When Alvin Sykes arrived at Mamie Till Mobley’s Chicago doorstep in 2002, something told her he was serious. That he would get done what others could not for her son, Emmett Till. So she gave him permission to try to reopen the case.
A week later, Mobley died.
But Sykes never gave up. He had made her a promise, after all.
Sykes, a civil rights legend and longtime Kansas City community activist who was best known for his work pursuing justice in unsolved civil rights murders, died Friday morning. He was 64.
Sykes became nationally recognized through his work seeking a delayed verdict in the killing of Till, whose 1955 murder in Mississippi became a rallying cry for African American leaders at the beginning of the civil rights movement. He was the impetus for the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which led to the formation of the FBI’s Cold Case Initiative.
Sykes also was primarily responsible for the Kansas City Police Department reopening its investigation into the 1970 murder of politician and business owner Leon Jordan. In 2010, new evidence suggested local mobsters or their associates were involved in his murder.
“In my mind, Alvin Sykes is the premier justice advocate, civil rights freedom fighter of our generation,” longtime friend Ajamu Webster said.
Just as Webster thinks of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, he thinks of Alvin Sykes.
Sykes was a force of nature, his friends said. He loved jazz, practiced Buddhism and inspired everyone around him.
A lifelong pursuit
Sykes was born in 1956 to a 14-year-old girl in Topeka and raised by his adoptive mother. Sykes, who had epilepsy and was often in and out of Children’s Mercy, lived his early years in the 2600 block of Highland Drive in Kansas City, Kansas.
He experienced a traumatic attack that shaped his life outlook and pursuit for justice. When he was 11, Sykes said during a public event in 2009, he was sexually assaulted by neighbors across his street who lured him in with candy. He was afraid to tell his mother, and to him the police seemed “so far away.” He went back to confront his rapists, who assaulted him again.
“After that incident, I knew that there had to be some people out here that are in between law enforcement and the family, so that when you get in trouble you have somebody that can help guide you through this maze called the criminal justice system,” Sykes said at the time.
The next year, his start in activism would be molded by another event: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the scars left behind by the unrest in Kansas City. On their bicycles, Sykes and a friend tried to turn in those who were setting fires in the Black community in the wake of King’s killing.
At a young age, Sykes became disillusioned with the idea of a formal education. He dropped out of high school, and in his own words, transferred from the public schools to the public library. He devoured books on every subject, his librarians becoming his de facto teachers.
Around that time, he began sitting in on courtroom cases to watch the legal system in action. He was fascinated, and developed a reputation among his friends and acquaintances for being knowledgeable about the law.
“What a phenomenon he was,” Kansas Sen. David Haley said Friday.
“There are appellate judges who could not hold conversations on the law successfully with him — that’s the truth,” Haley added. “He influenced U.S. senators, U.S. congressional members, state legislators on issues of human rights and social rights, remaining committed to a more just and equitable society.”
Haley, who had planned on seeing Sykes at a rehabilitation facility in Shawnee, where he was a patient, said the cornerstone of his larger accomplishments in the Kansas Legislature were “purely the inspiration and the motivation and dogged determination” of Sykes.
“We will not have anyone who can replace him,” Haley said of Sykes, who also had a desire to hold law enforcement accountable. “He is irreplaceable.”
Sykes remained at the Shawnee facility while recovering from a fall two years before at Union Station. The Kansas City Public Library, which in 2013 named Sykes its first Scholar in Residence, said he had been on his way to visit a cousin of Emmett Till at the time.
He had a number of health issues during the last two years, his friend Webster said, as he recovered from the fall that injured his spine. He had significant paralysis, and was later diagnosed with COVID-19. But despite that, he never gave up.
Sykes used a wheelchair and would say, “I’ll roll my way to justice,” Webster said.
In 2019, Sykes made his annual visit to the Nefertiti Ballroom in Kansas City, Kansas, to celebrate the last day of Kwanzaa. Every year, Sykes, Webster and Haley would take a picture — they had a commitment to never miss it.
Because of the pandemic, that 2019 photo of the trio smiling was the last picture they took together.
And he never conceded to his injuries, said Mickey Dean, who knew Sykes for at least four decades. Instead, the gentle and resilient soul was planning for the future and felt he would overcome his health challenges.
Among other accomplishments of the soft-spoken Sykes, the library wrote, was his work on Missouri legislation to eliminate statute of limitations for cases of child sexual abuse.
Sykes was one of the founding members of the National Black United Front Kansas City Chapter. He also served on the board of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism since the 1990s.
“He’s a national treasure,” said the center’s director, Brian Levin. “His talents and his heart saw no boundaries.”
Levin said Sykes’ work reverberated across the country.
“He not only did the job but his joy was so infectious that it changed the nation,” Levin said.
‘The medicine of justice’
Sykes was an encyclopedia of information about old civil rights murders and the case law that could be applied to reinvigorate them, even when federal statutes of limitations had closed.
“All of my victories have always started with a ‘No,’ ” Sykes said in 2016.
Sykes pushed for a 2007 federal law named for Till that allowed the Department of Justice to re-examine civil rights murders from decades earlier. He also successfully lobbied to re-authorize the act in 2016.
Widespread calls for justice in Till’s killing began in 1955 when his mother held an open-casket funeral in the boy’s hometown of Chicago.
The 14-year-old boy was kidnapped, tortured and beaten beyond recognition, shot in the head and tossed into a river after he was accused of whistling at a white woman. His death and the attention it received is widely credited with touching off the modern civil rights movement.
An investigation was launched and two white men were criminally charged, but they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
During a 2007 congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., concerning the original law, Sykes described the path that led him to the doorstep of Till’s mother. Five years before, Sykes had offered her an opportunity “to turn the poison from Emmett Till’s death into the medicine of justice for many others.”
She accepted, becoming chairwoman of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign. Less than a week later, she died at the age of 81, passing the torch to Sykes and other supporters.
In his testimony to lawmakers, Sykes rattled off obscure case citations and federal decisions with ease. Succinctly and confidently, he said he looked forward to the passage of the law.
And in his closing remarks, he offered a piece of advice to the murderers who had escaped justice for so long: Lawyer up.
“Because we are coming after all of you that are out there, and we want to be able to bring you to the bar of justice,” Sykes said. “And for those that we don’t get, we want you to die fearing that you are next.”
Local media pioneer Chuck Moore, who frequently interviewed Sykes on his long-running public affairs show, said Sykes’ knowledge of the law had people believing he was an attorney.
“With the Emmett Till case, he showed that you don’t need multiple degrees to make a difference — being truly committed to a purpose, and being well-read, can overcome injustice,” he said.
Moore’s co-host, Gary O’Bannon, remembered Sykes’ same passion when he fought to keep alive the case of the racially-motivated killing of Steve Harvey, a jazz musician who in 1980 was beaten with a baseball bat at Penn Valley Park. People thought he could have gone on to be the next Charlie Parker.
Harvey’s killer was initially acquitted by an all-white jury, but Sykes’ work with the Justice Department later led to a conviction and life sentence. At the time, it was the fourth successful U.S. prosecution under the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
“He was a true servant leader,” O’Bannon said of Sykes. “He sought to enrich the lives of individuals, build better organizations and ultimately create a more just and caring world.”
His friends said he had an “uncanny ability” to go where someone needed his help. Those cases were not always in the spotlight, but he did everything he could.
When it came to injustice, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The Star’s Katie Bernard, Glenn E. Rice and Robert A. Cronkleton contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 21, 2021 5:00 AM.
Cortlynn Stark
The Kansas City Star
