Chuck Burris

News Obituary Article

Chuck Burris, 57, former mayor

By CHRISTIAN BOONE

When Chuck Burris launched his first bid for the Stone Mountain City Council in 1991, he attracted an unlikely supporter.

James Venable, the former Imperial Wizard of the National Knights of the Klan, allowed Mr. Burris to put a placard in his yard and said he'd vote for the political neophyte. Six years later, Mr. Burris was elected the first African-American mayor of Stone Mountain.

"It was the denouement of years and years of people working together to change the city's image," said Gary Peet, who defeated Mr. Burris in 2001. Chuck Burris, 57, of Bowie, Md., died Thursday in Annapolis from post-surgery complications related to amylodosis, an incurable disease in which an abnormal protein builds in body organs and tissues.

Mr. Venable held several Klan rallies atop Stone Mountain, where the modern Ku Klux Klan was born in 1915. Former Stone Mountain City Councilman Billy Mitchell said Venable's support for Burris was telling.

"Chuck was very personable, very diligent, and I think even Mr. Venable came to realize that," said Mr. Mitchell, now a Georgia state representative.

A native of rural Louisiana, Burris moved to Atlanta in 1967 as a scholarship student at Morehouse College. He attended Saturday classes with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and later went to law school before taking a job as a crime analyst in former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson's administration.

He relocated to Maryland two years ago to work at Lockheed Martin in Baltimore and to join his wife, Marcia Baird Burris, who had accepted a position in the public affairs office of the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum.

The funeral is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday at St. Monica and St. James Episcopal Church in Washington.

Other survivors include four children, one stepchild and 12 grandchildren.

Staff writer Rick Badie contributed to this article.

© 2009 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution