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March 19 Democratic primary race for Illinois governor ...
Roland Burris interview
By George N. Schmidt
Substance editor George N. Schmidt interviewed Roland Burris on February
26, 2002, at the Burris for Governor campaign office at 1130 South Wabash,
Suite 501. What follows is an edited version of that all-too-brief interview.
Substance: You’ve been a leader in Illinois politics for three
decades. Many of today’s teachers weren’t even born when your
achievements began. Let’s start there, as a reminder to everyone.
Since 90 percent of our readers are teachers, I’m sure they’ll
want to hear what your experiences are with the public schools and what
your policies will be when you are elected governor of Illinois.
Roland Burris: Teaching is in my family and in my blood. My brother,
who died when he was 30 after complications of surgery, was a public school
teacher in my hometown of Centralia. He died of acute pancreatitis at
the beginning of a great teaching career. He had a Master’s in education
from SIU.
 I came out of Centralia,
educated in the public schools. I had excellent — excellent, you
can’t emphasize that word too much — teachers in our public
schools. I can name the name of every one of my elementary teachers to
this day. They made such an impression on my life.
My first grade teacher
was the last of those people to pass on. She just died two weeks ago at
the age of 94. I knew her as “Miss Mason.” I was probably 40
years old before I learned “Miss Mason’s” first name. I
thought Miss was her first name. My Mom called her “Miss Mason,”
my grandmother called her “Miss Mason.” Every teacher in those
days was called Mr. or Mrs.
Miss Mason reminded
me that when I was four years old and my brother was in the second grade,
my sister was in Miss Mason’s class, in the first grade. They had
this platform right outside the first grade classroom where you could
go through that door and was also the place they held the plays. My dog
Spot and I would come to school in the morning and play with the kids.
Then after the bell would ring, they went into class.
Well, I wouldn’t
go home. Spot and I would sit there on that platform, until recess, listening
to the class. Then they would come out and they would play and we would
play then they’d go back in and I sit there until noontime and go
home for lunch. Then they’d get out around two o’clock. And
that is how I spent my days at four years old. And, of course, I couldn’t
go to school until I was six. And Miss Mason was the one who reminded
me of that.
I missed very few days
at school. I loved school. I went to elementary and high school in Centralia.
I was very active in sports and other activities. I was a very extraverted
kid, always involved in things.
I had a good family
life, with both parents and grandparents. My mother’s stepfather
died when I was young, but I still knew him. I didn’t know my mother’s
father because he died before I was born when my mother was real small.
Now, of course, her mother remarried. Then there was this other, what
we’d call extended family. I am a classic case of the village raising
the child.
My family was, we didn’t
have any money, but they accused us of being kind of a middle class family
compared to what was there, because we ran a grocery store. We had a business.
My dad still worked at Illinois Central with all the other people. But
we also ran the business, which gave us a little modicum of difference.
We never were hungry. That was the difference. Mom fed everybody anyway
free. She could barely pay the bills.
I graduated from high
school and went on to Southern Illinois University and got a degree in
political science, a pre-law major. And while at Southern, because I was
in liberal arts, I had to take a foreign language. I took German. And
I was in the top students, selected as one of two students to go the University
of Hamburg in Germany as an exchange student. Two of us went to Hamburg
and two came to Southern.
That was a great experience.
I spent a year working on my Master’s degree in international law
— in the German language, by the way. And then I did not go back
to SIU to finish my Master’s. I got that at the Howard Law School.
I went to Howard and finished three years at law school. I then came back
to Chicago in 1963.
Substance: That is a breathtaking time to come back to Chicago.
Roland Burris: I came to Chicago because of the political activity
in Chicago. I had already set two goals between my sophomore and junior
years in high school. One goal was to be a lawyer. The other goal was
to be a state-wide elected official of Illinois. I was on that track.
When I came out of
law school and came to Chicago I naturally started looking for a job.
In those days it was hard to find a job, but I was hired by the federal
government as the public comptroller of the currency as a national bank
examiner. They were hiring lawyers to examine trust departments. And I
became the first black in this nation in 1963 to get credentials examining
banks.
I had my first job
at the Livestock National Bank over here on 33rd and Halsted, after I
had my training. I went over there to examine the bank, and the guy guarding
the door wouldn’t let me in. You know, it was my first job, so I
was going to show up early. And my boss wasn’t there yet. Of course,
I had to knock on the door. The guard was barring the door. He wasn’t
going to let me in. I stuck my credentials through the door and he kept
shaking his head.
Someone got an officer
and the officer read “Comptroller of the currency” on the badge.
So they opened the door and said “O.K., you can sit right here.”
They had me sit right inside the door. Until my boss showed up they wouldn’t
let me move. But anyway, I did that for one year.
My first child was
born in 1964, and I had to get off the road. That’s when I applied
to work at Continental Bank, the biggest bank in our state. I started
out there in the trust and tax area.
After four years of
moving up in the tax division, I transferred over to commercial lending.
I worked my way through the various ranks at the bank. When I left there,
eight and a half years later, I left as a vice-president of the bank.
Substance: What year was that?
Roland Burris: I left there in 1973 to join [Illinois Governor]
Dan Walker’s cabinet. I was at the Continental Bank from August of
’64 until January of ’73. And I went to serve as director of
the department of general services in central management services under
Dan Walker, four years there.
And while I was with
Dan, he ran for reelection as governor. And Mayor Daley, J. Daley, hated
his guts, so he took the secretary of state, Mike Howlett, in that primary,
and I was running with Dan Walker for comptroller in 1976. And Mike Howlett
and his team were running and all of them beat us. I was beat by Mike
Bakalis for state comptroller in 1976.
So we left office in
January 1977, and I went to work for Reverend Jackson in January 1977
at Operation PUSH. I was the national executive director and the chief
operating officer for PUSH. I did that until November 1 of 1977, at which
time I announced my candidacy again for the office of state comptroller.
I won the primary in
March of ’78, for comptroller, beating a young man by the name of
Dick Dulop who was a state senator. And then in November ’78 I was
elected, beating John Castle, a very wealthy Republican individual, whose
father was a two-time attorney general of the state, who also served in
Jim Thompson’s cabinet at the time.
So I beat Castle in
November ’78. I was elected to the office of state comptroller, nationally
becoming the first African American to hold state-wide comptroller office.
Substance: How long did you hold the office?
Roland Burris: I was reelected in 1982, beating my Republican opponent
by a plurality of 1.1 million votes. I was reelected in 1986 for comptroller
and I led the ticket again, but my plurality was only 900,000 votes. That’s
still a pretty good margin. And then, of course, I ran for and won the
office of attorney general in 1990.
What’s interesting
about that race is the fact that Neil Hartigan was losing to Jim Edgar
for governor in 1990 by about 92,000 votes. Jerome Cosentino was losing
to George Ryan for secretary of state by 160,000 votes. And I beat Jim
Ryan — the current front runner on the Republican ticket — for
attorney general by 92,000 votes, in between Edgar and George Ryan.
Substance: I think people are going to be real interested in how
you view this race, this primary, right now. How does your organization
look? How do you feel about the recent polls?
Roland Burris: We have a top notch organization. Tremendous staff.
We are prepared to put our position papers and our plans on the issues
forward.
I view my opponents
as good individuals, who had some success in their personal lives, but
I don’t see them as having the experience to compare to my experience
as taking over the reins of a $53 billion corporation.
The Chicago Public
Schools job is not the governor of the state of Illinois. And the Congressman
has not really administered much of any positions and has no experience
in the executive leadership. He has had some political experience, two
terms in the state legislature, two terms in Congress.
But when you compare
them to Roland Burris — if you were to lay my resumé on the
table next to those of my two opponents — they couldn’t touch
my resumé.
My learning curve will
be very small when I get into the governor’s chair. They really haven’t
been in the executive branch of government to have to put forth policies
and carry out the laws and execute the laws the way I have, and to stand
for election and stand for reelection and have a resumé validated
every four years on a statewide basis, not on a legislative or congressional
district basis.
The state of Illinois
is a microcosm of America. You have to balance off all of those interests.
You can’t be saying one thing in one part of the state that you aren’t
saying in another part. You won’t be able to carry any of it out.
I listen to my opponents
as they put forth their positions and I tell them it is wishful thinking,
“pie in the sky” thinking. There is another branch of government,
the legislature. Policies and programs have to win the approval of that
body. So you have to have some idea of how you work with them, and be
able to trade off to get what you’re proposing done.
There are very seldom
any new ideas in Springfield. One thing that I am also noted for, based
on my experience, is knowing what would work in Springfield and what would
not work in Springfield. I can give many examples.
That’s the experience
I bring to this office. That’s what I have over my opponents. The
Republicans as well. Corrine Wood has only been in the corporation six
years. Jim Ryan’s been in for eight years. O’Malley, four years?
Six years?
Substance: Most of our readers are school teachers, highly committed
to public education. Lately it’s been frustrating because of the
national testing movement which is not designed to solve the problems
of public schools, especially in the cities. Jonathan Kozol wrote about
the “savage inequalities” in our schools between, say, Glenbard
West and DuSable, or Glenbard West and East St. Louis. In this context,
how are we going to start to overcome these inequalities? Right now, if
you live north of Howard St. or west of Harlem Ave. you can get a better
public education, and that’s unfair to the children of places like
Chicago.
Roland Burris: That is totally unacceptable. We are programming
some of our children for failure and mediocrity and some of them for success.
And I’m not talking about bringing down the New Triers and the Naperville
schools, I’m talking about bringing the other schools up.
It has to do with funding.
We have to get off of the property taxes and let the state produce the
revenues for education so that we can bring those other schools up to
a minimum of $10,000 per student. It will take ten years before we get
there, but we can begin now. I intend to be in for two terms, and I intend
to see us on our way up there. George Ryan now has reversed the Thompson/Edgar
slide of state funding of the schools. When we left, with Dan Walker,
it was at 48 percent. It dropped down to 33 percent under Edgar. Now it’s
up to 38 percent. We have to continue that.
Substance: So you can say to Hinsdale and New Trier and Glenbard,
you have some of the finest schools in the country, and our program is
to make all the schools as fine, not to reduce the better ones.
Roland Burris: Absolutely. We have no problem with you. But we
have to bring it up for the lower schools. It’s going to be hard
to catch up.
Substance: There is talk about a teacher shortage, but it’s
like other problems. I don’t think you have a teacher shortage in
the more affluent school districts. The teacher shortage, like other problems,
is differentiated.
Roland Burris: We must get teacher salaries up in those areas,
in those underfunded school districts. We must get class size down. We
must get the various enrichment programs back in those classrooms —
the arts, the sports. And we must make sure that those teachers are challenging
the student the way Miss Mason challenged us.
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