Show Me Justice - Sykes, Alvin
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Show Me Justice tracks the life and career of the late civil-rights advocate and pioneer Alvin Lee Sykes, who used his self-taught legal knowledge to reopen the dormant murder case of Emmett Till. He was also tenacious in his investigation of other unsolved murder cases of African Americans from the civil-rights era. Typically, the people Sykes represented were as poor as he was-"poor as a church mouse," to quote former United States senator Tom Coburn, who worked with Alvin on the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. In this book's foreword, Ronnique Hawkins, co-producer of The Untold…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
Show Me Justice tracks the life and career of the late civil-rights advocate and pioneer Alvin Lee Sykes, who used his self-taught legal knowledge to reopen the dormant murder case of Emmett Till. He was also tenacious in his investigation of other unsolved murder cases of African Americans from the civil-rights era. Typically, the people Sykes represented were as poor as he was-"poor as a church mouse," to quote former United States senator Tom Coburn, who worked with Alvin on the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. In this book's foreword, Ronnique Hawkins, co-producer of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till and founder of The ALM and Learn My History foundations, writes: "From jazz singer Steve Harvey to the monumental case of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, Alvin championed for victims like they were family." Sykes was born to a fourteen-year-old girl and placed by relatives in the care of another woman who worked as a domestic and a beautician. She recognized his strong curiosity about the world around him and stretched her meager budget to supply books and musical instruments. She mortgaged her home to pay the bills to treat his epilepsy and other childhood illnesses. As a young teenager, he spent time at Boys Town in Nebraska, but his formal education never extended beyond the eighth grade. Instead, as he says, his secondary and higher education took place in public libraries, often among shelves of law books. In Sykes's hometown of Kansas City, and nationwide, he remains a legend among the downtrodden whom he helped and also among the powerful who admired his efforts. He marshaled his facts, framed his arguments persuasively, and acted patiently and resolutely. Always, his goal was justice. Typically, he reached that goal.
Autorenporträt
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.