'The love is real': Young people's stories capture life growing up on Buffalo's East Side
When a gunman walked into the Buffalo Tops on Jefferson Avenue May 14 and killed 10 people, their deaths reverberated across Buffalo’s East Side neighborhood. It rattled the families and neighbors, and temporarily eliminated a crucial food resource for the many people living nearby.
The shooting put this neighborhood in Buffalo under a magnifying glass, exposing years of disinvestment and giving voice to advocates who have long been calling for change.
For teenagers and young adults living, learning and working on Buffalo’s East Side, this attack was inflicted upon them at a pivotal moment of formation. Their career paths and choices will reflect their devotion to this community, their fierce intention to see it made whole, better than it was before.
We're able to cover the stories from across New York that matter most to you and your family thanks to the support of our subscribers. Consider supporting our efforts with a subscription to the New York publication nearest you.
USA Today Network New York sat down with 14 young adults living in this neighborhood. They weren't specifically asked about the shooting, but they talked about it anyway.
Ranging in age from 15 to 27, they include lifelong Buffalo residents, college students and newcomers. They share a connection to Say Yes Buffalo, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to remove barriers to educational and economic attainment for young people living in the city. And they share something else: They’re all proud to be East Siders.
This is the future of Buffalo’s East Side, as perceived by the generation poised to shape it.
The only problem on Buffalo's East Side is lack of resources
Seven young men — and a few days later, seven young woman — gather in one of the blue conference rooms at Say Yes Buffalo, housed on the first floor of a neat, brick building on the corner of Jefferson and Northampton, mere blocks from the scene of the shooting.
Malik Stubbs, 25, has big goals for Buffalo. He plans to run for mayor one day — his friends call him Mayor Malik — and he was elected to an Erie County committee member position on his 24th birthday. Stubbs is a graduate student at Medaille College and a 2019 graduate from Canisius College.
“A lot of people wanted to get involved after the shooting, and that was good for the first couple of weeks, but the need is right now,” he says. “We can’t pretend like this didn’t happen. I mean, there’s still issues happening in our community and we still need help.”
Stubbs wants outsiders to understand this neighborhood is a food and development desert, and what that means for those living there, how the worry over buying groceries following the shooting is indicative of larger structural and infrastructural issues.
A study released by the University at Buffalo Center for Urban Studies found that Buffalo’s Black residents have not made progress over the past 30 years — and problems are, in fact, getting worse.
“City leaders, including the last three mayors … never fully invested in a comprehensive action plan to address core problems facing Buffalo’s Black residents,” the Investigative Post reported last year. “Instead, the city continued to emphasize a failed agenda that promoted economic development in certain areas of the city while ‘marginalizing and under-developing’ Black communities and neighborhoods.”
About 85 percent of Black people in Buffalo live east of Main Street, or on the East Side, a 2018 study by the Partnership for the Public Good found.
Read more: This housing project cemented segregation in Buffalo. Now, Black activists want to save it.
The youth are cognizant of the situation in which they live. For them, it’s not just figures and statistics, it is something with which they, their families and their friends grapple each day. For them, it is real life. They see the drastic differences in their part of town and in others.
“Why is it so hard for us to get food, housing and basic human necessities,” asks Meryl Lafargue Despaigne, a 20-year-old architectural major at Alfred State, “when the upper class and any other side of Buffalo is thriving?”
Tyler Dread saw the disparity play out in front of him as a kid.
A 19-year-old rising sophomore at SUNY Brockport, Dread used to go to school near Elmwood Village. It’s where the city has invested money, where softly hewn curbs line quaint storefronts and trendy restaurants. On Saturdays, Elmwood's tree-lined Bidwell Parkway is transformed into a thriving producer-only farmers market featuring musicians.
"Here on Jefferson (Avenue), and on nearby Bailey (Avenue), everything is run down," Dread says. "Things are dirty, destroyed even. It honestly does bother me."
The East Side is separated from Elmwood only by Main Street, the dividing point at which East Ferry Street becomes West Ferry Street. It’s the other side of town, mere blocks away, but it might as well be the other side of the world for kids like Dread and Josiah Ramirez, a 16-year-old junior at Hutchinson Central Technical High School.
The layout is the same on both streets, and what’s there — shops, restaurants, housing — also matches up. In fact, Ramirez says, Jefferson is literally Elmwood. "It just doesn’t look like it.”
Ramirez loves the East Side, he loves everything about his neighborhood and points out that the neglect does not represent the love East Siders have for their community. It just doesn’t look as pretty as Elmwood, he says, and that’s a shame, because he believes that would be easy to fix.
“The only problem,” Ramirez says, “is the lack of resources.”
Read more: Healing the Harm in Buffalo: How 2 men are changing youths' lives through mentorship
'It's like you never get a break'
All 14 young people USA TODAY Network New York journalists spoke to mentioned the streets and sidewalks on the East Side, how badly they need to be repaired. They site the crumbling sidewalks as hazards to children on bicycles and wheelchair users.
Deonté Brown has played in parks across the city, but it’s the ones on the East Side that don’t get cleaned regularly, if at all.
Brown is a junior marketing major at Howard University. The East Side of Buffalo is "the community that raised” the 22-year-old, but now that he spends so much of his time in Washington, D.C., he has begun to think about the differences in quality of life in the two cities.
In D.C., he frequents a number of available green spaces, clean and open parks, to achieve a moment of calm when he is feeling stressed. There’s no place to disconnect and relax like that on the East Side of Buffalo, no peaceful, natural environment, no way to achieve physical or mental distance from stressors.
“Take that away and it’s crazy all the time,” he says. “It’s like you never get a break.”
This group wants to see gyms and fitness centers, free mental health facilities, empty lots converted to shelters for the unhoused, food programs, services to get people on their feet and a Black-owned 99-cent store. Tyianna Coleman, who is 21 and attended SUNY Erie Community College, says she’ll open that herself, ensuring "basic things you need to be a human" are accessible to all members of her community.
They want free hygiene products in their schools, and they want to see better representation in their classrooms. Many of the young adults mentioned rarely seeing Black teachers where they were in school. Shawn Collins is a 19-year-old student at Niagara University now, and he believes students would benefit from having teachers who look like them and can relate to them.
On Buffalo's East Side, 'the love is real'
There’s another layer beneath the surface identity of the East Side. It’s the bedrock, but you might miss it if you’re just passing through. The East Side is a tightly knit, got-your-back community. On summer days, the neighborhood is vibrant with laughter, chatting and music. People sit outside their homes greeting passersby. The community is alive.
The youngest member of this group is Hailey Howard, who attends Hutchinson Central Technical High School. She’s 15, and already she has a sense of how her neighborhood operates.
“Everybody thinks it’s so bad,” she says, “but everybody helps each other. They don’t care who you are or what you do or nothing. They will just try to help you out no matter what you do.”
Howard is already thinking about staying in Buffalo when she becomes an adult, and knows that she wants to be part of bringing change to her community.
For Angel Jones, a 17-year-old incoming freshman at D’Youville University in Buffalo, that was never clearer than in the aftermath of the shooting.
“After everybody realized how bad it was and how terrible, everybody just started coming together even harder,” she said. “Everybody was like, ‘OK, we’re going to do this and this for this community, we’re going to set up a plan to make sure this community is good.’ It just opened everybody’s eyes up a little bit. I think that it brought realization to everybody because everybody wasn’t serious before."
There are different ways this element of community plays out.
Dorian Withrow Jr. saw it in all the mothers who came out with food and water one day when he was playing basketball with a group of guys on Roosevelt — they brought enough to feed the crowd who’d gathered to watch.
Read more: After Buffalo's mass shooting — and its grief — these gardens defy white supremacy
For 21-year-old Derricka Settles, who is a communications major at Medaille College and moved to the East Side from Georgia as a child, it's in the welcoming feeling that comes from living within walking distance of your family members and churches, as well as near multiple businesses owned by Black women.
For 19-year-old Shanzay Butt, who is originally from Brooklyn and now a business major with a marketing concentration at the University at Buffalo, it lives in organizations like Say Yes Buffalo, community resources that have shaped her as a young adult. She doesn’t know where she’d be without them.
It’s in the way strangers greet each other here, how parties happen here, meals are shared, doors are opened. Stubbs calls it an extended family.
“If somebody’s cooking, everybody eating. Everybody’s eating,” Jones says. “If somebody has a party, everybody’s invited. The whole neighborhood is invited. If somebody from out of our community messes with somebody in our community, everybody is going to be there for the support and to stick up and watch.”
Despite the East Side’s challenges, Brown says “the love is real.”
Marcus McConnell, a 21-year-old rising senior majoring in political science at Buffalo State, wants people to understand that, despite what many already know about the East Side, the community has more to offer.
“We are who we are, you know? So when it comes to Black people on the East Side, we’re not just known not to have grocery stores, but we’re known for a lot of things,” McConnell said. “We have musicians, we have lawyers, we have doctors — we have people that are honestly civil rights leaders.”
'We’re pushing forward to a new day of change'
The young adults gathered at Say Yes Buffalo are already paving the way for the future of their community.
Dorian Withrow Jr. graduated from Canisius College. At 22, he’s also the co-author and author of two books, “Speak Young Brown People, Speak! We Are Listening” and “Thoughts of Creative King 114 Realities.”
Deonté Brown is the CEO of a small business.
Meryl Lafargue Despaigne wants to design a community center.
Hailey Howard plans to study biochemistry in college.
Tyianna Coleman wants to open her own businesses and help provide housing to women and children.
Coleman’s sister, 27-year-old Tashiana Daniels, wants to improve resources in the community, especially in regards to mental health.
In a way, the Tops shooting put pressure on this group.
Settles said it “woke you up to what is the real problem in our community and in the nation, period."
Brown worries what might happen if people like him leave town, if they decide to live somewhere else. Who will be there to offer the helping hands that were there for him? Who will look after the children who are coming up today and in the future?
Lafargue Despaigne is working to create programs that existed when she was growing up, places she could go that allowed her to "just be a kid," services that took her on trips to the zoo or out of town. Her college professors don’t understand it, and suggest such things are unnecessary.
But Lafargue Despaigne knows resources like that can be “literal safe havens” in a community like the East Side, and she wants to provide that for the kids that come after her.
“Maybe the next kid will turn into the next me and just repeat this cycle,” she said. “Maybe one day we can better the world without all the back and forth and all the hatred that’s being thrown out in the world right now.”
The key, Coleman says, is that no one is left behind.
“We are here to break generational curses, and prepare the next young ones to not have a tough life, not to go through all that,” she said. “To get them off the street, be successful … graduate college and become a millionaire or billionaire.”
Because, they say, you have to remember the community you came from. Your success isn’t your own — you have to turn around and give back, to offer the same opportunity to someone else.
“We’re pushing forward to a new day of change that will better our next generation,” Settles said.
Adria R. Walker is the Upstate New York storytelling reporter for the USA Today Network's New York State Team. Follow her on Twitter at @adriawalkr or send her an email at arwalker@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Teens, young adults growing up on Buffalo's East Side share feelings
