Remembering the racist Eddie Burke.
It has been five years since former alder Eddie Burke was indicted on corruption and racketeering charges.
That was too long to wait to get a little justice.
It shouldn’t have been such a heavy lift for prosectors.
We will have to wait another six months until Burke hears what his sentence will be.
The expectation is that Burke will receive jail time. Some legal experts think he will get six to twelve years.
Burke is 80 so it is unlikely he will actually serve twelve years.
For me there is not a lot of satisfaction in any of this, even apart from how long it has taken to bring Burke to some form of justice.
Harold Washington knew what kind of man Eddie Burke is.
My friend Curtis Black wrote about Harold and Eddie Burke in an article in the old Chicago Reporter in 2018 when Burke was first indicted.
But for Burke it went beyond parliamentary maneuvering. By several accounts, Washington distinguished between Burke and former Ald. Edward Vrdolyak, the majority faction leader. Vrdolyak was “not a racist, he’s a bully” who would gladly “use race” toward his ends, Washington told press secretary Alton Miller, as reported in Miller’s book, Harold Washington: The Man, The Mayor. “Burke is a racist,” Washington said.
Indeed, it was systemic racism – a ward map was eventually found in federal court to discriminate against minorities to protect white incumbents – that gave Vrdolyak his council majority and enabled him to replace the city’s first black finance committee chair, Wilson Frost, with Burke.
Corruption in Chicago City Council is as common as a Chicago pot hole in February.
Over 30 Chicago alders have been convicted of corruption since I moved to this city fifty years ago.
But no politician goes to prison for being a white supremacist.
Sadly.
Yet that was Eddie Burke’s real crime.
Burke’s conviction for corruption is like Al Capone going to jail for tax evasion.
But it will have to do, I suppose.