Former Harlem Globetrotter Dies

{Lexington, Kentucky}…Harry Sykes, Lexington's first black city commissioner, a civil rights leader and former Harlem Globetrotter, died Wednesday in Lexington of natural causes. He was 85. Sykes was born in Mississippi, where his father was a sharecropper and minister, and attended a one-room school. After the family moved to Chicago in the 1940s, Sykes became a star athlete and won a scholarship to Kentucky State College, now Kentucky State University. Sykes played two years with the Globetrotters after attending Kentucky State College. He left basketball to become a teacher at the old Dunbar High School in Lexington. Sykes served four consecutive terms on the old city commission, beginning in 1963. He was city manager and chief executive officer and elected mayor pro-tem in 1967. He ran for mayor in 1971, the first black candidate for that office.