so I'm curious as to what stories you may have heard about the obstacles they encountered while they were establishing themselves here. And I'm also curious as to how you might have … played this mental game with yourself. What would San Antonio look like had the Suttons not settled in San Antonio? Charles?
Andrews: The truth of the matter is that we were kind of privileged, as such. We were the victims of segregation. But we had a good life. It's like living in a neighborhood and everybody has the same thing, and you don't know you're poor, because everybody around you is poor. But we were not poor. My father was a physician. I grew up on the West Side of San Antonio, where my father practiced medicine, and my father had the first integrated medical practice in the South to Southwest, because he set up on the West Side and just took people as they came.
And since he was the only physician in the area, all the different people of different ethnic groups and that kind of stuff went to Dad for medical care. Dad practiced [medicine for] almost 60 years. And many of those non Black patients stayed with him all of those years.
Let me give you an example of the kind of experience I had. The Schu family. The Schu family had a service station on the corner of Zarzamora and Culebra. And the Schu family were my father's patients. Well, one of the Schu sons drove a bus. He drove the Culebra Street bus, as such. And one of my jobs as a child, as a kid, was to take the samples, my father's blood samples, etc, that he had drawn down to what was then called the Medical Arts building. It's now called the Emily Morgan Hotel. And so I would get on the bus, on Mr. Schu’s bus, and he would have me sit immediately behind him, although the sign of his head said that the front seats were reserved for the white people as such.
He would drive, [and I would] get off at Joske’s, run over to the Medical Arts Building, drop off the thing. And by that time, Mr. Schu would have made his circle and come back, and he picked me up and had me sit right behind him. And if anybody got on the bus and complained about me — the little Black boy sitting behind the driver — “Mister,” he would tell him, “Get off my goddamn bus.”
My family integrated a lot of things in San Antonio. My brother integrated the San Pedro swimming pool. My mother integrated the Camellia Room at Joske’s. My sister integrated the lunch counters at Woolworth, etc. So ours was a powerful family.
Now, I'm not sure if the Suttons hadn't been here in San Antonio, I think somebody else would've adopted that role. I mean, there were other very strong families in San Antonio, the Bellingers, the Hudspeths, the Burns. There were many, many very strong families, the Callases as such, who were here in San Antonio, who would have, I think, had we not been here, have taken up that mantle and made San Antonio a better place to live, like I think the Suttons did.
Sutton: I think it would look a lot different had my grandparents not settling this town. And I think because they were leaders, and vanguard leaders as such, in civil rights, in business, in social services, in a number of areas, I think it impacted the community in a major way. I mean, my grandfather alone, I don't remember my grandmother ever telling me that people dropped out of high school. Anybody who went to Wheatley, there was no such thing as a dropout rate. You went to school, and if you didn't show up, my grandfather would show up at your house to find out why you didn't show up, and talk to your parents about it. He set the tone for a lot of things in terms of excellence and expectation of excellence from everyone, I mean, from the lowest person to the highest.
So I think that expectation permeated the community in lots of ways. And so I think they did have a major impact in their own way, but I think certainly as vanguard leaders in civil rights and politics in the Black and Hispanic community. As an example, my grandmother's house on Cherry Street was a center of political action, particularly in voter education and voter registration on both the East Side, West Side of town in the Black and Hispanic community. I remember participating as a child in voter registration at the Victoria Courts. That was in the `60s.
But before that, the Spend Where You Earn program that my aunt Lillian helped to start to try to protest against those businesses that wouldn't hire Black and Hispanic people. It was a boycott program in the `40s and `50s. But it happened at my grandmother's house. A lot of political leadership was started there by Uncle G.J.’s (Garlington Jerome Sutton’s) local campaign. So that's, I think there was a major impact on the community had my aunts and uncles and my grandparents not settled, [had] they stayed in Seguin and not settled in San Antonio.
Andrews: One of the people who was very instrumental in our political affairs was a man whose name was Lalo Solis. And Lalo Solis was a Mexican American who was a friend of G.J. Sutton. And he told G.J., “I'm going to get you elected to something.” And he did. G.J. was, I think, the first Black elected to any office in the South or Southwest when he was elected to what was the San Antonio Community College Board in 1948 (G.J. Sutton was the first Black elected official from Bexar County). That was as a result of Lalo Solis’ efforts to get G.J. elected to something, and he did.
Lalo Solis was a little short fellow who was a political genius, and he shared all of his “geniusness” — I don't know what the proper term is — with G.J. G.J. then shared that with Henry B. Gonzalez.
So, on reflection of what I said that it wouldn't have made a difference, I think I'm going to backtrack on that and say, yes, I think it would have made a difference if Lav and grandmother had not come to San Antonio.
Sutton: Yeah, I think so too.
Martinez: We've kind of given a really good tease as to what people can expect when view two are part of a speaking panel at the Carver Library talking about the Sutton family legacy. Can you maybe give us a little bit more detail about that? Alexander?
Sutton: I hope that people will come. I'm hoping to see some of my friends, Charles's friends, even though we're older people now that they'll show up, interested community people will show up who want to know something about the history of San Antonio, particularly who are interested in genealogy, historical facts, because, as our family often told us, you didn't spring up out of the ground. You came from somewhere and where you came from will lead you to where you're going to need to go.
So I think a lot of folks will come just out of interest, to find out more about who the Suttons were and how they evolved as a family, how two people who could could birth and raise 12 adults who became prominent in every place they went and made a difference with in all the places that they they were involved in. And I think there's going to be a piece of the program on genealogy. It's made a difference for us in the Suttons. We found a whole branch of our family we didn't even know we had.
The story of the Suttons will be shared with San Antonio on Tuesday, Nov. 19, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Carver Library, 3350. E. Commerce. “Black Brilliance: The Story of the Sutton Family” is free and open to the public. Registration is required here.
The event is made possible by Democratizing Racial Justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio in collaboration with San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum (SAAACAM) and San Antonio Public Library.
