Longtime civil rights defender, lawyer Alvin Sykes dies at 64

Alvin Sykes, who left high school in the eighth grade, completed his education by reading legal textbooks at the public library and later used his vast knowledge of the law to pry open long-dormant murder cases from the civil rights era — including the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till — died March 19 at a hospice facility in Shawnee, Kansas. He was 64.

The cause was complications from a fall two years ago that had left him partly paralyzed, said Ajamu Webster, a longtime friend.

Though he never took a bar exam, Sykes was a brilliant legal and legislative operator whose admirers included City Council members, politicians and U.S. attorneys general from both parties.

“Alvin Sykes was a superb attorney, better than I ever was,” David Haley, a Kansas state senator, said in an interview. “I’ve watched him argue the law in front of appellate court judges. He understood the law innately.”

Sykes converted to Buddhism in his 20s, and he led a monk’s life in the name of social justice. He rarely held a job, wore secondhand clothing and lacked a permanent address for long stretches of time, staying with friends instead and living off donations and, later, speaker fees. He never learned to drive and so walked everywhere, most often to the reference section of the library in Kansas City, Missouri, where he did his research, or to a booth at a restaurant that he used as an informal office, his papers surrounded by cups of coffee and stubbed-out cigarettes.

Along with his work on cold cases, he successfully lobbied for local, state and federal laws reforming jury selection, promoting animal rights and enhancing the role of DNA in murder investigations.

“Anyone who worked in civil rights during the last several decades knew Alvin Sykes,” said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “He changed the face of American law, and he learned it all in a Kansas City library.”

His first victory came in 1983, when he persuaded the Department of Justice to reopen the case of Steve Harvey, a Black musician who had been killed by a white man in a Kansas City park in 1980. A jury had acquitted the assailant, Raymond L. Bledsoe, but Sykes argued that Bledsoe had infringed on Harvey’s civil rights on public property, a violation of the 1968 Civil Rights Act.

The federal government took up the case, and Bledsoe was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The case brought Sykes national acclaim, but something Harvey’s widow said nagged at him: Her husband was the second victim of racial injustice in her family, the first being her distant cousin Emmett Till.

Two white men had been charged with kidnapping and murdering the 14-yearold Till in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. Though an all-white jury had acquitted them, Till’s death became a galvanizing moment for the civil rights movement.

Sykes spent years researching the law around the case, and he was convinced that there was a way to reopen it. He presented his argument to a district attorney in Mississippi, and in 2005 the Justice Department took it up.

Thought the department decided against new charges at the time — it did reopen the case again in 2018 — the Till case spurred Sykes to press the government to look into similar injustices.

In 2005 he helped write a bill to fund a civil-rights coldcase initiative within the FBI. But the bill met potentially fatal opposition from Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a Republican who thought that the proposal was a waste of money.

Undeterred, Sykes reached out to Coburn, and after several failed attempts got a meeting with him. Following an hourslong conversation, the senator not only relented but also became an advocate for the bill.

“We are going to see this bill come into fruition,” Coburn said on the Senate floor in 2007, acknowledging Sykes, just before the Senate sent the bill to President George W. Bush to sign. “I can’t say enough about his stamina, his integrity, his forthrightness, his determination.”

Alvin Lee Sykes was born on July 21, 1956, in Kansas City, Kansas. He said that his father, Vernon Evans, had raped his mother, Patricia Sykes, who was 14 years old when she gave birth to him. Eight days later an acquaintance of his mother, Burnetta F. Page, took him in as a foster child.

He is survived by Edna Dill, his foster sister.

Sykes had a painful childhood. He suffered from epilepsy and mental illness and was in and out of the hospital. Two of his neighbors, he said, both adults, sexually assaulted him, twice. Page had to mortgage her house to cover his medical bills, and she later sent him to live in Boys Town, the home for atrisk youth outside Omaha, Nebraska.

When he returned he lived for a year with his birth mother and then with an uncle. Though he promised his uncle he would stay in school, he left after eighth grade, and to bide his time during the day he visited the public library’s main branch in Kansas City, Missouri.

“There was a time when somebody like me wouldn’t have been allowed inside a library — or as a Black man permitted to read at all,” he told journalist Monroe Dodd, the author of a short biography of Sykes. “But I was able to revolve much of my life around the library. I sought and got my education there.”

In 2013, the library named him its first scholar in residence.