When Kaleena Burkes was 11, her family moved from Detroit to Camp Hill, Ala., transferring her from a school where most of her classmates were Black to one where a majority were white.
On the school bus one day, a white classmate referred to Burkes' Black seatmate by a racial epithet. The incident was reported but the white student faced no consequences.
"I've had experiences where I've been silenced and where I haven't been listened to," she said in a recent interview. "People need a voice. We're all human. We should have people who stand up for us if we can't do it in our own right."
Burkes, 41, said the incident was an early realization about disparate treatment of Black girls. As she grew up, she saw how academic, sports and social status didn't flow to the Black female students as freely as it did to the white girls.
In 2023, the Minnesota Legislature formally acknowledged the disparities as well, creating one of the nation's first state Office of Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls.
The establishment of the office grew out of a task force that looked into why Black women and girls experience violence at higher rates. Black women make up only 7% of the population in Minnesota, but they represent 40% of domestic violence victims and they are three times more likely to be murdered than white women, according to the task force's report.
As the first director of the office, Burkes also must build it. She started late last month and is in the early stages of putting it together with an annual budget of $1.24 million. The office is under the state's Office of Justice Programs at the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
In 2016, Burkes moved to Minnesota to work as a research associate at the University of Minnesota Law School's Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. She came after studying for a doctorate in criminology from Florida State University.
More recently, she spent more than seven years with the state's Guardian ad Litem Board in various positions. The board oversees a statewide network of court representatives who advocate for the best interest of children in the juvenile and family courts, and Burkes said she noticed that Black families experienced harsher treatment.
It was hard to watch, she said. "But because we could change the way that a guardian saw things or the way that their work behavior showed up when they were with children and families, that gave me peace," she said. "We started seeing people as human beings and not just a client or number, but these are human beings just like us who just needed a little bit of extra empathy."
Burkes wasn't looking for work when a friend forwarded the posting for the director's job at the new office. "The appeal was helping people who look like me who traditionally don't have a voice," she said.
She envisions her new role as wide-ranging, helping raise awareness of missing and murdered Black women while also serving as a resource for survivors. She expects to build a team of four to six staff members to help with research, developing a plan and getting the word out.
Eventually her aim is prevention. Her goal right now: Saving one person.
"We're not going to have a solution in six months," she said. "We're probably not going to have a solution in 12 months. This community has been harmed by all of the systems. It is generational. It is four and five hundred years in the making. So it's going to take a lot of work to unravel."
Burkes said her tremendous personal losses have shown her the importance of empathy. Her father died when she was 3. When she was a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, her mother died, and within a year, so did her maternal grandmother.
She wants to help others through the dark days. "This is probably the worst time in someone's life, and they need someone to be on their side and they need someone to speak for them. And they just need that empathy and support that the system traditionally doesn't give to them."
