Show Me Justice tracks the life and career of the late civil-rights advocate Alvin Lee Sykes, who used his self-taught legal knowledge to reopen the dormant murder case of Emmett Till in the early 2000s. He was also tenacious in his investigation of other unsolved murder cases of African Americans from the civil-rights era. In the 1980s, Sykes’s relentless efforts also 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.

Typically, the people Sykes represented were as poor as he was— “poor as a church mouse,” to quote former US senator Tom Coburn, who worked with Sykes 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.”

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.