PRAY FOR THE DEAD, FIGHT FOR THE LIVING – 5/14 REMEMBERED

Please take a moment to sign the No New Jails petition that our dear friends at Black Love Resists in the Rust are sponsoring. 

Read more at https://linktr.ee/nonewjailec, and donate to BLRR by clicking here.

On a warm sunny Saturday afternoon two years ago today, a white nationalist terrorist, homegrown right here in NY, walked into the Tops grocery store at Jefferson and Utica on Buffalo’s East Side with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. He shot 13 people, murdering 10, and terrorizing and traumatizing an entire community.

We mourn those we lost – 

• Celestine Chaney, 65
• Roberta A. Drury, 32
• Andre Mackniel, 53
• Katherine Massey, 72
• Margus D. Morrison, 52
• Heyward Patterson, 67
• Aaron Salter Jr., 55
• Geraldine Talley, 62
• Ruth Whitfield, 86
• Pearl Young, 77

We also remember, support and center the survivors and their families who are still recovering two years later. 

We mourn, and we are angry. 

Two years later, what has changed? 

This is not, by any means, the first white supremacist terrorist attack, that stemmed from the racial inequities of Upstate, nor the first that targeted Black folk in Buffalo and our region. Notably, Timothy McVeigh was raised in Niagara County. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks several currently active white nationalist organizations from the areas he grew up.

Also notably, Black communities in WNY and upstate have been terrorized systemically through both direct and indirect acts of violence.

Every single mortgage denied to a Black family, every insurance company that designates predominantly Black areas as “too high risk” to insure affordably, every junkyard allowed next to a school or residential neighborhood, every property contaminated by industrial dumping, every industry that offers Black employees a lower wage and every single act of physical police violence is a form of white supremacist terrorism that business and elected leaders choose to take or passively allow and that residents of Buffalo’s East Side awaken to every single day.

We do not need roundtables of business and elected leaders to wring their hands and talk about how to better include Black residents in their flawed white supremacist systems. 

We need business leaders to stop opposing progressive changes that may undermine their shareholder profits but will build a better world that no longer relies on the exploitation of Black, Brown, and working class folk. 

We need our elected leaders to make policy changes that will force system changes to bring an end to white supremacy. 

As Mother Jones told us, pray for the dead and fight for the living.