Alvin Sykes

Alvin Sykes was a longtime human rights worker and activist, beginning in the Kansas City area and eventually extending to Chicago, Mississippi and other parts of the United States. His untiring efforts to achieve justice for others led him across the country and to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.He was brought up in the 1950s and '60s by a household worker who was not his biological mother, and lived through a medically troubled childhood. He never saw his father until his father's...See more

Alvin Sykes was a longtime human rights worker and activist, beginning in the Kansas City area and eventually extending to Chicago, Mississippi and other parts of the United States. His untiring efforts to achieve justice for others led him across the country and to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.He was brought up in the 1950s and '60s by a household worker who was not his biological mother, and lived through a medically troubled childhood. He never saw his father until his father's funeral.In his later life, Sykes overcame poverty, homelessness, discrimination, and scorn-as many obstacles as any fictional Horatio Alger-and met with great success, measured not in personal fortune but in public good. He made himself a respected and renowned advocate for human and legal rights. A tenth-grade dropout, Sykes got his legal education at the public library, the institution he calls the Great Equalizer. In the early 2000s, he helped reopen the case of Emmett Till, whose murder in Mississippi in the 1950s served as an inspiration for the civil rights movement of the era. Then he worked with U.S. senators, Justice Department officials, and others to enact a federal law empowering the government to investigate other long-ago cases of civil-rights violations. In the 1980s, Alvin Sykes's relentless efforts brought about the federal civil-rights conviction of a white man whom a Missouri jury had acquitted in the beating death of a black musician at a public park. See less