  Roland Burris returns to his roots
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Despite having lived in Chicago for the past five decades, the 71-yearold doesn’t miss a beat when it comes to remembering details about Centralia. For example, he shouts out names of former high school classmates and distant cousins, recalling with ease not just their names but also nicknames and who dated, eventually married, divorced and remarried whom. “I’m home and I’m at a loss at what the heck to say,” Burris said when he took the podium. “I won’t even read this prepared speech because I’m afraid I’ll say something out of line. Because I get home with you all and I just start talking and I get too comfortable. And because there’s press here, I want to make sure that I don’t say anything out of line because it would be all over the newspapers in terms of ‘Burris did it again.’”  Actually, Burris avoided controversial headlines throughout most of his 30-year career in Illinois politics. Burris was born in 1937, the youngest of three children. Centralia (current population: 14,136) was a boomtown in those days, thanks to the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad and coal and oil industries, and where African-Americans made up 10 percent of the town’s growing population.
A decade after his birth, on March 25, 1947, 111 miners died when a coal dust explosion at a Centralia mine collapsed underground tunnels just minutes before shift change. Not long after the disaster, the town’s mining industry tanked, and many believe, so did Centralia.
The disappearance of jobs didn’t help to improve the palpable tension between blacks and whites either. In 1953, when Roland was 15 years old, his father, Earl, successfully led a campaign to desegregate the municipal swimming pool. On Memorial Day of that year, Roland was the first African-American to take a dip. Delores Wanzo, who’s held several elected offices in Centralia, says she thought something was special about young Burris even then. “He used to be my paper boy and when I owed him a dollar, he stayed there until he got it,” Wanzo recalls.
In fact, according to people who’ve known him his entire life, at age 16 Burris made up his mind that he wanted to become an attorney and run for statewide office. And though the town was divided racially, Burris tells how his alma mater, Centralia High School and its sports teams, nicknamed the Orphans, brought the community together.
“We had a heck of a football team. We lost two games in four years, both to East St. Louis,” says Burris, who, at five-feet-
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