Burke Confirms the Rumors: She Plans to Retire

Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke is coming to the end of a long political run, a once-interrupted 40-year stretch during which she has won 10 elections in the face of changing demographics and crises that have swallowed many of her peers. Barring something unexpected, Burke plans to step down from her seat on the board when her term ends in 2008.

"I'm inclined to say that it's time for me to move on," Burke said in an interview last week, confirming the rumblings within political circles. "I think I'm ready."

For Burke, 73, retirement will culminate one of Los Angeles' most durable political careers, tested in the fast currents of the city's racial politics.

Once described as "earnest but bland," Burke pioneered African American political power even before Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley came to embody it with his election in 1973. She weathered early acts of overt racism and later incidents of more subtle discrimination. She has witnessed progress -- and a discouraging lack of it. Today, few surviving members of her leadership class are more associated with the rise of African American political power in the 1960s and 1970s -- or with its scattering and dissolution in more recent times.

"She's one of the few people who straddles the earliest days of black political success to today, a more confusing and ... complicated period," said Raphael Sonenshein, a professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton who has written extensively on Los Angeles political history. "She really does bridge the whole history."

Burke's public life began at what for modern Los Angeles was the beginning, the Watts riots of 1965. She was then a recent law school graduate, and Judge Earl Broady, one of the early African Americans on the local bench, recommended her for a staff position with the commission assigned to investigate the causes of the riots.

The chairman was John McCone, a former director of Central Intelligence. The vice chairman, Warren M. Christopher, proved even more important to the history of the city, periodically playing vital roles in leading and stabilizing Los Angeles. They agreed to hire Burke, and she, Christopher said last week, "performed brilliantly on the staff" in that first public assignment.