PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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. Monroe Dodd, Sykes's collaborator on Show Me Justice, was an editor for more than 30 years at The Kansas City Star newspaper and its onetime morning edition, The Kansas City Times. The newspapers have covered Sykes's efforts for decades. Since 1999, Dodd has edited and written various books about Kansas City, from comprehensive local histories to accounts of its once-grand streetcar system and its most notorious crimes and criminals. In 2013, Dodd wrote for the Kansas City Public Library an account of how libraries influenced and aided Alvin Sykes's life work. That account, entitled Pursuit of Truth, was published by the library and distributed to the public and to other libraries across the country.
"""Most people have a problem with being egotistical, but Alvin does not. That fits well with me. You make a statement by what you do, much more than by what you say. He's genuine. He's genuine. I appreciate that."" -Rev. Wheeler Parker, cousin of Emmett Till ""God has his hand on this man. These aren't accidents that these things have come to him. He's kind of a prophet. He's being used by a greater power to put great things in the world."" -Tom Coburn, former US senator from Oklahoma ""Alvin Sykes is a different kind of guy. He never gives up. He never accepts the ways things have been. He changes the course of history."" -Herbie Hancock, jazz musician, bandleader, and composer ""He had one of the biggest hearts. He was unique, passionate, and painfully under-credited himself for his own accomplishments.... Alvin was about truth, justice, getting the stories told by the families. You can't really bring the Till family justice, and you can't for the remaining witnesses, but any type of solace you can bring them by way of the truth-that's what Alvin was about."" -Ronnique Hawkins, co-producer of The Untold Story of Emmett Till ""This brother, against all the odds, hung in there."" -Bill Samori Grace, formerly of W.E.B. DuBois Learning Center in Kansas City, Missouri"
Untold Story of William Shum
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