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Segregated Buffalo neighborhoods allowed gunman to target Black community

A recent report ranked Buffalo as one of the most segregated cities in the country while Raleigh is among the least

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By
Ali Ingersoll
, WRAL Investigative Data Journalist

Buffalo Police released the names of the 10 victims killed Saturday afternoon in a supermarket shooting. Eleven of the 13 people shot on Saturday were Black. The police referred to the act as domestic terrorism.

The 18-year-old shooter was targeting Black people. The self-proclaimed racist and white supremacist wrote in great detail in a 180-page manifesto about the attack, including why he selected that area of the city.

He traveled more than 3 hours to Buffalo because, as he wrote in a manifesto - that zip code has the highest percentage Black population that isn’t far away.

Buffalo’s demographic makeup can be seen simply by looking at a map with 2020 census data. Each tan dot represents a white person, each yellow dot, a black person.

There's a clear divide in the data. A city separated.

"The east side of Buffalo, in particular, is hyper-segregated," said Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies. "It very much is the heartbeat of Buffalo, I would argue, in terms of Black Buffalo; in the way that Buffalo seats itself to the world."

Researchers in Buffalo note the city's persistent issues with segregation are a result of decades of racist policies and little investment, even in recent years as many other areas of the city experienced a resurgence.

In fact, the Tops where this shooting happened is the only commercial grocery store in that part of the city.

"He knew to identify [that] as a black space and to be able to shoot up the supermarket in that regard," Neal, who received his PhD from the University at Buffalo, said. "I think any folks - whether we're talking about the city of Raleigh or Durham - who live in segregated Black cities, are always concerned that the hyper-visibility of that segregation can lead to these kinds of attacks in the future."

Buffalo's racial divide goes back to infrastructure. The city's demographics change going down Main Street and along the Kensington Expressway, which Neal points out isn't unlike Durham with 147.
Persistent segregation allowed Buffalo gunman to target Black community

"You have those kinds of dynamics where you have historically Black communities getting locked off from the rest of the city, because of the type of infrastructure that's being built in the city," said Neal.

Buffalo, however, has ranked among the most segregated in the nation. According to a Brookings Institution report published last week, Buffalo's segregation score is a 69 - meaning 69 percent of the city’s Black and white populations would have to move to be distributed equally across neighborhoods.

It's the 7th highest in the country. A number of other Rust Belt cities including Milwaukee, Cleveland and Detroit as well as Chicago, St. Louis, and New York are more segregated than Buffalo, the report finds.

Among the lowest when it comes to Black and white residents -- Raleigh. Its segregation score is a 40 and is at the 4th lowest.

"It's easy to go from one place to the other in Raleigh in ways that aren't the same in Durham," said Neal. "With so much new housing growth, in which so many more folks and diverse populations are moving to this City of Raleigh, it doesn't surprise me that it's a city that is not as historically segregated as it was in the past."

Raleigh is listed only after Honolulu, Tuscon and Las Vegas.

Durham wasn’t listed in the report but Neal says its history as a predominantly Black city is the root of it’s demographic landscape where there are large areas primarily occupied by the Black population.

As the Hayti neighborhood, once a thriving Black business district, fights to revive itself without losing its community, a lack of fresh food options is one issue local leaders point to.​

So, as in other cities, grocery stores themselves become sites of segregation.

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