Alvin Lee Sykes with Monroe Dodd

The late Alvin Sykes was a longtime human rights worker and activist. 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. A tenth-grade dropout, Sykes got his legal education at the public library, the institution he calls the Great Equalizer.

Monroe Dodd, Sykes’s collaborator on Show Me Justice, was an editor for more than 30 years at The Kansas City Star and its onetime morning edition, The Kansas City Times. In 2013, Dodd wrote Pursuit of Truth, an account of how libraries influenced and aided Sykes’s life work, for the Kansas City Public Library.