May 14, 2022, Buffalo.
Three Years Ago A White Supremacist Opened Fire At A Grocery Store In My City
On May 14, 2022 Payton S. Gendron, armed with an AR-15, shot thirteen people at the Tops Market at 1275 Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo. He murdered ten of them, all African-Americans. Three others were injured.
Gendron described himself as a white supremacist and an “ethno-nationalist.” He cited the Great Replacement Theory as motivation for his cowardly mass murder.
On February 15, 2023 Gendron pleaded guilty under New York State law to one count of a domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate, ten counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted murder, and a weapons possession charge.
He has been sentenced to life in prison.
Federal charges are pending.
A few days after the murders, The Buffalo News printed my Letter To The Editor, below. I sought to identify systemic, institutionalized white supremacy as the reason why Gendron was able to easily identify a place in our community where African-Americans would be vulnerable to attack.
The 1937 “Residential Security Map” was used by bank loan officers to determine availability of subsidized mortgages. The red zones indicate areas with a majority of African-American residents and were ineligible for publicly supported mortgages.
The map has changed little in 88 years. Buffalo remains one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States.
For more information about “redlining” in Buffalo, click here. For a discussion of redlining nationally, I recommend Richard Rothstein’s excellent The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017).
RIP Roberta A. Drury, Margus D. Morrison, Andre Mackniel, Aaron Salter, Geraldine Talley, Celestine Chaney, Heyward Patterson, Katherine Massey, Pearl Young, and Ruth Whitfield.
BUFFALO NEWS, LETTER TO THE EDITOR, MAY 20, 2022
Editor:
To be clear, the responsibility for the brutal act of racial terrorism at TOPS falls squarely on the shoulders of the shooter. It seems clear that he acting in support of the toxic “Great Replacement” conspiracy with its origins in white supremacy.
If we look closer, however, we can see that the placement of the Jefferson Avenue TOPS was the legacy of generations of “redlining,” or preventing access to mortgage loans to generations of African Americans. This government policy prevented most African Americans from homeownership and the ability to build intergenerational wealth.
Twenty years ago the Jefferson Avenue TOPS opened only after long efforts to provide an oasis in the “food desert” created by concentrated poverty. Sadly, it was this hard-won solution to food insecurity that made our neighbors the target of a sadistic act of mass murder.
To overcome racial inequality we must confront our history.