Unpunished murderers be warned: Alvin Sykes continues his justice crusade
By CJ Janovy in Follow That Story, Janovy
Wed., Feb. 18 2009 @ 7:03AM
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| Alvin Sykes |
In March 2006, we profiled Kansas City's Alvin Sykes, who has spent years methodically working to create a way for the U.S. Justice Department to address one of our country's most shameful legacies: countless unsolved murders from the Civil Rights era. Last fall, Sykes saw one of his main efforts rewarded when the Senate passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2008, creating a Justice Department office to investigate and prosecute those murders.
Sykes, among others, had successfully pushed the government to open an investigation into the lynching of Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was murdered, and his body mutilated, while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955. His killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, later confessed to the crime but went unpunished and have long since died. Others may have been involved -- particularly Bryant's wife Carolyn. Young Till earned his Mississippi death sentence simply for whistling at the white woman. Carolyn Bryant is still alive, but in February 2007 a LeFlore County, Mississippi, grand jury declined to return any new indictments, citing insufficient evidence.
But the fact that there was even an investigation was its own form of justice. As Sykes told me in 2006, "J. Edgar Hoover said there would never be an investigation."
Now there's the promise of more investigations. In fact, Sykes says, the Justice Department has 26 active investigations into cold cases from the Civil Rights era.
The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights act authorizes two new positions at the FBI and in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, but Congress has yet to appropriate the money to actually fund them. Sykes isn't waiting around. He's launched a national campaign to put pressure on Congress to make sure Justice gets its money, and to raise additional funds for the effort it will take to bring other cases.
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| Edgar Ray Killen at his 2005 trial |
Why should we still care? Sykes answers that question with a symposium of the same name on Friday, February 20 at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center. Among those speaking is Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till's cousin, who heard the thugs come to his grandfather's house and take Emmett away back in 1955.
Parker was a kid at the time. If anyone really wonders why, all of these years later, we should drag feeble old men into court and try them for murders they might have committed more than half a century ago, when the world was a whole different place, they ought to consider hearing what he has to say on February 20. The doors open at 5:30 for the event, which also includes a reception and movie screening.
"I feel good," Sykes says about everything he's accomplished. But he wants people to show up and donate to the cause. After all, there are a lot more families who need to find out what happened to their relatives who just disappeared one day back in the '50s or '60s. "Once we start these outreach efforts all around the country -- in places like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, all along the migration route where people left the south and moved north -- we expect more names and more cases will come forth to be placed on the Justice Department's list."
Which means there's no rest for murderers, either.
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