She helps Philly kids through adoption and parole and just discovered her own storied family history | We The People

Meet Tulleesha Burbage, a social worker for kids going through adoption and juveniles on parole who recently learned her grandfather was a star outfielder in the Negro Leagues.

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When Tulleesha Burbage visited her father as a child, he always told her “you got famous people.”

“He’d say ‘You are a beautiful woman and you don’t understand the genes you carry,’” Burbage said.

But what he told her never really sunk in.

“Maybe because I was younger or maybe because my dad was talking fast, I just remember not taking him seriously,” she said.

Burbage didn’t think much about it until six months ago, when she suffered a case of sleep paralysis following a dream in which she found herself running in the middle of an open field near an old shed.

Her friend, Dennis Richmond Jr., 26, of Yonkers, N.Y., believed it was Burbage’s ancestors trying to tell her something. He got to work tracing her family genealogy and discovered that Burbage’s paternal grandfather was Knowlington Burbage — also known as K.O. “Buddy” Burbage — a star outfielder in the Negro Leagues from 1929 to 1942 who lived in Philadelphia.

“He went down in history, literally,” Richmond said. “To know that my friend descends from him is amazing.”

Richmond created a genealogy book for Burbage, complete with a picture of her grandfather, whom she never got to meet, and gifted it to her last year.

“I was very, very surprised and really excited,” Burbage, 26, of Upper Darby, said. “I felt like Black history really ran in my family because of my grandfather.”

Burbage grew up in Southwest Philly with her mom and brother. She also has seven half-siblings from her father.

While attending the now-shuttered Communications Technology High School, where she graduated in 2013, Burbage joined Harcum College’s Upward Bound program, which helps potential first-generation college students explore options for college.

“Going to college was foreign for a low-income child growing up in Southwest, it wasn’t something we talked about at all,” Burbage said. “This program gave me the foundation to understand that going to school was a beautiful thing and I should expand my education and horizons as a Black person.”

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Burbage received a full scholarship to the Alice Carson Tisdale Honors College at Claflin University, an HBCU in Orangeburg, S.C.

“Just going to the South, it was so hot I was choking. I was like ‘What is this air?’” Burbage recalled. “My mom said ‘Oh, we are not in the hood anymore.’”

Though everything was different — “the houses, the roads, the air, the water, how people talk” — Burbage said leaving Philly and attending an HBCU was the best thing that ever happened to her.

“It’s something you can’t describe but it’s a fruitful and a cultural experience that will make you understand why you are on this earth and why you’re getting educated,” she said.

Burbage majored in sociology, inspired by her mother’s service as a foster parent and her admiration for the social workers who advocated for the children in her mom’s care. And she minored in criminal justice because of what she saw her father, who spent time in prison when she was a child, go through in the criminal justice system.

While in college in 2016, Burbage’s half-brother, Pierre, who was particularly proud of her “because I was the only one who got out of the hood,” was shot and killed outside a community center in Mantua.

“He’d always say ‘You have to let your nieces and nephews know they got to go to school,’” she said. “And that’s still my promise, to make sure they go to school.”

After graduating in 2017, Burbage went on to get her masters in Children and Family Services at the University of Pittsburgh.

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While in school, she interned for A Second Chance in Pittsburgh, a nonprofit which helps place children through kinship care. When she graduated in 2019, Burbage took a job with the organization’s Philly office, which has a contract with DHS, where she now works as a permanency supervisor and runs a caregivers support group.

That’s her day job. At night, she works as a supervisor for Catholic Social Services’ St. Gabriel System, running a 10-week program for juveniles on parole teaching them how to make better life decisions.

“We really want this program to go to all kids and not just kids who commit their first offense,” she said. “If we can get to them before their first offense we may be able to slow them up.”

Burbage feels called to this work, to teach kids in Philly what she had to learn on her own.

“I really want my Black brothers and sisters to know that there’s a world outside of here,” she said.

It’s something which Burbage discovered her own grandfather knew well, and which she admires him greatly for.

“He traveled all over,” she said. “He played in 10 different teams, he played for pretty much any Negro baseball team they had. He never stayed in one place.”

Burbage dreams of one day opening up her own recreational center, with beds, a kitchen, a computer lab, and counseling services where police could take juveniles instead of taking them to a holding cell.

“I want to be in the community,” Burbage said. “I want to be walking the same ground as the people I help.”

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