“Experiencing the City” seminar 2022: Ferry Streetįirst was the review of “Experiencing the City,” a seminar class formerly taught by the recently retired Professor Alfred Price and now taught by Professor Hiro Hata. These came at the UB School of Architecture and Planning during final review week. Just prior to May 14, a date that will live in infamy, I got a fresh look at this divide, a reminder of just how far we need to go to cure it, and also a look at a promising step forward. It will take all that and a whole lot more to get where we need to go. To heal our broken communities we’ll need symbolic acts and lots of teach-ins, but also sustained, organized action for years to come. Then we watched an eye-opening documentary about the mass eviction of people of color from Marine Drive Apartments. Housing advocate and attorney Grace Andriette talked about the history of segregation in a place where we could look out the window and see Buffalo’s segregation line, Main Street. My favorite was the one about housing segregation at HOME’s then-new home on Ferry Street at Main. One of the lesser-remembered aspects of Hands Across Buffalo was the set of teach-ins conducted that day, and for a time after. Teach-ins from Hands Across Buffalo (2014) And this time, instead of a one-and-done, perhaps we need to do it more regularly, to remind us all that the issue is still here and isn’t fixed yet – until, someday, it is.Īnd also this time – perhaps – as a collective expression of determination not to let what happened define us, divide us, or discourage us. So what role could a symbolic gesture like Hands Across Buffalo play in that? While clearly not enough – as it wasn’t eight years ago – it seems to me, when the time is right, it could help. And those of us who really understand just how bad the segregation in Buffalo is, yet managed to accommodate ourselves to it and continued to go about our lives. Including those who went to brunch Sunday morning the same as every weekend as if nothing had happened. Because it is not just those whose family and friends and neighbors were shot who will need healing, but all of us. A better day for the east side, for sure. If that sounds a little bitter to you, thanks for noticing.īut some day – who knows when – the time will come to try to see through the hurt and rage and cynicism to find a path forward to a better day. So if your propaganda-poisoned mind decides it’s time to go hunt Black people, where do you go? The one store they will all be at. An entire half of the second-largest city in New York State has but one full-service supermarket. The “Mississippi of the North” is how Organizer Dakarai Singletary put it in this article.Īnd it’s not just a modern-day settlement apartheid, but an economic apartheid and a food apartheid as well. What is shows clearly is that a century and a half after the end of the Civil War, a cause in which many Buffalonians gave “the last full measure of devotion,” Buffalo is one of the most structurally segregated places outside of South Africa. At the risk of giving any credit at all to that domestic terrorist whose world view was so twisted and thoughts were so consumed by hate, although tragically deluded he was no dummy.įrom all the way across the state, as the Buffalo News’ Caitlin Dewey described in chilling detail, the murderer methodically used the very same information our leaders and public officials have been able to see for decades.
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