[ Officials have described the recent shooting as an aberration in
the “City of Good Neighbors.” But this conceals the city’s
long-standing racial divisions.]
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HIDING BUFFALO’S HISTORY OF RACISM BEHIND A CLOAK OF UNITY  
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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
June 9, 2022
The New Yorker
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_ Officials have described the recent shooting as an aberration in
the “City of Good Neighbors.” But this conceals the city’s
long-standing racial divisions. _

A person waits outside the scene as police investigate after a
shooting at the Tops Supermarket on Saturday, May 14, 2022, in
Buffalo, N.Y. , (AP Photo/Joshua Bessex)

 

Tension choked the air when a ten-foot-tall cross, wrapped in
gasoline-soaked rags, burned wildly, as if to set the night on fire.
The cross burned in the fall of 1980, on Jefferson Avenue, which runs
through several Black neighborhoods that constitute the East Side of
Buffalo, New York, and it punctuated a wave of terror in and around
the city. A month earlier, on September 22nd, a Black
fourteen-year-old boy had been shot in the head three times. Over the
next two days, three other Black men were shot and killed. After
ballistics testing, the police concluded that all four had been killed
by the same weapon. Then, in early October, the bodies of two more
Black men were found, beaten and stabbed to death. Both men had had
their hearts cut out of their chests.

Several days after that, the cross was lit ablaze. The following day,
on October 10th, a nurse walked in on a white man trying to strangle a
Black man who was lying prone in a hospital bed. He survived, but the
attack left him incapacitated and in need of surgery. In the course of
those weeks, six African American males had been viciously murdered.
The streak of deaths overlapped with a series of bewildering
disappearances of Black children in Atlanta, which came to be known as
the Atlanta child murders
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heightening the terror.

In Black neighborhoods across Buffalo, rumors swirled that the
killings were the work of the Ku Klux Klan. During one of the
funerals, the Associated Press reported
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two carloads of whites drove by with a “mannequin with grotesque,
red painted head wounds,” and threw red paint on the hearse. City
officials scoffed at the idea that organized racists were involved in
the killings, and a state N.A.A.C.P. official allowed that the attacks
may have been committed by a single killer. “However, it is the
climate of racism and conservatism in this country that is
responsible,” she said. A Black resident named Lattice Alexander
told the _Times_, “Some white people think blacks are getting ahead
of them, even though that’s not totally true. With the legal rulings
over the last few years and all this unemployment they think they may
be losing something because of us.”

After the killings, city officials dealt with rising fear and anger on
the East Side of Buffalo. Three years earlier, Arthur O. Eve, a state
representative in the New York legislature, had stood on the cusp of
being the first Black mayor of Buffalo, after he shockingly beat James
Griffin, a former state senator, in the mayoral primary. But Griffin,
a high-school dropout based in South Buffalo, a mostly white area,
resurfaced in the general election on the Conservative Party line,
running on white-grievance politics: he opposed welfare, championed
“law and order,” and supported the death penalty. Eve had made a
name for himself by heading a solidarity committee that negotiated on
behalf of prisoners in Attica state prison in the aftermath of the
Attica rebellion
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Griffin painted Eve as “soft on crime.” But, in the wake of the
killings, Griffin lowered city flags and called for calm. Black youth
had been pelting cars driven by whites with rocks. Jesse Jackson came
to the city to plead for peace. Griffin, in a public plea, said, “We
can’t let mean and vicious crimes like these separate us. . . .
Buffalo is the City of Good Neighbors.”

Local leaders have often invoked the city’s invented “good
neighbors” moniker to promote an ethos of gritty unity in Buffalo.
In the aftermath of a racially motivated mass shooting at a Tops
grocery store
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which left ten African Americans dead, the current mayor of Buffalo,
Byron Brown, made the familiar plea, saying
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“We’re standing strong as a community and working to not let this
horrible act of hate detract from us being a loving, warm, welcoming
community. Buffalo is known as the City of Good Neighbors, nationally
and internationally.” When New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul,
joined President Joe Biden
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express condolences and present her plan to prevent these kinds of
attacks in the future, she made similar gestures. She compared Buffalo
to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Biden hails from. Hochul said
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“Buffalo’s a little bit like Scranton, little bigger version of
Scranton. You know, Scranton. You live a long time and you love your
community, but you get knocked down a little bit and don’t quite get
the respect sometimes as other parts of your state do.” She went on
to say that, as a result, “there’s something called Buffalove.
It’s a combination of the words ‘Buffalo’ and ‘love.’ We
call it Buffalove.”

The effort to console and empathize can just as easily distort and
conceal. Buffalo is not like Scranton, which has never had a
population that was more than eight per cent African American. It is
more akin to Philadelphia or Newark, with a large Black population
constituting more than a third of the city. As in those cities, there
is severe residential segregation, which keeps Black and white
residents living in different social, economic, and political
realities. In 1993, a writer in the local daily
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the Buffalo _News_, compared Main Street, the central dividing line
of the city, to the Berlin Wall, “dividing rich from poor, the haves
from the have-nots.” Buffalo is one of the poorest cities in the
country, and nearly half of children living in the city are poor. But
the hardship that defines the city is not evenly shared. A
disproportionate number of the have-nots live on the East Side of
Buffalo, where more than three-quarters of the city’s African
American residents live.

Last fall, the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies
released a report
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“The Harder We Run: The State of Black Buffalo in 1990 and the
Present.” The report was a follow-up to a similar one that my
father, Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., had produced nearly thirty-one years
earlier. The key findings were stunning in their similarity. In 1990,
Black unemployment stood at eighteen per cent and the average
household income was thirty-nine thousand dollars a year. Thirty-eight
per cent of Blacks lived under the poverty line; there were more
African Americans who had dropped out of high school than who held a
college degree; and less than thirty-five per cent of African
Americans owned their own homes. By last year, Black unemployment was
eleven per cent; the average income was forty-two thousand dollars a
year; some thirty-five per cent of African Americans lived under the
poverty line; and only thirty-two per cent owned their homes. There
continue to be more Black dropouts than Black college graduates. For
most ordinary Black people, time has stood still. As the report
concluded, “Everything has changed, but everything has remained the
same.”

When these conditions exist for decades, they come to be seen as the
natural order of things. In the largely white West Side of the city,
there are brick homes, grocery stores, shops, and gorgeous parks
designed by Frederick Law Olmsted
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On the East Side sit ninety-four per cent of the city’s vacant lots.
In 2014, Evans Bank in Buffalo was sued by the state attorney general
for engaging in modern-day redlining, excluding the entire East Side
of Buffalo from its mortgage lending. (Bank officials denied that
racism was a factor.) Money is being poured into a new stadium for the
Buffalo Bills, and the restoration of the city’s Art Deco-style
Central Terminal. Meanwhile, on the East Side, residents struggle with
busted sidewalks, most of which, according to the Center for Urban
Studies, “do not even have curb ramps and pedestrian crossings.”

When Joe Biden travelled to Buffalo to console the city, he spoke
passionately about white supremacy, saying
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“It’s been allowed to grow and fester right before our eyes. . . .
No more, no more. We need to say as clearly and as forcefully as we
can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.”
But racial segregation and poverty were among the conditions that left
Black Buffalonians vulnerable to a white-supremacist attack. (The
shooter searched the Internet by Zip Code, looking for a location with
a high density of Black residents.) Calls for reforms on these issues
have largely been ignored.

 

In the United States, it has always been easiest to denounce virulent
and explicit acts of racism. Still, it is clear that there is mounting
energy to resist forms of racism that are not explicit but are still
deadly and stultifying. The Black Lives Matter street protests
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Buffalo during 2020 gave voice to a growing frustration over city
government’s claim of a “Buffalo renaissance,” which seemed to
bypass most African Americans living in the city. Out of those
frustrations came the improbable rise of India Walton
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a registered nurse, socialist, former teen-aged mother, and welfare
recipient, who rode the wave of anger over racism and inequality in
Buffalo to win the city’s Democratic primary, defeating the
four-term Mayor Byron Brown. Brown eventually defeated Walton in an
unprecedented write-in campaign, in part by accepting the help of
Republicans who provided volunteers and fund-raising; the highest
percentage
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Brown’s votes came from the mostly white South Buffalo. But
Walton’s campaign shone a light on the conditions of
underdevelopment in Black Buffalo. Now the murder of ten Black people
at the Tops grocery store has once again exposed the city’s vicious
inequalities. Locals fear that city officials and private enterprise
will once again pay lip service to the tragedy and then move on once
the news cameras have left. When I asked Walton what she believed the
story in Buffalo to be, in the aftermath of the murders, she said,
“I am very disappointed that, like, already, in the media, the
dominant narrative is that this was an out-of-towner, who mysteriously
appeared and committed this act, rather than confronting the systemic
racism that has plagued Buffalo. We have been pegged the fifth or
sixth most segregated city for so many years. And we’ve not
confronted that as a reality of where we live.”

In 1982, Joseph Christopher, a white racist from Buffalo, was
convicted of murdering three of the Black men who had mysteriously
been killed in the fall of 1980. Christopher was initially linked to
the Buffalo murders after he admitted to a psychiatrist that he “had
to” kill Black people. But, in 1985, Christopher’s convictions
were overturned because the judge had improperly prevented psychiatric
evidence from being presented at trial. A year later, he was convicted
again. He was ultimately implicated in the murder or assault of Black
men not only in Buffalo but also in New York City and Fort Benning,
Georgia, on an Army base, in 1981. Still, many city officials clung to
a narrative that emphasized Christopher’s mental illness over the
racism that motivated his actions. Today, white supremacy is being
loudly denounced for motivating the rampage at Tops. But, in both
cases, it is important to remember that the racism behind the shooting
didn’t spring spontaneously from the killer’s deranged mind but
also emerged from a society that regularly disregards the conditions
of inequality and poverty in poor and working-class Black communities.
The attack in Buffalo might be taken as an opportunity not only to
pass gun-control legislation
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to confront the political phenomenon of white supremacy but also to
transform the conditions that undermine the life chances of ordinary
Black people. ♦

_Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker,
where she writes about Black history and politics, social movements,
and racial inequality in the United States.  Taylor is a professor of
African American studies at Princeton University and the author of
several books. “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate
Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
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semifinalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a 2020 finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize for history. _

 

* Buffalo
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* Systemic racism
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* Racist Attacks
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