Will Burns, a candidate for alderman in Chicago’s Fourth Ward, is not a flashy politician. Short and stocky, with a boyish face and a sharp wit, he dons conservative suits and shuttles between campaign events in a beat-up 2003 Impala. His voice is firm and brassy but not booming. If Burns, who’s 37, didn’t represent Illinois’s 26th house district, a job he’s held for three years, he might be running a social service agency or teaching grad students political theory.
Public service runs in his family. Burns’s paternal grandmother was the first black woman to be elected ward committeeman in Cleveland. Burns remembers sitting on her porch as a small boy in the late 1970s, near where some of Cleveland’s worst race riots had taken place a decade earlier, and watching people stop by to thank her for registering voters and organizing community forums.
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But it’s his mother who Burns takes after most. Introverted, bookish, and socially conscious, she attended Monmouth College in west-central Illinois—she was one of eight black students—and returned home to Cleveland to earn her master’s in social work at Case Western Reserve University. Throughout Burns’s childhood she impressed upon him the importance of self-worth and racial pride. Burns remembers celebrating Kwanzaa “before it was cool” and subscribing to Ebony Jr.!—”Highlights for black kids,” he jokes.
His mother made him navigate between disparate worlds at a young age. The family lived in Warrensville Heights, a predominantly black inner-ring suburb of Cleveland with stable middle-class families who’d recently migrated there from the city’s east side. His second home was Friendly Inn, Cleveland’s oldest settlement house, which his mother has run since 1978. Situated in a public housing complex, the center provides group therapy and service programs for some of Cleveland’s poorest residents. “I grew up there,” Burns says. “I went to summer day camps, I’d go to community meetings. She’d drag us to all of this stuff. I saw that opportunity is not equitably distributed in our society.”
After graduating in 1995, Burns landed a job at the Blue Gargoyle, a literacy and tutoring nonprofit (since shuttered) anchored in Hyde Park. One day that September he swung by a campaign event for a neighbor named Barack Obama—he was launching his run for the state senate. For a young liberal African-American trying to make inroads in Chicago’s parochial political scene, particularly in the moribund climate that followed the collapse of Harold Washington’s coalition, Obama’s bottom-up approach to electoral politics was instantly appealing.
As an African-American, Burns brought an uncommon perspective to the staff job. And his analytical skills, honed in graduate school, were more advanced than those of his peers. He gravitated toward issues that he’d been thinking about since the days in his grandparents’ living room, researching and drafting several prominent bills—racial-profiling protections, death penalty and ethics reforms—that Obama eventually carried when Democrats regained the majority in 2003 and Jones became senate president. Without those legislative accomplishments, it’s unlikely that Obama would have been able to survive a crowded U.S. Senate primary the following year.
Burns went back to work behind the scenes in Springfield. During the next session, which ran from 2005 to 2007, he was on the staff of the senate rules committee (now called assignments), whose majority determines if and how bills should proceed through the legislature. “One of my jobs was to go through every bill that was introduced, at least the summary of it, to try to figure out where it was coming from,” Burns says. “I got to touch a lot of paper.” He became intimately familiar with the senate’s procedural rules, which few members take the time to study.
