‘I’ve Always Wanted to Be Helpful’

John Burris apologizes for arriving several minutes late to this interview. The 79-year-old civil rights attorney sits in an office chair of his law firm Burris Nisenbaum Curry & Lacy in Oakland, California, wearing a navy suit and a tie with diagonal stripes in different shades of purple. Behind him hang framed newspaper clippings from his 40-plus-year legal career as well as plaques honoring his service in mentoring youth and sponsoring Little League baseball teams. Burris just wrapped another media interview. His firm has made headlines for winning a $7.5 million settlement against the city of Antioch, California, in the Angelo Quinto case. Quinto, 30, was a Filipino American and a Navy veteran. In 2020, his mother called the police while he was in a mental health crisis. Quinto died from asphyxia after Antioch police restrained him by kneeling on his neck for five minutes. 

“This is a situation where [the police] did not have to do what they did,” says Burris, who specializes in police misconduct. “We know the cops have the responsibility to do their job, but the question is how you do that job. Holding them accountable is my responsibility.” 

Burris has represented more than 1,000 victims of police misconduct, some of whom were high profile and some of whom barely made the news. He was part of Rodney King’s legal team and helped him win a $3.8 million judgment in 1994 after being brutally beaten by four Los Angeles police officers. Burris also represented the family of Oscar Grant, who was killed by a BART police officer on New Year’s Day in 2009, a story depicted in the film Fruitvale Station. BART settled with the Grants for $2.8 million. 

Regardless of the client, Burris’ tireless devotion to ending racial disparity and police brutality has brought more than just awareness and discussion about important topics. He’s affected real change that’s benefited civilians and improved police departments. 

Former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, MA 69 (public administration), a longtime friend and colleague of Burris, says Burris’ passion for justice and courage for winning difficult cases has made him one of the top civil rights attorneys in the nation today—and one of the few, he says, willing to represent the underdog against powerful entities with a lot of resources, like the police and corporations. 

“Trial lawyers who fight for the underdog are like gunslingers. You have to have a high level of confidence in yourself and certainly in your case,” Harris says. “It’s always an uphill battle because [powerful entities] sometimes have a hundred lawyers. … But John has never wavered from his willingness to … fight for his clients regardless of their economic circumstances or anything else. And that’s … a very rare kind of lawyer.”

Lessons in disparity

Burris’ interest in civil rights began in his youth. The oldest of six, he was born and raised in Vallejo, California. His father worked in the shipyards after serving in the Army Air Corps, and his mother was a psychiatric nurse at Napa State Hospital. They also did field work and looped their older children into picking fruit. It was an early lesson for Burris.

“My interest [for law and justice] was sparked by what I saw working in the fields—the disparity,” he says. “I really disliked the fact that there were bosses over us dictating how we lived our lives and how we worked. I felt like a slave hand.” 

He also took notice of disparity in education when he and his sister left their Black school and integrated into an advanced placement elementary school that was all white. White schools, he recognized, had more resources than his former Black school. 

“I really could see injustice early,” Burris recounts. “I could see Black kids didn’t have good [baseball] fields. I could see the world was different, and that stuck with me.” 

Burris’ child eyes widened even more to racism in 1955, when he learned of a tragedy that rocked the nation. Fourteen-year-old Emmet Till traveled from Chicago to visit family in Money, Mississippi. After a white woman alleged Till was flirting with her, two white men kidnapped, beat, shot, and threw Till into a river. Till’s mother intentionally held an open-casket funeral, and photos of Till’s bloated and beaten body circulated in newspapers and magazines, galvanizing the Civil Rights Movement. 

“That was traumatic,” Burris says. “I’m a 10-year-old at the time, and I couldn’t understand it. How could this happen? Could this happen to me? It was probably the modern-day George Floyd movement for young kids.” 

Till’s murder drove Burris to dive into newspapers. He began following the Civil Rights Movement and other injustices in the South. The news showed a world unlike his Bay Area community where he got along with Black and white kids. 

“Those stories had a dramatic impact on me because it let me know that life was different,” Burris says. 

Engaging with Black and white kids and reading about Black lawyers like Thurgood Marshall helped Burris see there was a bigger world outside of his Vallejo community. Attending a white school where he competed with other kids boosted his self-esteem. 

“Business school … gave me a vision of myself in terms of activism, the importance of connecting with groups, how to resolve conflicts, how to disagree without being disagreeable, and [how to be] an advocate for your positions.”

“It truly made me know that I was as smart as anybody else,” he says. After graduating from high school, his father drove him to the shipyard to apply for a journeyman job, but Burris wouldn’t get out of the car. 

“I said, ‘I’m not doing this. I’m going to college. Period.’” 

Education and activism

Burris graduated from Golden Gate University in San Francisco with an accounting degree, which he pursued because he was good at math and people in his community recommended he become a bookkeeper. In 1967, one of the biggest accounting firms in the country at that time, Haskins & Sells, hired then 22-year-old Burris to work in their San Francisco office. Burris says he was the first Black accountant to work for a national CPA firm in San Francisco. 

He stayed with the firm for two years but became restless. The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were an impetus to attend Haas. Between the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the Black Panther Party, he wanted to do more to uplift the Black community and sought an MBA to learn how to help build Black wealth and economic stability.

“Business school was an important period of time for me because it … gave me a vision of myself in terms of activism, the importance of connecting with groups, how to resolve conflicts, how to disagree without being disagreeable, and [how to be] an advocate for your positions,” Burris says. 

“The big advance is cameras, body cams, cell phones. So now you don’t have people who are afraid to acknowledge that police do bad things.”

One early cause he championed was as the leader of the campus’ chapter of the Black MBA Association. He and fellow students recruited Black students to Haas. Karen Francisco, MBA 72, was an accounting major at San Francisco State University when she met Burris. She and other Black students at SFSU were unaware that UC Berkeley even had a business school. 

“John is one who encourages individuals to stretch themselves and to get involved,” says Francisco. When she and other Black students arrived, Burris and fellow activists created a tutoring program for them. 

Haas Professor Dow Votaw noticed Burris becoming more vocal about social justice issues in class and encouraged him to consider a law career. After graduating from Haas, Burris enrolled in Berkeley Law. 

A passion for justice

A law school internship in Chicago opened Burris’ eyes to police brutality outside of the segregated south, sparking a lifelong crusade that would impact the lives of civilians and police officers alike. In the early 1970s, Illinois Congressman Ralph Metcalf organized a commission to investigate police brutality after his friend, a Black doctor, had been beaten up by Chicago police officers. Burris spent months interviewing victims of police brutality in the city. 

“This was like real-life stuff in the North. That was traumatic for me,” says Burris. “So that was something that I kept in the back of my mind as a sense of outrage. I’m thinking there is something that has to be done about this.” 

After finishing law school in 1973, Burris first practiced in the Chicago law firm Jenner & Block and later became an assistant state attorney in Cook County, Illinois. After three-and-a-half years, he returned to the Bay Area to serve as an Alameda County prosecutor. A few years later, he started a law office with his Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brothers David Alexander and future Oakland mayor Harris. Then another killing of a Black teenage boy further fueled his passion for justice. 

In 1979, Oakland police shot 15-year-old Melvin Black multiple times in the back, killing him, while responding to calls of kids shooting on the freeway near Children’s Hospital Oakland. 

To quell the community and address the mistrust of police and prosecutors, Oakland’s mayor sought an independent private investigator to review the case. He hired Burris because he’d practiced in both the DA’s office and for a private firm. After his investigation, Burris found that the police behaved improperly and were dishonest about their actions. This case made Burris more interested in “improving the quality of policing and doing civil rights work,” he says. He left the law office he’d started to be a civil rights attorney. 

Harris wasn’t surprised by Burris’ move. “Sometimes people do what’s convenient,” he says. “John always tries to do what’s right.”

Systemic changes

Among his many court victories, the one Burris says will have the most lasting impact is the Riders case. “It was an opportunity to take over the entire police department, review it from top to bottom, and really bring about the kind of changes that are systemic,” he says.

“The Riders” were a group of four rogue police officers active in the 1990s and early 2000s who were on trial for beating civilians, planting evidence, falsifying reports, and more in their pursuit of reputed drug dealers in West Oakland. In a 2003 civil suit litigated by Burris and attorney Jim Chanin, the city settled with 119 plaintiffs for $10.5 million and agreed to federal monitoring of the police—still ongoing more than 20 years later. 

Since the ruling, Burris and Chanin have worked with the federal oversight committee and have drafted 55 tasks the Oakland Police Department must fulfill for changes to police policies in internal and external procedures. These tasks include addressing the use of force, disciplining officers who are dishonest in court, ensuring civilian complaints reach supervisors, and more. The Riders trial ruling and federal oversight have led to reforms in the OPD.

Several other lawsuits came out of the Riders trial that revealed layers of issues within the Oakland Police Dept. “For example,” Burris explains, “cases where Black men were being strip-searched on the street got declared unconstitutional. We’ve got cases now where people’s houses were being searched without proper search warrants.” Burris co-represented some 100 plaintiffs who were wrongfully served with warrants and, at times, harassed. They settled for $6.5 million. 

While Burris is known for fighting for civilian victims of police misconduct, he’s also represented police officers themselves. “I’ve been very concerned about the disparity of treatment of Black officers within that department. I know that Black officers were being disciplined at a higher rate than white officers,” Burris says. “Well, I’ve been able to put a finger on that and make a real change.” Burris recommended a study by a private independent company that found patterns of racial imbalance within the department. Officers have since received training on implicit bias. 

Despite the weight of the cases he carries and the racial tensions in this country, when asked if we’ve made progress when it comes to justice and police misconduct, Burris is upbeat. “Oh absolutely,” he says. “Before Rodney King, I was doing cases, and it was a fight because white people did not accept the notion that police could be so abusive. However, if you go 30 years from then, you have George Floyd [and] all these other cases I’ve been involved in. The big advance is cameras, body cams, cell phones. So now you don’t have people who are afraid to acknowledge that police do bad things. That has made a huge difference. “

Rounding third

At 79, Burris isn’t ready to retire yet, nor is he saying when he thinks that day will come. 

“I’m not thinking about a number because when I do that my wife might hold me to it,” he jokes. “As I say, I’m rounding third and sliding into home. I’m just not running to get there.” 

He credits his wife, the retired law professor Cheryl Amana Burris, for providing him with stability. Their blended family has brought more children and grandchildren into Burris’ life.
“Her kids are great,” he says. She’s an East Coast person so that has broadened my sense of the world as well.”

Husband, father, grandfather, famed civil rights attorney, mentor to Bay Area youth for decades—so many roles make up Burris. So what does he want his legacy to be? “I was able to help people,” Burris says. “I’ve always wanted to be helpful.”