Attorney William Sulton stands in one of the rooms he works in at the NAACP Milwaukee Branch, 2745 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, which also is the location for his law practice. (Photo by Meredith Melland)
By Meredith Melland
This story was originally published by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, where you can find other stories reporting on fifteen city neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Visit milwaukeenns.org.
Milwaukee attorney William Sulton’s mission is to represent those considered to be the least, the last or the left behind.
Although he has been in the news for his work with the troubled Social Development Commission and as one of the attorneys representing the family of D’Vontaye Mitchell, who died after a confrontation at the downtown Hyatt Regency, Sulton serves in various legal and board leadership roles in Milwaukee.
“I just try to do what I can do that’s the right thing and use the legal tools that I have available to me,” he said. “But they’re often difficult problems.”
Sulton estimates that he spends a third of his time running his law practice, The Sulton Law Firm, 2745 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, which specializes in civil rights and public interest cases.
He devotes another third of his time to volunteering, which includes serving as the board president of the ACLU of Wisconsin. He is the legal redress chair of the NAACP Milwaukee Branch and director of the Honorable Lloyd A. Barbee Foundation, which is named for the late activist lawyer and state legislator who fought for school desegregation.
Sulton is also on the board of Convergence Resource Center, 2323 N. Mayfair Road, an anti-human trafficking nonprofit in Milwaukee.
How it all started
During his childhood, Sulton lived in Maryland, Wisconsin, Colorado and New Jersey.
His mother is from Racine and worked as a civil rights lawyer, which Sulton said had a huge impact on him and his siblings.
“All three of us [siblings] had a really strong sense of social justice and wanting to help people, particularly racial justice issues,” said Sulton’s sister Patrice Sulton, who also is an attorney.
She now runs DC Justice Lab, an organization focused on criminal justice reform policy.
Sulton remembers one case in which his mom was defending Gil Webb, a Black teenager who was charged in the death of a police officer after a car crash in Denver in 1997.
People called their home and left racist and threatening messages on the answering machine.
“I remember being a little kid and riding my bike home so I could erase these messages because I didn’t want my mom to hear them,” he said.
Sulton studied political science as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University, where he started representing students in plagiarism cases.
While attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, Sulton met his wife, Stephanie, and later moved to her hometown of Milwaukee.
Attorney William Sulton talks about the photo of Lloyd Barbee pictured in the office he works in at the NAACP Milwaukee Branch, 2745 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. (Photo by Meredith Melland)
Public interest law
After finishing law school, Sulton noticed that many people in the courtroom were unrepresented because they believed lawyers were beyond their reach.
Wisconsin ranks low in lawyers per capita and has an even smaller number of civil rights lawyers, Sulton said.
Public interest lawyers usually represent poor, marginalized or underrepresented individuals or organizations that are not served by private sector law firms, including civil rights and social justice cases.
“These cases are important,” he said. “They mean something. It’s not just about how much money can you make on a case, right? It’s about, can you really change government policy? Can you really make things better, right?”
Sulton has gained a reputation for taking cases he says that few attorneys will take and demonstrating that they can be profitable.
“If I had a magic wand and I could do one thing, I would shift the way that we talk about public interest work,” Sulton said. “I think the number one reason that people don’t do public interest work is they don’t think that it’s profitable.”
Sulton also makes time to speak to law students at UW-Madison.
One law student asked him about the traumatic weight of his cases and if it impacts him, which Sulton said he had not thought about before.
“I think I’m just callous, because it doesn’t,” Sulton said.
The ultimate volunteer
Through his volunteer work with the NAACP, Sulton has taken on equal employment opportunity cases and helps clients understand legal problems if they are considering filing complaints, said Clarence Nicholas, president of the NAACP Milwaukee Branch.
“He has a friendly personality and he’s personable,” Nicholas said.
Sulton started representing the Social Development Commission, also known as the SDC, in late 2022 on a volunteer basis when longtime attorney James Hall Jr. was getting ready to retire and brought him on. Hall died in early 2024.
SDC suspended operations in April, halting a variety of programs and laying off employees. Sulton is working with the SDC board to find paths forward for the agency.
“I don’t know anybody else that would do what he has done, the amount of work that we have put on him, especially in the last four months,” said Barbara Toles, chair of the SDC Board of Commissioners.
Patrice Sulton said she doesn’t know anyone else in the legal field or elsewhere who holds as many time-consuming positions at the same time.
“I think it’s probably too much to juggle, but I also see how those things work together,” she said.
One of Milwaukee’s unsung heroes
Sulton said he tries to work early in the morning or late at night to spend the final third of his time with his wife and four kids, ages 13, 10, 8 and 5.
He said he likes the life he has built, and his main goal is to try to help people.
Debbie Lassiter, executive director of Convergence Resource Center, thinks Sulton is one of Milwaukee’s unsung heroes for his work in the community.
“He never makes you feel like: ‘Listen, I’m too busy to talk to you,’ ” she said.
“You don’t hear a lot about him getting awards or people thanking him for what he’s done, but we will be forever grateful for what he did for us,” Lassiter added.
Meredith Melland is the neighborhoods reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.