The man who wanted to win justice for Emmett Till
More than 40 years before Black Lives Matter emerged as a movement, Alvin Sykes doggedly questioned police brutality in cases famous and not.
Sykes convinced the federal government to reopen unsolved 50-year-old civil rights era murders, scores of cases in Mississippi and other southern states, solving some and providing long awaited attention for the victims’ families.
He helped establish case law and a unit within the Department of Justice so that newer cases of today and crimes yet to be committed, might also be reopened in time.
That’s impact.
In many ways, the national consciousness around race and criminal justice in America is just beginning to align with where the late Sykes always focused.
Sykes died March 19 from complications of a fall two years ago that left him partially paralyzed.
He was a legal savant, able to find obscure federal codes that turned into new avenues to pursue cases where witnesses had died, evidence was lost and double jeopardy otherwise limited prosecutions.
He never attended law school. He educated himself by studying law books in public libraries.
He solicited cooperation from every recent U.S. Attorney General. The first was Edwin Meese in the Reagan administration.
The last was Jeff Sessions during Trump’s.
Sykes’ approach had to do with finding the truth, not exacting revenge. He wasn’t out to vilify police in the blindingly self-righteous way so many today practice. But he consistently unraveled cases where law enforcement’s duplicity, bias and sometimes outright racism let people get away with murder.
He convinced Congress to pass legislation instructing the FBI to dig into unsolved civil rights era murders. The legislation was named for Emmett
Till, often called the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement. When the initial legislation expired, Sykes lobbied bipartisan support to reauthorize it, creating a permanent cold case function within the Department of Justice.
Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who, naive to the depths of racial hatred in the South, went to visit relatives in Mississippi in 1955 and wound up gruesomely murdered.
Sykes was long fascinated by the case. He was instrumental in getting the FBI to reopen the murder investigation in 2004.
The Till case was Sykes’ most famous pursuit, but not the one closest to his heart. That honor would be gaining a conviction for the 1980 murder of his friend and fellow musician Steve Harvey, a man who had been beaten to death by an assailant who assumed that he was killing not only a Black man, but a gay one.
In March of 2019, Sykes had been on his way to Chicago when he tumbled over a metal bench as he awaited an Amtrak train. The fall injured his spine.
The trip had been to celebrate the 80th birthday of Wheeler Parker, Jr., an older cousin of Emmett Till. Parker is the last surviving eyewitness to the kidnapping of Till.
Parker, when I called him to let him know that Sykes had passed, expressed deep gratitude and affection for his friend. He said Sykes had added a necessary chapter to his family’s history.
Sykes allowed a bit of closure, despite no new convictions. Parker, a Reverend, had given the eulogy when the family reburied Till after an exhumation and autopsy for the new investigation.
The only thing left unfinished was his book, chronicling these stories and so much more. The planned title gives evidence to his spirit: “Show Me Justice: The Happy Life Journey of Alvin Page Sykes.”