Buffalo civil rights leaders call Cheektowaga business
boycott
By Leslie
Feinberg
"Boycott!" Buffalo civil rights leaders held an April 3
news conference to call on residents of all nationalities to
boycott every business in nearby Cheektowaga in which Black
shoppers have experienced racist treatment.
Rev. Darius Pridgen said that his group, the Coalition
Against Racial Injustice, was calling for mass informational
picket lines outside Walden Galleria mall in Cheektowaga
beginning April 7. Pridgen is pastor of True Bethel Baptist
Church and a member of the Buffalo School Board. The Rev.
William Gillison, pastor of Mount Olive Baptist Church, is
also a coalition leader.
Because of widespread evidence of the systematic targeting
of African American drivers in Cheektowaga, Pridgen announced
that picketers will meet in Buffalo and be bused to the
location.
Black civil rights leaders and organizations have
increasingly condemned mall officials, Cheektowaga officials,
cops and judges for racist profiling in recent months. A
bodacious anti-racist protest inside the mall on March 31
helped lend momentum and solidarity to the call for the
boycott by the African American community.
Cheektowaga is virtually an apartheid town. It sits
alongside Buffalo, a city that is one-third African American.
Of the some 100,000 Cheektowaga residents, it's estimated
only five percent are people of color. The town board, town
supervisor, both judges and the police chief are all white.
So is the entire 133-member police department.
Buffalo lawyer Roland Cercone told the media that the
coalition had amassed enough data about racist discrimination
and harassment to warrant a class-action suit against the
town.
On Feb. 26, Black area residents packed a Cheektowaga Town
Board meeting. One woman described how she was arrested while
shopping for her mother, who is stricken with cancer. She was
arrested for trying to use her mother's credit card. When she
returned with cash, six security cops surrounded her while
she cradled her infant in her arms. She was later banned from
ever returning to the mall.
"It's not just you," Buffalo resident Billy Howard told
the Town Board. "It's Kenmore, Lancaster--all the outlying
areas me and my people fear going to."
The day of the Town Board meeting, the coalition set up
two phone lines for residents to lodge complaints about
racist abuse in Cheektowaga. By the next afternoon, more than
120 people had called with personal accounts--about half of
which occurred at Walden Galleria mall. Hundreds more people
have called since.
On Feb. 27, Black motorists--a 70-year-old woman worker
and a young college student--filed two suits against town
police charging racist harassment.
Cercone recounted some of these racist horror stories.
'Justice for Cynthia Wiggins!'
Pridgen called for public hearing to allow many others to
come forward about racist treatment at the hands of mall
security, town police and judges.
In December 1995, Cynthia Wiggins--a young Black
mother--was a passenger on a city bus coming from the African
American community in Buffalo that wasn't allowed to stop on
mall property. She was killed trying to cross seven lanes of
traffic on Walden Avenue to get to her job at the mall.
Lawyers for her estate argued that the bus was barred from
stopping at the mall to discourage inner-city residents from
shopping there. Mall owner Pyramid Corp. settled the suit for
$2.55 million in November 1999.
Yet last year more than half of those arrested at the
Galleria mall--54 percent--were African Americans (Buffalo
New, March 4)
"Now, years later, there has been absolutely no known move
to change the atmosphere nor the fear that inner-city
residents experience when shopping or driving through
Cheektowaga," Pridgen told the Buffalo News on Feb. 27.
Frank Mesiah, head of the Buffalo NAACP, said his group is
also investigating a Feb. 3 incident in which mall security
reportedly waded into a large crowd of youths, throwing out
Black teenagers while bypassing young whites.
The 20-member mall security force, dressed to look like
state troopers, is beefed up with Cheektowaga cops.
The Buffalo NAACP also filed a complaint against the
town's two judges last year with the state Commission on
Judicial Conduct. Mesiah said the complaint "documents the
disparity of treatment" between Black and white defendants by
Cheektowaga Town Justices Ronald Kmiotek and Thomas
Kolbert.
"To us, this is blatant racism," Messiah told the
commission.
While the Cheektowaga Black community is numerically very
small, more than half those arrested for driving with a
suspended registration last year and about 85 percent of
those arrested for driving with a suspended or revoked
license were Black.
And Black motorists are not just getting stopped more
frequently. Rod Watson wrote in the March 8 Buffalo News,
"many say they're being hit with racial slurs or the classic
'What are you doing out here?'"
Put on the spot for a response about the disproportionate
traffic arrests, Erie County District Attorney Frank J. Clark
admitted, "There aren't that many Black people, driving
around in ... Cheektowaga any one time. It just doesn't make
sense, unless you are indiscriminately checking plates of
these people simply because they are Black."
However Clark himself should be made to answer why in
neighboring Buffalo, where Black people make up one-third of
the population of the city, two-thirds of those arrested last
year were African Americans. (March 4 Buffalo News)
According to a report in the March 14 Buffalo News,
Buffalo has the country's 8th-highest segregation index for
African Americans.
Systematic discrimination and police brutality inside of
Buffalo act as a boot heel on the necks of the Black
community. Apartheid conditions in the suburbs are meant to
keep the outlying areas all white.
Clearly it is time for people of all
nationalities--especially white residents--to stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with the call from the Black leadership
for an economic boycott. And community control of the Buffalo
and suburban police is long overdue.
Jim Crow must go--
from Cheektowaga to Buffalo!
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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