Gilbert’s cousin, Buffalo native Adrianne Murchison, a journalist in Atlanta, said she felt the heartache of the shootings hundreds of miles away, but the depths of the community connections will be a factor in the neighborhood’s recovery.
“That’s the way the Black culture is,” she said. “There’s a lot of resiliency in general and in Buffalo in particular. Being so small, people are very connected. There are generations of families in Buffalo that are connected, and so the community is very much together. It still hurts. It really hurts. Who would think that something like that would happen? In the end, that community will manage it and come back strong. It’s what we, as Black people, do.”
In 2018, the Partnership for the Public Good, a community-based think tank, published a report that called the Buffalo-Niagara region “one of the most racially segregated metropolitan regions in the nation.”
It added that “of all people who identify as Black within the city of Buffalo, roughly 85 percent live east of Main Street,” which is the area where the store is located.
Officials have classified the mass shooting as a racially motivated hate crime.
The N-word was scrawled on the rifle used by the gunman. A lengthy manifesto Gendron posted two days before his attack talked of “the great replacement theory,” which is a false ideology that there is a covert faction that is moving to replace white Americans with nonwhites through violence, interracial marriage and immigration.
Gendron was arraigned Saturday evening on first-degree murder charges after being arrested at the scene without incident. He pleaded not guilty.
As one of the community leaders who also worked in the mayor’s office, Jamil Crews watched the unedited video of the killings recorded by the alleged shooter with a camera on his helmet.
“I wish I could erase what I saw,” Crews said. “It literally just broke me to my core. I’m getting emotional now just thinking about it. Those innocent people. These are people’s grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and, and young people working in the store. This was very deliberate and what we need to see happen now is for people who consider themselves allies to step up. We don’t want to see this happening anymore in our communities. It’s senseless. Completely senseless.”
More than a grocery store
It was a success for a downtrodden community when Tops opened in 2003. “The community had been a food desert,” said William Mitchell, a television sales executive who grew up not far from the store’s location. “It represented progress in a neighborhood that had been largely ignored. Buffalo is divided along racial lines and there is a long history of racial issues and tensions.
“But the fact that this tragedy happened at this place, which is the center of the community — this very closely knit neighborhood — makes it all the more difficult.”
The Jefferson Avenue area where Tops is located was a thriving Black community prior to the “Long Hot Summer of 1967,” when race riots erupted across the country. Buffalo lived five days of unrest in which dozens of businesses were burned or destroyed.
“The neighborhood never really fully recovered from it,” Crews said. He had an office in north Buffalo but opened Crews Control Media company close to Tops because, he said, “that whole area is an historic African American neighborhood. We were starting to see a lot of investment that was taking place and I wanted to be a part of that renaissance. It is such an historic part of our city, our culture. Tops is in the center of it.”
After Saturday’s horrific shooting, the store was closed the remainder of the weekend, but a Tops spokesperson said that the store eventually will reopen.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Crews and others provided food for the community.
“With Tops closed, there isn’t another grocery store for miles,” Crews said. “The one thing about this Buffalo Black community is we’re so tight-knit. Everybody knows everybody; if you didn’t know a victim, you knew someone who was related to one. We will be there for each other. So, while there’s a lot of pain, there’s also a sense that we’re going to bounce back from this, that we’re not going to let what we are building be deterred by this senseless act of terrorism.”
Confusion and anger collide
The shooter reportedly studied demographics in Buffalo, determining an afternoon strike at the popular store frequented largely by Black people would be the ideal time to “cause as much carnage and damage as he possibly could and do it for the world to see,” Crews said. “This was a very deliberate attack. It was carefully planned and calculated.”
Tonya Guzman, a Buffalo native who works at a college in Rochester, New York, said the rise in racism-related events is a factor.
May 16, 202202:44
“You’re not shocked because there’s so much racism and hate going on in America,” Guzman said. “But it’s kind of unbelievable that your hate is that deep that you really went out of your way to attack a specific group of people. It’s just sad. We prayed for Buffalo at church. You feel for the people that are really impacted. The families who have lost people over this madness. But it’s our faith that’s going to pull us through this foolishness.”
“You’re hurt and you’re definitely angry,” Mitchell said. “How do you develop these kinds of ideas and thoughts at such a young age? It’s incredibly scary. To be targeted like this, it speaks to a lot of bigger issues around guns and race in the country. When these tragedies happen, there’s talk of gun laws, but nothing changes. Something has to change.”
Della Young, a former Buffalo police officer for 20 years, worked Jefferson Avenue as part of her beat, she said. She was crestfallen when she learned that a former colleague she knew, security guard Aaron Salter, Jr., a former Buffalo police officer, was killed during a shootout with the alleged attacker. “Great man, very intuitive,” she said of Salter, “and very supportive of the community.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
