Senator Sean Ryan Commemorates Three-Year Anniversary Of May 14 Racist Mass Shooting Attack On Buffalo

Transcript:

Today is the three-year anniversary of one of the darkest days in Buffalo’s history. On May 14 – beautiful, sunny day – 2022, a hateful racist who was only 18 years old, drove from his home, drove two-and-a-half hours to a supermarket on the East Side of Buffalo to murder people who were complete strangers to him just because of the color of their skin. Because they were Black.

Ten lives were stolen that day: Celestine Chaney, Roberta Drury, Andre Mackniel, Kathrine Massey, Margus Morrison, Heyward Patterson, Aaron Salter, Geraldine Talley, Ruth Whitfield, and Pearl Young. Three others, Christopher Braden, Zaire Goodman and Jennifer Warrington were wounded, but survived.

Three years later, this is all still fresh in our minds. I’ll never forget the day; I was doing yard work in my backyard, and I started seeing helicopters flying overhead. Then I started hearing sirens, and I was wondering, “What’s going on?” And I went over to my cell phone, and it was lit up with messages. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, that this was happening just two miles from my home. And today I still feel the confusion, the anger, the sorrow, just the disbelief that I felt on that day. I can’t for a second imagine the trauma that the survivors who were shopping there that day are still dealing with, knowing that it could have been them instead, wondering why they got out and others didn’t. Today, my heart is with them. My heart is with the families of the victims who continue to grieve, who continue to hurt. Anyone who’s lost a loved one, I’m sure everyone in this room has, knows that the grief never goes away. It just gets less painful in a different way. We learn how to live with the grief. We learn how to live around the grief. We build around it. And that’s what Buffalo and these families have gone through in the last three years.

This horrible tragedy could have further divided us. It could have broken us. Instead, it galvanized an entire community, and it drew national attention to the inequities that Buffalo’s East Side has faced for decades. The people of the East Side are descendants of the great migration; people who left the south hoping for freedom, but they met the northern version of Jim Crow: redlining, disinvestment, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, banking discrimination and much more. It’s no secret. We all know it. The effects of the discrimination and disinvestment are abundantly clear. The root causes and the challenges those neighborhoods face today are clear. In Buffalo, you can see it just by driving in the neighborhood: Streets are left barren, potholes are unfilled, houses were demolished with nothing rebuilt. Every social indicator, whether it’s individual wealth, home ownership, health outcomes – Black Buffalonians on the East Side are worse off than anyone else in the city.

But the only way we can begin to fix it is to acknowledge the reality and to acknowledge the problem that we have caused. It’s the harm done by leaders of the past generations. But that harm was intentional and it was purposeful, so we have to be intentional and purposeful in our efforts to reverse it. That means sustained investment where there was disinvestment in Black communities. One year ago, I stood in this chamber and said, “We can only solve these problems if we’re all pulling in the same direction.” We all know that on a federal level, things are not going the direction we wanted them to go in. We’ve got a new administration that thinks acknowledging sins of the past is a bad thing, that thinks “equity” is a dirty word. But that makes our work in New York State all the more important. We need to continue to fight back against federal backsliding, but we also need to make sure that we’re keeping up our end of the bargain. 

I’m proud of the way that New York State has stepped up for the East Side since the attack. We’ve invested in home renovations, infill housing to fill in the sea of vacant lots. We’ve put millions into small business grants and workforce development, and we’ve invested money to combat food insecurity, prevent foreclosures, and to make home ownership more attainable. But we have got a long way to go. It’s a great start, but it’s just a drip in the bucket of the problem that we have.

Money alone is not going to solve it. We need to make sure we’re investing it properly. We need to make sure we listen to the community to get guidance from the community. This weekend, I attended the Buffalo Black Caucus. It’s an annual event that was organized after 5/14 by Buffalo Councilwoman Zeneta Everhart, whose son was shot that day; he is one of the survivors. Every year, the event brings together community leaders to uplift Black voices and to strengthen Buffalo’s Black community. It’s a remarkably powerful way to honor those that were taken from us – the community coming together to do good. 

We will not let hate win. We will not let hate keep us down. We will not let hate continue to divide us. We will remember, and we will move forward together.