Why did the May 14, 2022, Mass Murderer Target Buffalo, New York?

There’s More Than One Reason

Issue #55: American History

It was reported that the 18-year-old man (I will NEVER speak his name or show his picture) who murdered ten Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo planned his attack for months. He specifically targeted that particular majority Black neighborhood, even though it was more than 200 miles from his home.

It was also reported that this man had planned to spread his murder spree to Black churches and/or schools in the area.

In addition to live-streaming the shootings, he wrote and posted on Google a 180-page “manifesto” where he admitted he was a white supremacist and anti-Semite, and that he subscribed to the “Great Replacement Theory” promoted by Fox News Host Tucker Carlson and others. He also professed that he was killing Black people to save the white race from becoming a minority in the United States.

This was not some “random attack” by a “mentally ill teenager.”

The History of Buffalo Mirrors the History of Many U.S. Urban Cities

Like my hometown of Detroit, Michigan, Buffalo, New York has a very ugly racial history. At present, Buffalo is one of the top six racially segregated cities in the United States.

It wasn’t always that way. Buffalo was formally planned in 1804 by a man named Joseph Ellicott. In 1834, it was chartered as a city and rapid expansion continued all the way through 1950 mainly because Buffalo was a great location for a transshipping hub, and also it became an important city for grain production, steel production, and hydroelectricity.

Immigrants started arriving in Buffalo in the mid-1800s, with groups of Irish, Germans, and Southern and Eastern Europeans settling there through about 1920.

Similarly, in Detroit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Eastern Europe, Greece, and the Middle East came here to escape economic inequality and political persecution and to take advantage of jobs in the auto plants and other manufacturing companies. 

In the 1920s because Buffalo was a manufacturing center, many Blacks migrating from the south during the Great Migration came to Buffalo looking for good jobs.

Many Blacks also moved from the south to Detroit around that same time to work in the auto plants around the same time and for similar reasons—good-paying jobs. And just like in Buffalo, when Black people started moving into white neighborhoods racial tensions increased and restrictive covenants became commonplace.

Redlining in Buffalo, Detroit, and America

Racially restrictive covenants remained in place nationwide until a 1948 Supreme Court decision declared the practice unconstitutional due to the 14th Amendment.

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created by Congress in 1934 in response to the massive home foreclosures during the Great Depression. The FHA’s mission was supposed to spur greater homeownership by insuring mortgages on loans and reducing mortgage risks for the lenders.

However, even before the Great Depression, economist Frederick Babcock wrote a book in 1924 that established a racist doctrine concerning the valuation of neighborhoods in America. Using that book and its policies as a template, the FHA established underwriting rules that valued white neighborhoods higher than all neighborhoods with higher Black residents and people of color or those with a high number of foreigners. The FHA ranked all neighborhoods with a grade from “A,” which is the most valuable, to “D” which was the least valuable, and all of the Black neighborhoods were listed in the “D: category. All of the white neighborhoods ranked with an “A” grade.

This process, which came to be known as redlining, restricted the flow of capital in and out of minority neighborhoods and ensured that Black people had less access to loans, making it much more difficult for African-Americans to buy homes, open businesses, build wealth, or move to other neighborhoods as their incomes and purchasing power increased. Because fewer people would invest in neighborhoods whose property values were declining, many neighborhoods went into a downward spiral of disinvestment, some of which is still in effect today.

Urban Renewal and Highway Construction

I have been a regular viewer of “The Rachel Maddow Show” (TRMS™️) since its inception. On her show on Monday, May 16, 2022, Dr. Maddow discussed how Buffalo used the policy of urban renewal and the construction of new highways, both of which were funded by the Federal government, to deliberately tear down and destroy Black neighborhoods and businesses while further segregating African Americans to certain neighborhoods. (Rachel Maddow is a Rhodes Scholar who achieved a doctorate in Public Policy from Oxford University.)

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the deliberate destruction of Black neighborhoods and Black businesses in the name of “urban renewal” happened in Buffalo and also happened in Detroit. On purpose.

But what also caught my ear on the Monday show was Dr. Maddow’s discussion of the highly-regarded park system in Buffalo, which was designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead. Olmstead also designed Central Park in New York City and the Belle Isle Park in Detroit. Not many people know that Belle Isle is substantially larger than the more famous Central Park.

In Detroit, Belle Isle is an actual island whose access was not radically affected by urban renewal and highway construction, but in Buffalo, new highways were deliberately created to split some of the parks in half and to limit access to the parks by Black people forced to live in segregated areas further from the park system.

Segregation and the Buffalo Tops Supermarket

Just as in Detroit, segregation, redlining, and racist policies led to majority Black neighborhoods in Buffalo not having access to shopping and other amenities available in more affluent/majority-white areas.

Before the Tops Market grocery store opened in the Black neighborhood of Buffalo in 2003, there were no large grocery stores in that area for decades.

When Tops opened, it not only finally provided a place for those residents to get groceries, but the store also became a community gathering place for residents. The store also has a bank and drug store inside for the convenience of shoppers.

This is exactly why the murderer chose that specific location and that specific time for his attack. He researched everything and “cased” the store beforehand. He even visited the store several times in February of 2022. He knew that the Tops store would be full of Black people at 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon.

As in Detroit and in most other cities in America, the intense racism and segregation that led to majority Black areas with far fewer amenities and opportunities were not accidents. 

The choice of the Tops supermarket for his murderous attack was not random. 

These policies, paradigms, and results have been in the making for decades, especially since the end of the Reconstruction era. On purpose.