That Time Emilia Sykes' Family Sued an HBCU in Federal Court When She Lost a Collegiate Beauty Pageant

What a 15-year-old lawsuit says about the the Sykes' ability to look out for anyone else's interests.

Ohio House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes (left) and her father, State Senator Vernon Sykes (right).

NOTE: With President Warren G. Harding reeling from last week’s disgrace of a performance and the president needing to marshal his finances, the $10,000 Presidential Power Parlay will return next week..

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One of my biggest pet peeves in American politics is dynastic families. We fought a revolutionary war in this country—or so I was told in my public education—so the rich and powerful couldn’t foist their mediocre adult children into positions of power over the rest of us struggling to survive in the trenches.

Unfortunately it turns out that some brain-diseased Americans love nothing more than recycling the same fuck puddle into positions of power.

Take, for example, current State Senator Vernon Sykes (D-Akron). His career in state politics started in 38 years ago in 1983 when he was appointed to the Ohio House of Representatives, a position in which he served until 2000 when Ohio voters (foolishly) enacted term limits.

Did Sykes humbly step aside? No. His wife, Barbara, replaced him and served until she decided to run a failed campaign for state auditor in 2006.

Did these freaks retire into the sunset after that? Absolutely not. They knew their voters would keep pulling the lever for them, so Vernon ran to replace his wife. He won another four terms until he was term limited again in 2014, leading to this hilarious Wikipedia graphic:

AmericanFamilyDynastyPolitics.jpeg

You might think Barbara ran to replace him. Not so fast, my friends! It was time for some new blood in that seat, which by the Sykes’ standards meant their 28-year-old daughter, Emilia, would run. She promptly won another Akron-based election.

Emilia wasted little time in making her move for power.

In 2018, then-Ohio House Minority Leader Fred Strahorn (D-Dayton) warned his caucus of the perils of brokering a deal with a career criminal like Rep. Larry Householder (R-Glenford) to install him as Speaker of the House once again. Strahorn was uniquely positioned to issue the warning.

Thanks to term limits, Strahorn was the only active Democrat that served during Householder’s first tenure as Speaker, which ended under a cloud of FBI investigation and Householder tucking his tail back to Perry County to accrue a couple DUIs while mulling his eventual return to power that would result in RICO charges.

None of that mattered to Emilia Sykes. She threw Strahorn under the bus and brokered a deal with Householder in return for peanuts for her party, which is actually an insult to peanuts because they taste delicious despite their lack of nutritional value.

Fast forward to 2021, Vernon Sykes serves as a State Senator while Emilia reigns as House Minority Leader. In what must be the coincidence of the century, these two find themselves on the Ohio Redistricting Committee with sole power to vote for Republican maps that would be enacted for 10 years, as opposed to four years without their support.

Why would they do that? Well, the price would be an Akron-based Congressional seat for which Emilia could run and win on family name recognition alone.

Does that sound preposterous? Well, consider that back in 2006, the Sykes family sued Tuskegee University in federal court over the university reversing a decision that originally crowned Emilia the winner of its annual beauty pageant.

From Sykes vs Payton:

According to the plaintiffs' complaint, Emilia Sykes was crowned Miss Tuskegee University, but the results were called into question. Although Emilia and her parents, Barbara and Vernon Sykes, were subsequently assured in unequivocal terms by defendant Spears that the results would stand, an official inquiry was ultimately launched. The investigation revealed a scoring error in another entrant's score, that error was corrected, and the title of Miss Tuskegee University was taken from Emilia and bestowed upon the other entrant, whose corrected score was higher than Emilia's.

The plaintiffs then filed this lawsuit, in which they ask the court to prevent the university from taking the title of Miss Tuskegee University from Emilia. They subsequently amended their complaint to include claims for compensatory damages arising from mental and physical anguish and financial losses attributable to their belief that Emilia would be Miss Tuskegee University, namely Emilia's decision not to pursue a $2,600 stipend for the upcoming academic year, out-of-pocket expenses by the family to enhance Emilia's wardrobe in expectation of appearances she would make as Miss Tuskegee University, Emilia's decision not to remain on the cheerleading squad, and Emilia's decision not to take advantage of a summer program that would have given her research experience and exposed her to other colleges.

It’s so funny in its own right that the Sykes family financed a federal lawsuit in attempt to recoup a $2,600 stipend and “out-of-pocket expenses by the family to enhance Emilia’s wardrobe.”

That’s even before considering the hilarity of them seeking psychological damages for her decision not to remain on the cheerleading squad or “take advantage of a summer program that would have given her research experience and exposed her to other colleges.”

Oh, no! What was the daughter of a wealthy, politically connected family supposed to do without a ceremonial title she did not in fact earn? We have the answer now, of course, but the court didn’t back then and they pretty much laughed at the family until the agreed to dismiss their case:

To award specific performance, the court would have to award the title of Miss Tuskegee University to Emilia despite the fact that she scored lower than another contestant; necessarily the court would have to take the title away from that contestant who had the highest score during the Miss Tuskegee University pageant. Put succinctly, in order to right the alleged wrong arising from the broken promise, the plaintiffs, in seeking specific performance of the promise, would have this court wrong another person who had the highest score at the Miss Tuskegee University contest. The plaintiffs contends that the school committed an error but nonetheless promised them that it would not correct the error.

You can’t find much about Miss Tuskegee 2006 with basic internet searches. Lord knows I tried. But I did stumble upon this article from insidehighered.com from August 2006 which only mentions the lawsuit in passing:

A federal court has ruled that Tuskegee University is within its rights to take its Miss Tuskegee University award away from one student and give it to another who was erroneously denied the award, the university announced Tuesday. Tuskegee had given the award and the accompanying scholarship to Emilia Sykes in April, but university officials subsequently learned that a timer's error had improperly penalized the runner-up, Calinda Joy Caldwell, who was then given the award. Sykes sued, but a judge tossed out most of the lawsuit.

Sykes would later transfer from the university for understandable reasons.

Interestingly, the university’s official announcement of the decision has been scrubbed from its website. The link goes to a 404 page.

What’s also funny is that, despite all their political connections, the Sykes family chose Percy Squire, a sleazy Columbus-based lawyer, to go to war in federal court. I wonder how his career trajectory has gone since then?

From Debra Cassens Weiss of abajournal.com in May 2021:

An Ohio lawyer sanctioned $1,500 for filing a substandard appellate brief told a federal appeals court on Friday that his failures stemmed from the COVID-19 death of his 96-year-old mother.

Columbus, Ohio, lawyer Percy Squire apologized after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati tossed his lawsuit against the Good Samaritan Hospital of Cincinnati for alleged negligent destruction of medical records, Law360 reports.

In its April 15 opinion, the 6th Circuit cited the “striking legal emptiness” of Squire’s brief and then sanctioned Squire $1,500 May 20 to partly compensate the Good Samaritan Hospital of Cincinnati for time lost to the appeal

[…]

Squire was indefinitely suspended from law practice in 2011 for failing to keep client funds separate from his own money. Squire admitted at the time that he was a bad bookkeeper but said he never stole client money. He was reinstated to law practice in 2015, the Columbus Dispatch reported at the time.

Gee, sounds like a winner even before you consider that his wife, former Franklin County Judge Carolyn Squires also got suspended for misconduct in 2007.

… Given their collective time in office, which has been devoid of delivering material improvements for the working class thanks to their ability to blame everything on the Republicans, I’m bereft of reasons to think why Vernon and Emilia Sykes will be looking out for anything other than their own self-interests during the redistricting process.

To do so would go against their entire careers in “public service.”

THOSE WMDs. A lawyer whose wife and son were recently killed planned his own shooting for insurance money… How to stay calm during a confrontation, according to an expert… I spent my entire childhood helping my mom sell dead people’s junk… The dark underside of the dog-show world… Easy homemade churro recipe.