Alvin Sykes holds none of the standard credentials to wield influence in the power corridors of Washington, D.C. He is not a lobbyist or an attorney, nor did he graduate from a prestigious college. In fact, he is a high school dropout.

Yet senators listen to him. Prosecutors return his calls. As a self-made civil rights activist, Sykes persuaded the Justice Department to re-investigate the 1955 slaying of 14-year-old Emmett Till, and he deserves a fair share of the credit for the department's recent decision to review as many as 100 old murders in 14 states.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced the investigation as Congress prepares to vote on a bill that would set up a permanent cold case unit in the Justice Department to probe those old crimes.

Last year, Sykes, as chairman of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, persuaded his then-home-state senator, Jim Talent, R-Mo., to introduce the bill. Since then, Sykes and other civil rights leaders have helped sell it. Although Talent lost his seat in last fall's election, the bill — which authorizes $11.5 million to fund the unit — has new sponsors and has gained momentum in both houses and parties.

"He reflects the spirit of the civil rights movement, where ordinary people found a way to make a difference," says Brenda Jones, spokeswoman for Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., whose beating during a protest march through Selma, Ala., in 1965 helped propel the Voting Rights Act through Congress. Lewis is sponsoring the House version of the Till bill.
 
Sykes is described by those who know him as tenacious and informed. "He's a very pragmatic man," says Donald Burger, a retired Justice Department mediator who met Sykes in the 1970s during battles to desegregate Kansas City, Mo., schools.

U.S. Attorney Jim Greenlee of Mississippi's northern district in Oxford had never heard of Sykes when Sykes asked him in 2004 to reopen the Till case.

The case was legendary. Most of the principals were dead or old and in poor health. The statute of limitations on applicable federal laws had expired. Only state charges related to murder or manslaughter remained possible.
Sykes arrived in Oxford armed with a legal argument that laid out why the FBI had jurisdiction to proceed with a new federal probe. "He was extremely informed and very logically presented why it should be looked into," Greenlee says.

Sykes grew up poor and sickly in Kansas City, the product of a 14-year-old mother and a father he never knew. "When I first met him, he was in his casket," Sykes says of his father. "I was 27.

Prone to schoolyard fights, Sykes dropped out of school in the ninth grade. Although he once dreamed of becoming a lawyer, he got most of his education from the public library. To support himself, Sykes found a job managing a local R&B band, Threatening Weather.

After campaigning to desegregate Kansas City schools, he helped persuade Missouri legislators to lower the age of jurors from 21 to 18, thus widening the pool of potential jurors. He also persuaded the Justice Department to re-investigate the mysterious death of a black teenager in Kansas City in 1985 Although the report was inconclusive, the federal involvement helped calm local residents, who had been skeptical of the local police investigation, Burger says.

He adds: "That would never have happened if it hadn't been for Alvin."

Sykes' major achievement involved the 1980 murder of a local jazz musician named Steve Harvey, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat. The man charged with the murder had been acquitted.

Sykes thumbed through library law books and found an obscure federal statute that essentially said a person couldn't be deprived of his use of a public facility because of race. Using contacts he had made at the Justice Department during the school desegregation struggle, Sykes contacted Richard Roberts, the attorney in the civil rights division who was looking into the Harvey case. "He said, 'Send me everything you've got,' " Sykes says. In 1983, Roberts won the conviction of Raymond Bledsoe on federal civil rights violation charges. He is now serving a life sentence.

"He didn't just call once," says Roberts, now a federal district judge in Washington, D.C. "Ordinarily, people who want to know about a case will go to their local U.S. attorney. I was struck by the fact that Sykes did not rest with that. He pressed forward with more research on his own. His questions to me were pointed and showed someone who had done his homework."

The murder of young Emmett Till, who was killed in Mississippi after whistling at a white woman in a store, galvanized the civil rights movement.

Although Till's killers were known — Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted a month after Till's death and later confessed in an interview with Look magazine — subsequent investigations centered on whether the men acted alone. Trial testimony suggested that Bryant's then-wife might have been with her husband and brother-in-law when Till was abducted.

Sykes pored over library law books and consulted with his Justice Department contacts. They steered him to a 1976 opinion by Antonin Scalia, then an assistant attorney general and now a Supreme Court justice, that gave the federal government jurisdiction to conduct further investigation into President Kennedy's assassination. The same opinion was used to investigate Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder.

"Even if the statute of limitations had run out, it meant that there could be an investigation for Till," Sykes says.

A Mississippi grand jury last month declined to indict Bryant's ex-wife, Carolyn Bryant Donham.

To Sykes, that doesn't mean the end of the Till case. He says he made that promise to Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, before she died in 2003.

The FBI has compiled 8,000 pages of notes and interviews. Now Sykes wants the Justice Department to publish a report of the investigation.

"I made that pledge to Mrs. Mobley before she died that we would get the truth out," he says.

Credit – Laura Parker for USA Today 3/19/07