Keith Griffler, PhD
Keith Griffler is Associate Professor of African American History in the Department of Africana and American Studies at SUNY Buffalo. His most recent book is The Freedom Movement's Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation, forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky.
Editorial Note--In light of the recent tragedy in Buffalo, New York, which involved the murder of eleven innocent African Americans by a white supremacist at the Tops Supermarket, we at Historianspeaks see this as a teachable moment. This blog, the second of two (be sure to see the first blog here), explores the long history of Buffalo, New York in the 20th century century. In order to understand the present, we must talk about and engage the past.
Students who come from other parts of the state to attend one of Buffalo’s many colleges and universities are often surprised to find out about and thrilled to participate in the city’s Juneteenth celebration, according to its organizers, the third-largest in the nation. It was started in 1976 by the grassroots organization B.U.I.L.D. “as a culturally relevant alternative to the country's Bicentennial Celebration.” The festivities were originally focused on Jefferson Avenue, “the ‘Main Street’ of Buffalo's Black community.”
On May 14, 2022, that very thoroughfare was the site of the brutal assassination of the victims known locally as the “Jefferson Ten” by a white supremacist from a small town hours away.
Other features of Buffalo seem far more infuriatingly familiar to its universities’ predominantly in-state students in this “bluest” of states.
New York’s persistent and pervasive residential and educational segregation, a legacy of centuries past, maps out the geography of the terrorist attack that penetrated the heart of Buffalo’s Black community. Across different methodologies, Buffalo consistently ranks as one of the most segregated cities in America, joining the Empire state’s other major metropolitan areas.
A June 2021 report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project identifies New York as home to the nation’s most segregated school system from the standpoint of its Black population—even though white students now comprise the minority statewide.
New York City gets more attention, but the situation in Western New York is actually worse by some measures, with the problem in Buffalo now once again as bad as it was in the early 1970s before court-ordered desegregation.
For decades, the city has rather inconspicuously marched in virtual lock-step with the nation as a whole. The Black community has done more than help pave the way for a national “Emancipation Day” holiday. Buffalo elected its first Black mayor in 2006, and Byron Brown has served in that capacity ever since, now one of 39 among the largest 100 American cities.
Buffalo is equally reflective of a nation that has retreated from its commitments to ending racism that seemingly marked the Civil Rights era as a new dawn, with disastrous and deadly consequences. Johnny Cochran’s comparatively lower profile work in the city offers a typical example, as he represented the family of Cynthia Wiggins in their wrongful death suit against an upscale suburban mall.
The Black teenager was cut down in the prime of life as she attempted to get to work across a dangerous multi-lane highway from the bus stop made deliberately inaccessible to keep out less affluent Buffalonians. Cochran helped get the bus stop moved, but the racially-motivated resistance to extending Buffalo’s lone subway line into the suburbs persists to this day.
Another Buffalo Black woman, Cariol Horne, fought for 14 years to claim her police pension after she was fired for successfully intervening against a white colleague who had put a Black man in a deadly chokehold.
The sudden breakthrough of the Black Lives Matter movement into the national political mainstream in the summer of 2020 provided her a platform in her struggle for justice and police reform. Buffalo instituted legislation requiring law enforcement officers to render assistance, known as “Cariol’s Law” in her honor. Less than two years later on a fateful mid-May Saturday afternoon, the underlying racism that defies the usual associations with a “blue” state like New York have thrust its second largest city into the global spotlight of America’s hate crime crisis.