William Haywood Burns (June 15, 1940 – April 2, 1996) was an American lawyer, author, professor, civil rights activist, the second dean of the City University of New York Law School (he served from 1987 until 1994) and a Civil Rights Movement leader.
In between, on a Harvard fellowship studying in Cambridge, England, he conducted research on black Muslims that he turned into a book, The Voices of Negro Protest in America, published in 1963.
After law school he worked for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, clerked for Constance Baker Motley and then became an assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc.[2] Burns served as general counsel to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign and was one of the founders of the National Conference of Black Lawyers.
After meeting with Nelson Mandela in Harlem, Burns was a legal advisor to the drafting of South Africa's interim constitution in 1993.
He was killed in a car accident in Cape Town, South Africa, in April 1996.