February 8, 2011

Lincoln County native Ozell Sutton was a key participant in many of the critical moments of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1950, when hired at the Arkansas Democrat, he became the first black newspaper reporter for a white-owned paper in Arkansas. In 1957, Sutton escorted the Little Rock Nine as they entered Central High School. In the 1960s, he marched at Selma and Washington DC and was with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when King was assassinated in 1968.