Career
She held a variety of positions in federal, state, and city government in New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She was appointed the first director of New York State Women"s Division by Governor Hugh Carey in 1975. She was born Mary Cornelia Burke on July 6, 1926, in Tuskegee, Alabama, to Ruth Freeland and Walter Sturgeon Burke.
Her father, Walter Burke, who also had a law degree from Howard University School of Law, had moved the family from Washington District of Columbia to Tuskegee during the 1920s to help establish Tuskegee Home, one of the United States" first Veterans Administration hospitals for African-American military veterans.
The family moved back to Washington District of Columbia when she was about 10 years old. She graduated from Dunbar High School in Washington, District of Columbia in 1944.
Burke then received her bachelor"s degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1948.