SUMMER 2014
Someone is sharing about gratitude or God or triggers. With fifteen minutes left in the meeting, the kid in the teal polo shirt comes back from the bathroom and sits down next to the jittery girl he met in rehab. He leans over and kisses her on the mouth. Then he turns bluish gray and falls to the floor in the middle of the meeting. It is the only time I’ve seen someone overdose.
I go outside and smoke while the woman working the counter comes in and shoots the kid full of whatever that stuff is you’re supposed to shoot junkies full of when they OD.
It took getting sober for heroin to affect my life.
I met Jane in 2006, outside the meeting room with the disco ball where they’re trying to pump life back into that poor fucking kid. An ambulance arrives. I get out of the way.
PRESENT DAY
Technically, Jane is still not allowed to be alone with Gracie.
It took months after getting out of the halfway house, but Jane eventually got her shit together. As far as I know she’s been clean for over a year. In many ways, she’s a great mother. She figured out Gracie needed glasses and got her eyes tested. I thought she just liked sitting too close to the TV.
Gracie and I still have our weekday routine. The roughest times are Sunday nights, when Gracie first leaves her mom.
I put Gracie to bed, and she says, “I miss Mommy when I’m not with her. Is it okay if I cry? I can’t stop the tears.”
I hug her and I tell her of course it is.
There’s nothing I can do to stop them either.
*Author’s note: All names have been changed, but everything else is true to memory.
HENRY LOUIS TAYLOR JR.
Will Blacks Rise or Be Forgotten in the New Buffalo?
IN BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS SCATTERED ACROSS Buffalo’s East Side, residents must be wondering what all this Buffalo Happy Talk is about. Buffalo is not a happy city for most of them. It never has been. When black folks look around Buffalo, they see the city being re-created for whites: college-educated millennials, the creative classes, refined, middle-aged urbanites, and retired suburbanites.
As a black historian and urban planner, looking through a glass darkly, I can see Buffalo rising. Yet, I can’t help but wonder for whom the city ascends. If you visit Buffalo’s so-called hot spots—Harbor Center, the waterfront, Allentown, the Elmwood Strip, Chippewa Street, and the Theatre District—you will see mostly hipster, latte-drinking whites. When you visit those neighborhoods where housing prices are rising and where swank rental apartments are found, you will find the same hipster, latte-drinking whites living there. Even in upscale apartments, like the Bethune and Elk Terminal lofts, which are located in the black community, you will find latte drinkers.
Yeah. I hear the rhetoric. The new buzz words are “equity,” “inclusiveness,” and “diversity.” For example, Greater Buffalo’s regional plan, “One Region Forward,” states, “Woven throughout the planning framework are two critical issues that define where we’ve been and where we want to go—our relationship to our fresh water resources and our desire to grow our economy in a way that is more equitable [emphasis added] and locally rooted.”
Yet, I am troubled.
I can’t stop thinking about that old African proverb, “What a person does speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what they say.”
I believe that Black Buffalo will be marginalized in the rising city, just as it was in the shrinking city and in the prosperous industrial city. The plight of Black Buffalo has never been important to Buffalo’s leaders. At every stage in the city’s history, black neighborhood development has been an afterthought in city building. Buffalo and its Erie County suburbs were never meant to nurture and provide a healthy place for blacks or Latinos to live.
In the 1930s, when Buffalo leaders imagined a new metropolis—a combined city and suburbs—it was designed as a place for white, higher-paid workers and the professional classes. The most desirable housing and neighborhoods in the city and suburbs were reserved for them. These places enabled whites to obtain the highest-paying jobs, the most desirable recreational areas, and the best education, health care, and police services. In their fancy, segregated neighborhoods, whites lived longer, healthier, and happier lives than their black, Latino, and immigrant cohorts. My friend Carl Nightingale, the University at Buffalo historian, says this segregated world was the consequence of political action, not economic realities or simple racial hatred.
Don’t get caught up in this race hatred thing.
This was mostly about white privilege; it was about whites using the neighborhood edge to get the economic and higher-standard-of-living edge. This was about whites being given an advantage over blacks, which was rooted in the economic organization of the city. Whites did not get this socioeconomic edge by accident or simple merit. They had help. City leaders consciously and deliberately designed an urban metropolis anchored by mass homeownership, race-based suburbanization, and neighborhoods stratified by housing cost and type. Whites were empowered to use guaranteed Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans to purchase homes in the suburbs or along the city’s leafy West Side parkways and avenues.
Blacks, meanwhile, rented in the grimy East Side. To keep them there, Buffalo’s leaders used urban planning, zoning laws, building codes, subdivision regulations, and eminent domain. They forced blacks to live in houses situated in the shadows of factories, railroads, and commercial establishments. These were the worst places to live in Buffalo and Erie County. The racist FHA gave money to whites, but denied blacks access to home-buying dollars. And when blacks did manage to get mortgages, the location of their neighborhoods caused housing values to fall rather than to rise. For them, homeownership produced debt, not wealth. African Americans were stuck in place.
Whites and blacks experienced metropolitan Buffalo differently.
The 1950s and 1960s were the most dynamic period in metro Buffalo’s history. Whites and blacks experienced it differently. Thousands of whites moved to the suburbs, where they found
