Blacks Are No Longer the Economically Dominant Minority On The Eastside

By Betty Jean Grant

We Are Women Warriors

Betty Jean Grant

It is a shame how everyone stands up for their children and their com munity except the Black community! How do we let our children continue be under-educated, our houses sold away from us, and our businesses be ignored and not supported until they are no longer sustainable and they are foreclosed or we are forced to sell them?

We can forget about claiming that we own the Eastside. We are not paying our rent or are selling our ancestral homes for pennies on the dollars to the new owners and managers of the Eastside. We are relying on free food, free clothing, and free toys at Christmas to make sure our children’s needs are met, and yet we are buying inch long fingernails, 1/2 inch eyelashes and hair braids down to our knees!

We are selling chicken dinners and setting up GoFundMe accounts to bury our young, murdered men and our old parents or grandparents who are dying with out having a lick of a savings account or life insurance. We are breaking into our neighbors’ homes and stealing their possessions long before they hit the city limits as they travel outside Buffalo to well earned vacations.

We are buying our children I phones, celebrity endorsed shoes and the latest AI games and programs while they worry about how long they have, in their homes, before the family is kicked out for the nonpayment of months of back rent.

Conservative politicians, many of them Democrats, knew what they were doing when they insisted that fami lies that were on welfare could not have any unemployed adult males in the homes regardless of whether the man was the father of the children or not. That move broke up families and allowed no positive role models in the children’s lives; especially our vulnerable male children who were growing up in an urban city where industrial jobs were taken away and relocated to the south. That was the first stone thrown in the dissolution of the nuclear family structure that Blacks have always had, back in Africa and even long before we were enslaved.

The persecution of groups such as the Black Panthers had more to do with the food pantries, neighbor hoods safety patrols, male mentoring programs and other self determination initiatives they instituted than it had to do with them as a law enforcement issue. The Black Panthers were addressing the problem of no readily avail able jobs for our young men except being hired in local inner city businesses. Many of our young teens helped to augment the family’s household budget by taking their earnings from those deli stores’ jobs home to help their mothers put food on the table. That all changed when the Black owners of those delis sold to business people who did not live in nor spent their profits in our community.

The lack of community jobs that paid a decent wage led to the proliferation of young men selling drugs on street corners and at certain deli stores. A few of these shady business owners not only allowed drugs to be sold outside their stores but sometimes supplied the drugs to the dealers to be sold!

So, to those of you who think that Black people con trol anything on the Eastside, look around you. And it is going to get a whole lot worse. If you own your home, you had better keep it and pass it down to your children and grandchildren. The way things are getting for We Black folks, homeownership is vastly being taken off the table. It is a sad legacy that Black folks leave after the struggles, deaths, assassinations and discrimination we have endured to be at this junction of our collective his tory.

Enslavement was an inhumane act and condition we somehow survived. The ensuing legacy of Jim Crowism and over 100 years of lynching and almost 200 years of police brutality, after slavery ended, and still being per petrated even today, do not let this country and its con tinued racism against African American citizens off the hook. We Blacks on the Eastside of Buffalo must not accept less than first class treatment in our community and our city. We must think less about how white folks are going to get to Buffalo, if the 33 Expressway is re moved and more about how we make the NYSDOT and Governor Kathy Hochul acknowledge and address the illnesses and deaths of those residents who became sick while breathing the toxic air of the Expressway for 70 plus years!

We must not allow New York State and the NYSDOT to put that tunnel in without documenting how damag ing the Expressway has been to our health and lives, and how a partially covered tunnel will only exacerbate the problem. The Expressway can be removed and Humboldt Parkway can be filled in and restored to its former glory for 1/2 the money it will take to put the tunnel in. The rest of the one billion dollars can be used in the streets sur rounding the Humboldt Parkway neighborhoods to re pair substandard housing, replace cracked sidewalks, rehab dilapidated buildings, repave roads and street and the address the health and wellness needs of those resi dents whose health and quality of life have been irrepa rably damaged by living near and breathing the carbon monoxide and other pollutants from cars and vehicles travelling the Kensington Expressway.