Roland Burris was born in 1937 in Centralia, Illinois, graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1959, studied international law in Germany and earned a Howard University law degree in 1963. He became the first African American national bank examiner for the Comptroller of the Currency, then spent about a decade at Continental Illinois National Bank, rising to vice president. After heading the state’s Department of Central Management Services and briefly running Operation PUSH, he was elected Illinois comptroller in 1978, the first African American to win statewide office there, and attorney general in 1990. He then lost bids for U.S. Senate in 1984, governor in 1994, 1998 and 2002, and mayor of Chicago in 1995.

As attorney general he kept fighting Rolando Cruz’s appeal despite a memo from one of his assistant attorneys general warning of a wrongful conviction; she resigned, and DNA tests cleared Cruz in 1995. A funeral trust his comptroller’s office had licensed collapsed with a $59 million deficit after he lobbied for it. In December 2008 Governor Rod Blagojevich, caught on FBI wiretaps trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, appointed Burris, and the Senate seated him only after the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in his favor. FBI tapes then showed him offering to write a personal check, and the Senate Ethics Committee admonished him for misleading statements. He was the only Black senator during his short term and did not run in 2010.

• His pre-built mausoleum in Chicago’s Oakwood Cemetery is carved with the word Trailblazer, with space left for future achievements.
• In the 1998 governor’s race he called his primary opponents non-qualified white boys.
• A year after organizing Chicago’s first gun turn-in day in 1993, he was found to still keep a handgun at home.
• Secretary of State Jesse White refused to sign his certification, and he was turned away at the Senate chamber doors.
• By April 2009 his campaign had raised a total of $845.