He won numerous awards from the Society of Illustrators in New York and the Art Directors Club in Washington, D.C. Sugarman's earlier career was a U.S. Navy Reserve ensign who served on an amphibious boat during the D-Day invasion of Normandy June 6, 1944.
Among Tracy's many works is “My War.” In 2000 he published a collection of over 400 letters, drawings and watercolours he sent to his young wife, during the harrowing days of World War II.
As a visual journalist, he covered the appalling conditions in Rikers Island jail for the New York Times and the Malcolm X trial for the Saturday Evening Post.
I came home from the dusty roads of the Delta with a deeper understanding of patriotism, an unshakable respect for commitment, and an abiding belief in the power of love."
We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns, published in 2009, is a sequel to his earlier work in which Sugarman reflected on the relationships formed that summer and how his life and the lives of his fellow volunteers were shaped by their experiences.
Sugarman was one of the principals behind Rediscovery Productions which he formed to produce documentary films about often overlooked black contributors who enriched American society.
At the age of ninety-one, Tracy Sugarman completed his first novel, Nobody Said Amen, the fictional story of two Mississippi families, one black and one white, coping with the turbulent changes brought by the Civil Rights Movement.