Black Buffalo determined to rebuild while dealing with grief and sorrow

The national media has packed up and moved on to the next mass shooting in America.

The national media has packed up and moved on to the next mass shooting in America. But residents on the eastside of Buffalo, where 85 percent of the population is Black, are still grieving — while also trying to figure out how to rebuild. 

“This isn’t one of those situations where we can just go on with our daily lives,” said Jillian Hanesworth, Buffalo’s first poet laureate and a social justice activist working for the organization Open Buffalo. 

The May 14 massacre magnified the plight of a community that had long been disadvantaged before 10 Black people were gunned down by a white supremacist at a supermarket. 

Through horror and grief — and in some ways, inspired by it — Black Buffalonians see a desperate need for substantial, community-wide change that goes beyond reopening the Tops Friendly Market.

Through tears, they say they view the massacre as an inflection point to exposing and fixing the many deficits in the city’s Black community. And they charge Buffalo’s first Black mayor, Bryon Brown, with being at the forefront of this revitalization.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-buffalo-determined-rebuild-dealing-grief-sorrow-rcna30761

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