Making History in Forest Hills

Bill Burleigh has never been the loudest guy in the room.

Yet in January 2010, roughly two years after he moved to , he was appointed to fill a vacancy on the borough council. At 65, it was his first experience in local politics. And as a relative newcomer to the community, he assumed a calm, soft-spoken demeanor.

“He’s not a windbag,” said Mayor , who met Burleigh while exercising at a local gym and told him about the opening. “He was interested in politics, but he wasn’t an ideologue.”

Burleigh considers himself a thoughtful listener of sorts, rather than the outspoken politician type.

“I don’t need to hear myself speak,” Burleigh said. “I’ve never been that guy.”

Fellow council member said appointing Burleigh was an easy choice. He came from a business background—Burleigh held sales and marketing positions with Colgate, IBM and Xerox, and has owned and operated a small IT consulting business for 28 years. He was a good listener—and he did a lot of listening.

“He was probably at every committee and council meeting for four or five months before he was appointed,” Karas said.

Burleigh grew close to Karas and council member , and when primary season got under way this year, the three Democrats ran a joint campaign for the three open seats.

Even though he had more than a year of experience on council, Burleigh worried that name recognition would hinder his bid. He spoke to voters of his business background and trusted that having Karas’ and Wood’s support would help his chances. The three won nominations in the primary, with Burleigh getting eight more votes than Wood. Long-time resident , a Democrat, was the runner-up. He would run on the Republican ticket in the general election.

When election returns started coming in Nov. 8, Burleigh watched as Karas and Wood pulled ahead in the vote counts. As the number of uncounted votes dwindled, it remained unclear whether Burleigh or White would take the third seat.

By the official count, 46 votes gave Burleigh the edge over White. When he was reached by phone on election night, Burleigh said he wasn’t sure, until then, that the community was behind him.

“At first, it was the council who put me in,” Burleigh said. “Now, I know that the people want me.”

Before the conversation ended, he casually mentioned that he was the first black person to be elected to Forest Hills Council.

Settling In

When Burleigh moved to Forest Hills in 2008, the community was in the midst of a significant shift in racial demographics. Census data from 2000 lists three percent of the population identifying themselves as black. In the 2010 Census, that figure is 9.1 percent. 

“I really feel good that there are more black people coming, if you want to isolate it like that,” Burleigh said.

He, himself, is in the process of moving—from a rental unit on Halsey Avenue to a house he bought just across the street.

“There is a larger black population here simply because it is a good neighborhood,” he said, adding that the community is safe and fair. “And, I can see people wanting to be in that kind of environment, coming from an environment they would want to get away from.”

Burleigh was born in Waynesboro, VA, an area nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the aesthetics of which he likened to that of Forest Hills. He described the home he grew up in as an old, unpainted farmhouse surrounded by woods. As a boy, he spent much of his time outdoors.

“I drank water out of the stream that ran through the property,” Burleigh said. “All of my friends, we’d go back in the woods—miles and miles into the woods. That was our playground.”

But it wasn’t all idyllic. Burleigh did, after all, grow into adulthood during the civil rights movement.

“The environment that I came up in—yeah, I at times was separated from the group,” he said. “I was called names. I was pushed aside. (There were) some opportunities I thought I should have gotten that I didn’t get.”

Burleigh would have been 9 years old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat—in the midst of a phase during which children begin making rational judgments about observable events. 

He recalled hearing of the Parks incident in grade school, if vaguely. News traveled slowly into Burleigh’s sparsely populated nook in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was in high school, part of a graduating class of 11, when four black college students launched a series of sit-ins at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. He didn’t hear of the protests until much later.

After high school, Burleigh spent a few years working and taking care of his mother. He made $500 a month—which at the time seemed to him like a fortune; his mother’s mortgage payment was $50 a month.

He didn’t have plans for college, but his mother urged him to go. Despite his resistance, she made arrangements for him to attend St. Paul’s College, a historically black liberal arts college in Lawrenceville, VA.

“She said, ‘The bus comes at 3 o’clock, and you’re going to be on that bus,'” Burleigh said. “When she sent me away, I was crying.”

The year was 1965. He was away from home for the first time. In Emporia, a town not far from campus, Ku Klux Klan members who owned businesses often hung signs on their doors to scare off black people, Burleigh said. He unknowingly walked into one of these establishments, a restaurant, and workers promptly told him to leave. 

Across the nation, racial tension continued mounting. In 1968, James Earl Ray shot and killed Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, TN. 

“It was very sad and very confusing,” Burleigh said of the times. “It hurt. It really did.”

Burleigh considers himself a religious man. He was raised Baptist before converting to become Episcopalian. Once, he even considered becoming a minister. He never participated in civil rights activism, he said. He wouldn’t have felt comfortable at a protest.

“It’s an aggressive behavior,” he said. “I’m very pacifist. I just felt like the Lord would take care of it. And I prayed on it—constantly.” 

Burleigh graduated college with a degree in education and a minor in psychology. He went on to teach sixth grade at Jefferson-Houston School in Alexandria, VA, for three years before taking up business. He didn’t like being in a classroom all day, he said, and he wanted to apply the skills he’d acquired in a different way.

During the years that followed, he landed sales and marketing jobs with Colgate, IBM and Xerox. In 1983, he founded Data Consulting Solutions Inc., which provides IT consulting and currently employs five people. He still runs the company, which is located in downtown Pittsburgh.

Burleigh never saw his race as an impediment, he said.

“The bottom line is, it helped me become stronger,” Burleigh said of his past. “It helped me understand more about the fact that everybody’s different, that you can’t satisfy all the people all the time, and that I needed to really focus on trying to understand people.”

Tune in for Part II of this small series later this week.