“Crucial to the Survival of Black People”

“This is a Black Paper,” declared the BUILD organization’s statement criticizing the Buffalo Public School system for providing inferior education to African American children in Buffalo, New York. ¹ Published in 1967 by the community organization called BUILD (which stood for Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity), “BUILD Black Paper Number One” was both a manifesto and a call for change. Like other African American communities in the 1960s, black Buffalo was caught up in the fervor of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education provided African Americans with the hope that the swift destruction of de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation in the North was close at hand. Yet black optimism was quickly met with the harsh reality that white supremacy was unwilling to release the nation from its grip without a fight. The Brown decision and the white backlash against it galvanized the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Meanwhile, Northern protest consisted of struggles to end discrimination in employment, housing, and education, difficult struggles when schools and neighborhoods were already supposedly integrated.

These efforts to end racial inequality coincided with an influx of African Americans to Buffalo. ² Census data indicate that between 1960 and 1970, Buffalo’s black population increased dramatically from 13.3 percent to 20.4 percent. ³ Residential segregation confined the majority of African Americans in Buffalo to the neighborhood known as the East Side. Located east of downtown Buffalo, the East Side extended five miles eastward to the town of Cheektowaga, bordered by Winspear Avenue to the north, Main Street to the west, and Buffalo River to the south. Its main streets were Genesee, Sycamore, Broadway, and Clinton. The East Side was known for high rates of unemployment, poverty and criminality. ⁴ Most of the city’s black population was ghettoized in the East Side.

Residential segregation was a nationwide phenomenon; it existed both in the South and the North. Studies on African Americans and urbanization in the twentieth century shed light on the demographic changes and structural forces, such as “blockbusting," disinvestment and “white flight,” that produced the segregated living conditions of African Americans in Northern cities like Buffalo. ⁵ The process by which segregation was created varied not only city by city, but also at the neighborhood level, that is, “block by block.” ⁶ The block by block nature of segregation was evident in the emergence of segregated housing in Buffalo. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton categorized Buffalo as one of sixteen “hypersegregated” cities in America. That is, the segregation of African Americans in these cities was “so intense and occurred on so many dimensions simultaneously.” ⁷ Hypersegregation meant that not only were black Buffalonians separated from whites geographically, they were also isolated in blocks wherein the residents were all economically disadvantaged. Political scientist Neil Kraus explains that according to the 1970 census, thirteen of the eighteen census tracts in Buffalo with the highest poverty rates were situated alongside each other in the East Side. These same census tracts were populated mostly by black Buffalonians. ⁸ Therefore, the majority of African Americans in Buffalo were not only spatially contained within the East Side, but they were also trapped in poverty, separated from economic structures that could have improved their living conditions.

Adding to the problem of residential segregation in the late 1960s was Buffalo’s declining economy. Since the early twentieth century, Buffalo’s economy depended heavily on steel manufacturing. However, in the 1960s, the city was in the midst of the beginning of deindustrialization. One study points out that in 1966, five of Buffalo’s major flour mills were shut down, along with many locally -owned and operated companies. Furthermore, in spite of installing state-of-the-art furnaces in 1964, two of the largest steel companies in Buffalo, Bethlehem Steel and Republic Steel, experienced a severe decrease in steel production by the late 1960s, leading to massive layoffs, in which thousands of Buffalonians lost well-paying jobs. ⁹ Many black Buffalonians were employed in steel manufacturing. For instance, African Americans constituted approximately 13 percent of Bethlehem Steel’s workforce of 18,000 people in the late 1960s. Black steelworkers were employed as cleaners and laborers in the coke ovens, the dirtiest and most physically-demanding jobs in the plants. Situated on the lowest rung of the seniority system, their jobs were the most precarious. ¹⁰ Deindustrialization exacerbated the persistence of racial discrimination in employment. In 1960, Buffalo’s black unemployment rate was 16.3 percent, about double the white unemployment rate. ¹¹ Although deindustrialization negatively affected the city as a whole, black Buffalonians disproportionately bore the brunt of its effects. While many black Buffalonians were also employed in the service, retail, and construction industries, they predominantly worked in the least desirable jobs and garnered lower incomes than those of whites. ¹² One study conducted in 1968 of retail and service businesses located in the East Side found that African Americans held the majority of part-time jobs but only one-third of full-time jobs in the area. ¹³ Therefore, members of Buffalo’s black community were either unemployed or underemployed and underpaid, a situation which was linked to and aggravated by racism.

The issues of deindustrialization, unemployment, and segregation facing African Americans in Buffalo exploded in a riot in the East Side on June 26, 1967. The riot, which continued intermittently until July 1, 1967, erupted when approximately 200 black Buffalonians responded to an incident of police brutality against two black teenagers. ¹⁴ Police misconduct against African Americans was a major source of racial tension in Buffalo during the 1960s. For instance, a year before the riot, a Buffalo policeman was investigated for the shooting death of an unarmed black youth. ¹⁵ The incident of police brutality against two black teenagers in the summer of 1967 caused outrage among Buffalo’s black residents because it reflected a pattern of discriminatory police practices with which the black community was all too familiar. On the first night of the riot, reports estimated that the crowd expanded from about 200 to 350 people. At the height of the riot, approximately 1500 black Buffalonians were involved, throwing rocks at police officers who attempted to disperse the crowds with teargas. The riot resulted in more than 180 arrests and approximately $250,000 worth of property damage. Although about 80 people were injured, there were no casualties. ¹⁶ When interviewed after the riot, participants and witnesses pointed to police brutality as the immediate catalyst for the riot and black unemployment as one of its long-term structural causes.

The 1967 riot brought the issues of deindustrialization, unemployment, and segregation to the forefront, highlighting the negative impact that these issues had on Buffalo’s black community. One response to the problems experienced by the city’s black community, particularly those ghettoized on the East Side, was Black Power. As the city’s black population grew numerically, so too did their ability to organize more successfully. In the late 1960s, black community organizing in Buffalo reflected trends that were taking place in other African American communities across the country. Black Power in Buffalo simultaneously corresponded to national trends in African American political and cultural thought while addressing the specific concerns of black Buffalonians, which were rooted in the urban issues of their Northern postindustrial city. As deindustrialization and unemployment worsened the plight of black Buffalonians in the late 1960s, they looked to Black Power not simply as a form of cultural expression, but as the ideology and practice through which they could ameliorate their living conditions. This view of Black Power was why BUILD’s creation of a separate school by black Buffalonians gained such importance. Local black people in Buffalo regarded Black Power as the answer to urban problems, such as unemployment, segregated housing, and inferior education.

How did local black people in Buffalo understand Black Power? This question is posed in the context of recent studies about the Civil Rights Movement in the North as well as scholarship on the origins and contours of Black Power that shifts the locus of activity from Southern to Northern cities, exposes the nationwide character of white supremacy, and challenges the facile distinction between de jure and de facto segregation. ¹⁷ Some historians argue that Black Power was a separate entity from the Civil Rights Movement. ¹⁸ This distinction was exemplified by Black Power ideology and activism in Buffalo in the late 1960s. Although several Civil Rights organizations already existed in Buffalo at the time, Black Power manifested in the statements made by ordinary black Buffalonians after the 1967 riot and the efforts of newly-established community organizations, such as BUILD, which created its own separate school, the BUILD Academy, in 1969.

Local people in Buffalo had varying opinions about Civil Rights and Black Power groups in the late 1960s. Historians Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard use the phrase “local people” to denote “a political orientation, a sense of accountability and an ethical commitment to the community. As such, local people were those who struggled with, came out of, and were connected to the grassroots.” ¹⁹ Buffalo’s local people formed new organizations in the late 1960s to ameliorate the racist conditions under which African Americans suffered; one of them was BUILD. Launched in 1966, BUILD was originally affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation’s national leader Saul Alinsky, who organized working-class Americans of various ethnicities across neighborhoods in Northern cities so as to affect political change within their communities. ²⁰ However, after its first year, BUILD generated its own leadership culled from Buffalo’s local black people. Its leaders as well as its rank-and-file members were ordinary, working-class black Buffalonians. For instance, BUILD’s president, William Gaiter, was a bus driver, and a respected member of Buffalo’s black community. BUILD was an umbrella organization comprising of 154 smaller, volunteer groups organized along neighborhood lines, known as block clubs. ²¹ An important part of Buffalo’s black community, BUILD’s office was located on 588 Jefferson Avenue, at the core of the East Side neighborhood, where the majority of black Buffalonians resided. ²² From its inception, BUILD was organized for, and by, Buffalo’s local black people.

In the late 1960s, black communities across the country were swept up in the fervor of the Black Power Movement. The slogan “black power” first gained nationwide attention on 16 June 1966, when Stokely Carmichael started chanting it at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) march in Mississippi. ²³ Carmichael was not the first proponent of the phrase “black power”; Richard Wright used the term in 1954 to discuss anticolonial movements in Africa. ²⁴ However, it was Carmichael’s use of the term over a decade later that motivated a younger generation of African American activists who were frustrated with the Civil Rights Movement’s tactics of passive resistance and interracial alliances. Speaking of African American unity, Carmichael asserted, “If we are to proceed toward true liberation, we must cut ourselves off from white people. We must form our own institutions, credit unions, co-ops, political parties, write our own histories.” ²⁵ Black Power advocates like Carmichael argued that African Americans needed autonomy from whites in order to gain political freedom. Carmichael’s embrace of Black Power continues a long tradition of black radicalism and black nationalism dating back to the 1920s with Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the “largest black mass organization ever.” ²⁶ Like Garvey, Carmichael emphasized black cultural pride and self-determination. Historian Winston James argues that many Caribbean immigrants to the United States formed and led black radical organizations in disproportion to their numbers. ²⁷ Carmichael, who was born and raised in Trinidad but moved to New York, was one such immigrant.

Black Power also shifted the terrain of the debate on racial injustice from a national to a global one. In a 1967 book that Carmichael co-authored with political scientist Charles Hamilton, titled Black Power, the pair maintained, “Black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them. Black people are legal citizens of the United States with, for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects in relation to white society. Thus, institutional racism has another name: colonialism.” ²⁸ By arguing that African Americans’ relationship with the United States was a form of colonialism, Carmichael implied that African Americans constituted their own nation. Furthermore, Carmichael’s definition of African Americans as a colony altered the context of the civil rights debate from a national to an international one. In doing so, he connected the predicament of African Americans to that of other black and colonized people around the world.

The arrival of Black Power ideology in the late 1960s caused a major rift in the Civil Rights Movement. Various Civil Rights groups staked positions regarding the use of Black Power as slogan and program. ²⁹ As with other black communities across the country, when Black Power came to Buffalo, different Civil Rights organizations debated its merits. ³⁰ The history of Black Power in Buffalo illuminates the contestations that existed not only between, but within, organizations. For instance, although the national leadership of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) embraced Black Power in July 1966, its Buffalo chapter held a different view. On 4 November 1966, Charles E. Rush, president of Buffalo CORE sent a letter to Buffalo’s black professionals stating:

The Buffalo Chapter of CORE has recently denounced the slogan “Black Power.” We did this because we felt this slogan did nothing to bring our people together. Now we are in the process of re-organizing and setting up a constitutive program aimed at meeting the needs of our community. As a professional Negro, we know that you are concerned with a “better community.” Your financial help is needed to help CORE continue its fight for human rights, to develop political and economical [sic] unity among our people. Won’t you help us help ourselves? ³¹

Rush’s dismissal of Black Power reflected both the middle-class leadership and membership of Buffalo’s CORE chapter. His use of the word “Negro” instead of “black” implied a distancing from one of the important ideological underpinnings of Black Power, namely, the self-identification of people of African descent in the United States with the word “black.”

The creation of the BUILD organization in 1966 coincided with a major shift in African American thought. Historians Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang explain, “During the late 1960s, what African Americans thought about themselves, white people, the United States, Africa, and the world changed dramatically. . . . These transformations produced immediate changes in ideology, practices, strategies, leadership, membership, discourses, and symbols. Indeed, they produced a new people—‘black’ people.” ³² One of the ways that African Americans’ newfound identification as “black” people manifested itself was through BUILD’s indictment of the Buffalo public school system. The report, titled, “BUILD Black Paper Number One,” declared, “This is a Black Paper. Historically, American officials have issued White Papers when they want to justify an action, cover it with official whitewash. This paper does not cover up anything. . . . As well, this paper is the product of black people, who in Buffalo, through BUILD, are declaring that we will no longer tolerate the abomination of inequality imposed on us because of the color of our skin.” ³³ BUILD’s use of the word “black” instead of “Negro” in the title of the paper aligned with Black Power ideology and denoted the shift in racial thought not only by the members of BUILD, but other African Americans in Buffalo as well. In 1967, Carmichael and Hamilton explained, “There is a growing resentment of the word ‘Negro,’ for example, because this term is the invention of our oppressor; it is his image of us that he describes. Many blacks are now calling themselves African-Americans, Afro-Americans or black people because that is our image of ourselves.” ³⁴ One important facet of Black Power ideology was its embrace of the term “black” as the name that African Americans called themselves as a people.

Local black people spearheaded BUILD’s desire to challenge and change the inferior education of black youth in Buffalo’s public school system. According to BUILD’s annual report, “BUILD Black Paper Number One” was written “under the leadership of BUILD’s Soul Sister #1, Mrs. Miriam Beale.” ³⁵ Miriam Beale chaired the BUILD Education Committee and was largely responsible for bringing the BUILD Academy to fruition. Her description as “Soul Sister #1” implied a connection between Beale’s status as a leader in BUILD and her standing in the community in light of Black Power ideas about culture. According to historian William Van Deburg, “Soul was the folk equivalent of the black aesthetic. It was perceived as being the essence of the separate black culture.” ³⁶ The allusion to Beale as “Soul Sister #1” may also have been a reference to James Brown, who was nicknamed “Soul Brother Number One” in 1967, and sang the 1968 hit song, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” ³⁷ BUILD members’ use of the term “soul sister” was an example of Black Power ideology in practice, spreading throughout black communities in American cities in the late 1960s. In 1967, Carmichael and Hamilton explained, “There is a terminology and ethos particular to the black community of which black people are beginning to be no longer ashamed. Black communities are the only large segments of this society where people refer to each other as brother—soul brother, soul sister. . . . It is a growing realization that black Americans have a common bond not only among themselves, but with their African brothers.” ³⁸ When black Buffalonians used terms like “soul brother” or “soul sister” to refer to each other, they not only subscribed to Black Power ideology within the United States, but affirmed their connection to the larger black world, the global African diaspora.

BUILD was not the only group in Buffalo espousing Black Power ideas. Another group calling itself the Buffalo Liberation Front circulated a manifesto titled “Revolution,” which made its way into BUILD’s files of other community organizations. The manifesto stated:

A black revolution is not so much something we are going to fight and die by but it is something we much [sic] have in order to gain specific objective, then you asked what are the objectives? What will be our program? . . . What this revolutionary movement will be about will be freedom we are telling the white man we wish to take responsibility for all aspects of our lives we demand and will achieve full control over what we ultimately do with our lives. We are black and we cant [sic] take any lotion or pills and turn white we cant [sic] go home at night and play some other role. No we are (BLACK AND WE ARE ANGRY [sic].) ³⁹

The manifesto outlined the desires of some black Buffalonians for individual and collective autonomy as well as freedom from white control. In line with Black Power ideology, “Revolution” identified its writers as “black,” as opposed to “Negro” and described an unbridgeable chasm between black and white cultures. The manifesto expressed black rage at a white supremacist system that denied black people control over their own lives.

The Buffalo Liberation Front also provided an explanation for the rise of Black Power in the late 1960s. The manifesto maintained:

What is really happening is the whole system in this country is being attacked by groups that haves been traditionality [sic] excluded from it. I dont think blaks [sic] and other minority groups are going to tolerate the way this country has always funcitioned [sic] so we are going out into the community and we are going to find sister and brothers who are potential revolutionary fighters to be selected according to our judgement [sic] as revolutionary we should use any means necessary to up hold the principal [sic] that black people of this country have a right to determine what kind of human beings they want to be, yes violence may not be the best means but whites have push our backs up against the wall so at this time violence is the means, because it disrupts and terrorizes, so that if black people of this country are not allowed to determine their own kind of lives then nobody else will. ⁴⁰

In accordance with Black Power ideology, “Revolution” did not eschew violence as a practical or necessary tactic in the black freedom struggle. Historian Peniel Joseph notes that, in sharp contrast to the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, “Black Power activists embraced a different political radicalism altogether, one that promoted self-reliance, self-defense, Pan-Africanism, internationalism, and co-operation among blacks.” ⁴¹ Black Power, as a response to white supremacy, insisted that black people should be at the center of their own revolution. Furthermore, a drawing of a large clenched fist, the Black Power symbol, appeared on the typed manifesto. According to Cha-Jua and Lang, African Americans’ “newfound black identity” was “reflected at a mass level in African Americans’ embrace of new cultural forms and symbols.” ⁴² The clenched fist was one of those new black cultural symbols.

Black Power ideology was also evident during and after the 1967 Buffalo riot. Witnesses to, and participants in, the riot claimed that although one incident of police brutality against two black teenagers initially sparked the riot, several issues that negatively affected black Buffalonians constituted the riot’s underlying causes. These issues included unemployment, deplorable housing conditions, and segregated schools, which had been plaguing Buffalo’s black community decades before the riot even occurred. African Americans viewed the riot in terms of its immediate cause of police brutality, as well as longer-term structural roots, such as unemployment worsened by deindustrialization, de facto housing segregation, and unequal, substandard education for black children. Black participants and observers understood the riot not as a criminal act, but as a political one, an act of resistance against racial inequality and a catalyst for social change. ⁴³

Historian Thomas Sugrue points to black community–police relations as one of the immediate causes of riots in the late 1960s. ⁴⁴ The police functioned as both the symbols and the protectors of the white supremacist system. Many members of black communities across the country viewed police officers as upholders of racial inequality who performed the work of containing African Americans within ghettos and ensuring that unemployed African Americans did not disturb the white peace. As such, the police were the primary targets of rioters’ frustrations as well as the state’s first line of defense against those who violently protested against it. In the case of the Buffalo riot, the crowd vented their frustrations at the police as well as vandalized and looted stores. Rioters viewed police officers as agents of political repression and stores as symbols of economic oppression. ⁴⁵

Three weeks after the riot ended, sociologist Frank Besag and his team of research assistants from the University of Buffalo interviewed local black residents, inquiring about their thoughts on the riot and its aftermath. The interviewers posed questions specifically about the efforts of Civil Rights organizations during the riot. For instance, an interviewer asked one seventeen-year-old black Buffalonian, “What do you know about the organizations in Buffalo that are trying to remedy the situation?” The riot witness replied, “Well, I worked with BUILD and NAACP during the time of the riots. . . . Although BUILD stated that their purpose was strictly to observe and they weren’t going to take any part in the riots, it seems to me that they could have done some more than just observe. Although, they did take the initiative after the NAACP had handed out a thousand dollars’ worth of bail. . . . It seems to me that BUILD could have done a little more to help the situation out.” ⁴⁶ However, the respondent qualified his position by stating, “I also understand that they are not a firmly established, uh, organization yet as far as the city of Buffalo is concerned, because they’re brand new but, uh, I think, given time, they might . . . come up to the standards that people believe them to have.” ⁴⁷ Although the teenager was initially critical of BUILD’s limited response to the riot, he also made allowance for the fact that he was comparing BUILD, a one-year-old organization, to the NAACP, the oldest Civil Rights organization in Buffalo and in the country.

Founded in 1910, the Buffalo branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the city’s most prominent Civil Rights organization. The seventeen-year-old witness’s assessment of the involvement of the NAACP in the aftermath of the riot was valid to the extent that the Buffalo chapter did indeed provide monetary assistance to black Buffalonians involved in the riot. Three days after the riot ended, the president of the NAACP’s Buffalo branch, Reverend Milton A. Williams, wrote to the national office asking for financial aid for the rioters. He pleaded, “I’m appealing to the National Branch for financial help to tide us over the crisis that has occurred in our city. From June 27, 1967 through July 2, 1967, a social disorder growing out of police brutality and lack of adequate employment for the Negroes of our community resulted in the arrest of over 200 persons of which we bailed out 36. Bail money and Legal fees have been incurred totalling [sic] $1590.00.” ⁴⁸ Williams continued his plea by suggesting that any financial aid given would improve the standing of the NAACP in the eyes of Buffalo’s black community. He implored, “We need this financial assistance to maintain our image and reactivation of the Branch in Buffalo.” ⁴⁹ In response, the NAACP national office agreed to send $1500 to assist the Buffalo branch. ⁵⁰ Williams’ letter to the national office demonstrated his awareness that the Buffalo NAACP chapter’s “image” in the black community was declining and that monetary assistance for the rioters would facilitate its “reactivation.” In effect, the NAACP had to implicitly support the rioters if it was to “maintain [its] image” in the eyes of black Buffalonians. This action acknowledged that a shift had occurred in the city’s black community from traditional Civil Rights tactics to Black Power, a shift that was brought to the forefront by the 1967 riot.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the NAACP first established itself in Buffalo, it was considered by most black residents as the city’s leading Civil Rights organization. According to historian Lillian Williams, “the NAACP concentrated on improving the lives of blacks by initiating a comprehensive program of nonviolent agitation, well-publicized protest, propaganda, and legal maneuvers.” ⁵¹ However, by the 1960s, Buffalo’s NAACP chapter had become, in the eyes of many working-class black Buffalonians, part of the establishment, largely unsuccessful at changing attitudes both within the organization and in the greater society. For instance, Donald Lee, who was elected as the president of the New York state NAACP branch in January 1967, was a thirty-two-year-old “Buffalo antipoverty official.” Although he described himself as one of the “young Turks” of the organization, implying that his relatively young age made him more open to new ideas, he was also quick to point out that there was “no ideological dispute involved” during his election and that “the organization would continue on its present course.” ⁵² Lee was the president of the Buffalo NAACP branch from 1966 to 1967. ⁵³ His leadership reflected the status quo in terms of the NAACP in Buffalo, which was staunchly committed to traditional Civil Rights tactics, such as filing petitions in order to change local and state legislation. Yet by the late 1960s, many black Buffalonians had ideologically moved away from the NAACP. Proponents of Black Power challenged the NAACP’s more traditional Civil Rights views and strategies. The importance of Black Power ideology in Buffalo was reflected in the creation of the competing organization, BUILD, in 1966.

The seventeen-year-old youth’s statement to an interviewer immediately after the riot provides a glimpse into the mindset of Buffalo’s black teenagers in the late 1960s. The teenager explained:

We’re not animals as the white man thinks we are. Sure, you brought us here over on a slave boat, and you brought us here in nasty, dirty, little hulls and you treat us like we were black trash which was the common thing for us, you fed us pig guts, which we call chitterlings, and things like this but we are people and we are people that want to get someplace . . . it doesn’t matter how you treated us in the last four hundred, five hundred years . . . just like we were slaves in Africa, we are slaves in the United States and in other countries, too, and it may take a little while, maybe another four or five hundred years but you just watch and see . . . the black man is going to be supreme. ⁵⁴

The black youth unabashedly spoke directly to the interviewer, who was presumably white. The teenager’s use of the word “you” prevented the interviewer from distancing himself or herself from the immediate circumstances of the riot. Furthermore, the teenager provided a vision of a future replete with Black Power ideology, which was originally influenced by the teachings of Malcolm X. In a speech titled “Message to the Grass Roots,” Malcolm X told an all-black audience in 1963, “So we’re all black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves.” ⁵⁵ Malcolm X appealed to race as a unifying factor among African Americans and connected the history of their enslavement to their condition as second-class citizens in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. His teachings inspired a generation of Black Power activists. ⁵⁶

Another riot witness, a nineteen-year-old black youth, provided informative details about the Civil Rights organizations at work in Buffalo before and after the riot. The teenager had worked with different community groups and been a Buffalo resident for eight years. The following is an excerpt of the interview:

Q.

Seems as if there’s a split in the Negro community on approval of this kind of action. What kind of people are for it and what kind of people are completely against it?

A.

Well, people . . . the younger generation and a few of the older set. The people that’s against it are the clergy, BUILD was against the riot, SNICK, they was against it, some of SNICK [sic] had stood up and some of BUILD had stood up but the riot was the younger generation against the older generation. You know, forces versus forces.

Q.

What about the church groups?

A.

Well, the church groups have been brainwashed for years and years. You look at the Christian religion, what has it done but take away the dignity of men. ⁵⁷

The teenager’s response reveals the tensions that were present in Buffalo between older Civil Rights organizations and new Black Power groups, such as BUILD and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The latter group was mistakenly preserved in the written record by the interviewer as “SNICK.” Also, there were schisms within each group based on generational and religious differences. In general, older African Americans tended to favor traditional Civil Rights groups and tactics while younger ones embraced Black Power. Traditional Civil Rights groups drew its membership from pre-existing church groups whose nonviolent tactics were based on Christian theology. Black Power, on the other hand, did not necessarily derive its moral impetus from Christianity.

Unlike the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power was not closely tied to a particular religion. For instance, Malcolm X, whose teachings motivated a generation of Black Power activists, was a devout Muslim. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael told a reporter that Malcolm X “had had a tremendous influence on his ideas.” ⁵⁸ Proponents of Black Power were either non-practicing Christians, non-Christians, or people who were more open to other religious beliefs. In Buffalo, the nineteen-year-old interviewed after the riot explained his dealings with black Muslims in the following excerpt:

Q.

Have you had any experiences with the Muslims?

A.

Yes, I have in the last few months now. A lot of my friends are black Muslims and I was thinking about joining up with them when I was younger but, uh, but I just can’t see that any religion or cult justifies hate . . . it isn’t my belief but they have done more for the black man than anything or any organization.

Q. 

How is that?

A.

Because, they took in the prostitutes, the junkies, and the drunks, alcoholics, gangsters, you know, gangbusters, and sort of deprived [sic], and showed them that black is beauty, which I’ve always thought it was. ⁵⁹

The respondent believed that the Buffalo branch of the Nation of Islam was the organization most responsible for effecting change within the black community. The interviewee alluded to the work that the Nation of Islam had done to better the lives of underclass black Buffalonians, who, as a result of deindustrialization in the 1960s, had become unemployed or underemployed. These black Buffalonians were, in the words of Buffalo activist and photographer, Milton Rogovin, “the forgotten ones.” ⁶⁰ They supplemented their meagre incomes through illegal means. These members of the black community, residents of the East Side, subsisted on the margins of the city’s declining economy and existed on the lowest rung of its social and class hierarchy. By showing dispossessed black Buffalonians that “black is beauty,” the Nation of Islam combined changing cultural perceptions about what it meant to be black with improving the material conditions of black lives.

The Nation of Islam was first established in Buffalo in 1954 when Sister Ora-Lee X Lewis, under the instruction of Malcolm X, began a study group, which turned into Mosque No. 23 in 1957. ⁶¹ The Nation of Islam practiced political scientist Benedict Anderson’s definition of nation as an “imagined political community.” ⁶² The Nation of Islam defined its members in particular and all African Americans in general as a nation. Black Muslims believed that African Americans constituted their own nation, different from, and subordinated by, the American state. In “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X declared, “A revolutionary is a black nationalist. He wants a nation.” ⁶³ The riot interviewee’s beliefs correspond with cultural studies scholar Sohail Daulatzai’s argument that connections existed during the 1960s among the Nation of Islam, Black Power, and “the Muslim International.” ⁶⁴ In the minds of its adherents and sympathizers, the three concepts were synonymous, nation = Islam = Black Power.

The riot witness’s insistence that “black is beauty, which I’ve always thought it was” reflected one of Black Power’s basic tenets about the aesthetic value of blackness. The phrase “black is beautiful,” originated with Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, who in turn influenced Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, who popularized it in the 1950s and the phrase was then picked up by proponents of the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s. ⁶⁵ The idea that “black is beautiful” represented one of the cultural legacies of the Black Power Movement, an affirmation that in spite of white supremacist ideology, which denigrated black bodies, black people were both attractive and good. Indeed, the Nation of Islam was one of the first organizations to promote the use of the word “black,” instead of the words “Negro” or “colored” to refer to African Americans. This concept was put forward by the Nation of Islam’s leader Elijah Muhammad in the early 1960s when the word “black” was still considered derogatory. In Message to the Blackman, published in 1965, he asserted, “Our search of the ancient history of the black man of the earth will prove that not once in time were Negroes or ‘colored’ people living in Asia or Africa. How did we come by those names? The names are from the slave-masters. They have called us by their names and the nicknames used among themselves.” ⁶⁶ Known to his followers as The Messenger, Elijah Muhammad emphasized the value of black culture, arguing that the history of African Americans did not begin with slavery, that they were part of the global African diaspora and, as such, heirs to a proud legacy. It was slavery, he claimed, that stripped black people of their inherent dignity and forced them to accept inferior status, signified by the use of the words “Negro” or “colored.” Implicitly, the Nation of Islam also challenged mainstream Civil Rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded in 1909, the NAACP, the oldest and largest Civil Rights organization in the country, continued to use the word “colored” in its name during the 1960s.

In the aftermath of the 1967 riot, different Civil Rights and community groups attempted to help black Buffalonians. Local people in Buffalo were clear about which groups they believed were working to ameliorate the conditions in their neighborhoods. The following is an exchange between an interviewer and a forty-three-year-old African American woman who lived in the Lakeview projects, the initial site of the riot:

Q.

What groups, do you think, are helping to remedy the situation?

A.

Since BUILD moved into Buffalo, I think they have done more for the people here in Buffalo, than any other organization.

Q.

Why?

A.

Because they demand. They demand jobs, opportunities for everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color.

Q.

Why is this group better than other groups like it?

A.

Because they are doing more, that’s all I can really say. ⁶⁷

The woman believed that BUILD was the most valuable community group because it demanded jobs for black Buffalonians in the wake of the riot. The work of sociologist Raymond Owen, who studied BUILD in 1969, supports the woman’s assertion that BUILD was the most successful black organization at the time. Owen argues that “BUILD has managed to carve out a position of influence for itself among Buffalo’s black citizens. It has become a reference group for 10% of those outside its ranks and 44% of its ‘psychological’ members. . . . For a large proportion of the non-members (41%), BUILD fulfills an ombudsman’s role, mediating problems for individuals less-equipped to deal effectively with society’s bureaucratized structure.” ⁶⁸ After the riot, many black Buffalonians felt powerless and unable to rebuild their East Side neighborhood. Deindustrialization along with racial discrimination had caused massive unemployment in Buffalo’s black community, particularly on the East Side, where the majority of black Buffalonians were ghettoized. The respondent’s insistence that BUILD was the most successful Civil Rights group because it demanded jobs for black people attests to the importance of economic issues in Northern cities. Black Buffalonians viewed unemployment as one of the primary causes of the 1967 riot and, therefore, one that required immediate attention. Their insistence that the issue of employment be placed at the top of a community organization’s agenda reflected the connection between civil rights and urban issues. In the minds of many black Buffalonians, one of the main purposes of a Civil Rights or Black Power organization was to pressure the municipal government for jobs. For them, the issue of unemployment was inseparable from civil rights issues. They perceived BUILD as their main advocate at city hall because BUILD attempted to obtain jobs for the black unemployed. As a result, black Buffalonians began to view BUILD as the organization that best spoke for the needs of the black community

BUILD’s emphasis on addressing the needs of African Americans in Buffalo was also reflected in its creation of a separate school for black children. In 1968, after a year of negotiations at BUILD’s insistence, the New York state government permitted the establishment of the BUILD Academy as an alternative to the de facto segregated schooling provided by the Buffalo Public School system. The BUILD Academy was a collaborative effort between the state government, the school board, and the BUILD organization. It officially opened in 1969, two years after the organization itself was created. ⁶⁹ Historians Cha-Jua and Lang argue that the successes of the Civil Rights Movement “cleared the ground for Black Power projects to focus on building alternative institutions, rather than gaining access to existing institutions.” ⁷⁰ Civil rights victories regarding the right of African American children to equal access to quality public education led to Black Power projects such as the BUILD Academy.

An example of Black Power ideology at work in Buffalo, BUILD Academy made a conscious effort to teach black history to its students. BUILD explained its rationale regarding the importance of teaching black history in this manner: “There are no electives in the Buffalo System for the study of Negro history. Part of the alienation of the school from the community is because the school is terribly ignorant of the life and history of the community. One of the great quests of students today is for identity, a place in history. That is one of the most basic education requirements.” ⁷¹ BUILD connected the lack of black history courses to the inferior education of black students at Buffalo’s public schools. BUILD members’ belief that black history should have been offered as an elective course in the Buffalo public school system demonstrated a desire to inculcate black pride among African American students. BUILD maintained that instilling black pride would have led to an increase in self-esteem among black students and enabled them to perform better as students and as members of the community.

Furthermore, BUILD wanted black history to be taught throughout the entire Buffalo public school system, not just at the BUILD Academy. To solve the problem of the unequal and substandard education of black children in Buffalo’s public schools, BUILD proposed the following solution: “At the high school level, Negro history should be an elective throughout the system; it should be a required subject in all-Negro and integrated schools. In addition, a major effort must be placed on in-service training of ghetto teachers and administrators, and in obtaining a rich variety of texts in Negro history.” ⁷² The emphasis on black history was one of Black Power’s most important tenets, the idea that black people needed to define their own history and values. ⁷³ The leaders of BUILD understood that teaching black history was crucial to promoting individual and collective black pride among young African Americans.

In order to enhance black self-esteem, BUILD members believed that it was necessary for African Americans in Buffalo to control their own institutions. A central theme in BUILD’s 1968 annual report was power. The report asserted that “black people can no longer afford to live with the illusion of freedom and justice. Much has been accomplished; however, much remains to be done. BUILD will continue its fundamental job of building power and strengthening those institutions of the black community which are crucial to the survival of black people.” ⁷⁴ Although the term “black power” was not specifically used in the report, the coupling of the phrases “building power” with “black community” and “black people” reflected an imbibing of Black Power ideology and a change in how the majority of the city’s black residents thought about their blackness and its relationship to the African American freedom struggle.

BUILD’s strategy of obtaining “power” for black Buffalonians did not end with the establishment of a separate school in 1969. It included efforts to improve the condition of unemployment among African Americans in Buffalo. The 1968 report announced:

The Economic Development Committee realized that despite the impressive record of the Jobs Committee, much more must be done, especially for the unskilled and the so-called hardcore unemployed. The committee has gone after ways of changing the basic pattern of the black community by creating black community-owned businesses, so we can get to where the real action is and avoid the trap of building up a collection of super consumers, who have no power and consequently, no control over their environment. ⁷⁵

BUILD was aware of the high unemployment rate in Buffalo’s predominantly African American East Side; it made a conscious effort to relieve black unemployment. According to historian Laura Hill, “The term ‘hard-core unemployed’ was widely used in this period to denote a person who was not easily employed because he or she had insufficient education or training, a criminal record, had suffered long periods of unemployment, or had never been gainfully employed.” ⁷⁶ One of the issues that BUILD targeted was to provide help to the “hard-core unemployed” African Americans of Buffalo by promoting and supporting black-owned businesses, particularly on the East Side.

Black Power was on the minds not only of African Americans in Buffalo, but white organizers as well. In 1966, Saul Alinsky, whom black Buffalonians initially approached to help establish the BUILD organization, was asked to comment about “the ‘black power’ controversy.” He replied, “I agree with the concept. We’ve always called it community power, and if the community is black, it’s black power.” ⁷⁷ Although Alinsky expressed his support for black power as a function of community control in a black community, he had some reservations about Black Power ideology in practice. In the afterword to the 1969 edition of his book, Alinksy wrote, “The danger of black power is that there may be no black power. This nation desperately needs the organized power of our black sector and its representatives in our body politic. I am gravely concerned that those who talk black power will do no more than talk, will not engage in the arduous, tedious job of organization. If this happens, the term ‘black power’ will degenerate from a proud, meaningful phrase and threat into a joke.” ⁷⁸ He clarified his position further, stating, “Today there is a great emphasis among blacks on identity: black culture, black history, and pride of race—‘Black is beautiful.’ The importance of achieving the objective of a black sense of identity cannot be understated. It is essential and of prime significance. It must be achieved. What concerns me deeply is that identity without power is still a second-class identity. Black culture must proceed hand-in-hand with the organization of blacks for black power.” ⁷⁹ The local black people in Buffalo who initially called on Saul Alinsky to help them organize and eventually establish BUILD heeded his concerns about black identity without black power. BUILD was one of the community groups in Buffalo that emphasized pride in black identity and organized black Buffalonians in an effort to gain control over their community and to change society.

Black Power, not simply in rhetoric but in action, garnered support for BUILD within Buffalo’s black community. Sociologist Raymond Owen found that in 1969, any gains made by BUILD in the areas of employment and education directly translated to an increase in BUILD’s standing in the minds of black Buffalonians. Owen asserted:

Concrete and symbolic achievements of a non-insidious nature tend to produce more supportive feelings for the organization than does pure militance [sic] and lashing out at the “system.” The concrete payoffs most conducive to gaining organizational support are successes in the areas of jobs and education, the most important symbolic payoffs are getting cooperation from City Hall, developing black pride and gaining the cooperation of the black community (working together). ⁸⁰

BUILD was successful in the minds of African Americans in Buffalo to the extent that it attempted to alleviate urban problems, such as unemployment and unequal education, which plagued Buffalo’s black community. The rhetoric of Black Power may have initially attracted Buffalo’s local people to BUILD, but concrete action caused them to view the organization in a positive light.

In conclusion, racial inequality in employment, housing, and education adversely affected African Americans in Buffalo in the 1960s and some local black people attempted to mount a collective resistance. One response to the problems of deindustrialization, unemployment, and segregation was Black Power, which revealed African American disenchantment with the failure of liberalism to produce the fruits of true equality in a democracy. The statements made by black Buffalonians in the late 1960s suggest that Black Power thrived in Buffalo. It affected the way the majority of African Americans in the city viewed events such as the 1967 riot and led to their support of the BUILD organization and the establishment of BUILD Academy in 1969. However, in 1976, through legal action by the Buffalo NAACP chapter, a judge found the Buffalo Board of Education guilty of violating the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, which outlawed segregation in public schools. As a consequence of the ruling, the school board was forced to implement an integration plan and the BUILD Academy was absorbed into the Buffalo Public School system. Yet for a brief period, the BUILD Academy functioned as an alternative to segregated and inferior education, a separate school initiated and controlled by African Americans, not only teaching, but making black history. The BUILD organization stood as an example of the promise of Black Power ideology in the lives of black Buffalonians.

The story of Black Power in Buffalo addresses two important historiographical issues. First, there is a dearth of historical scholarship on Buffalo in general and its black community in particular. Historian Todd Robinson argues that “although the new African American urban history has increased our understanding of the black urban experience significantly, the post-1940 period has been defined by histories of the political economy of race in larger cities and has neglected to examine black agency, specifically in secondary cities. . . . With the absence of secondary cities in the literature, there is still too much work to be done before anyone can truly write a definitive history of the freedom struggle in the North.” ⁸¹ In short, secondary cities such as Buffalo require further study. Second, an analysis of Black Power in Buffalo provides not only an addition to the list of understudied cities in urban historiography; it also contributes to a broader understanding of the relationship between the fields of Civil Rights/Black Power scholarship and urban history. As historian Robert Self asserts, “Histories of postwar United States typically tell separate stories. Civil rights was the great freedom movement. Suburbanization was driven by affluence and ‘white flight.’ Urban history was characterized by deindustrialization and ghetto formation. These stories stand side by side, but we are left with a surprisingly impoverished analytical language for thinking of them relationally. To consider them in relation is not just to recover their deep connections but to rethink the stories themselves.” ⁸² Analyses that tie together urban history and Civil Rights/Black Power scholarship lead to greater comprehension of the link between national and local issues. The history of Black Power and community organizations, such as BUILD in Buffalo, contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between urban issues and the Civil Rights/Black Power Movements. The statements made by ordinary, working-class black Buffalonians after the 1967 riot, and their actions through community organizations like BUILD, attest to the significance of Black Power ideology among the city’s African Americans in the late 1960s. The prevalence of Black Power in Buffalo at the time speaks to the connections among issues such as deindustrialization, unemployment, segregation, and community mobilization. Black Power gave African Americans the courage to see themselves as black people, endowed them with a story of the past that inspired racial pride, and provided a vision of a future free from the confines of racial inequality.