The #BuffaloSyllabus, Community Healing, and Reparative Justice in the Aftermath of Racial Violence

Tiana U. Wilson and J Coley

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doi: https://doi.org/10.65233/MTCH3250

On May 14, 2022, locals came to a standstill as they awaited updates about the active shooter on the East Side, the predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York.¹ As more information about the shooter was being reported, J Coley, a graduate student at the University at Buffalo and East Side resident, took to Twitter (now known as X) to counter mainstream media’s dominant coverage of Payton Gendron, the white supremacist gunman who drove 200 miles to murder Black Buffalo residents at the Tops Friendly Markets.² Rather than privileging the attacker’s racist motives, Coley used the platform to raise awareness of Black people’s experiences in the city, to contextualize why the white gunman targeted the East Side, and to examine the impact of his actions. Coley’s tweets went viral, which sparked one follower to suggest a reading list for outsiders interested in learning more about Black Buffalo. Coley then put out a call to formalize a team of Buffalo natives invested in drafting a syllabus for the public. Tiana U. Wilson, William Jamal Richardson, and Robert Mays answered the call, leading to the birth of the Black Buffalo Syllabus Collective (BBSC). The Collective’s early meetings consisted of imagining the best medium for sharing resources on Black residents’ experiences in Buffalo from a historical, sociological, geographical, and economic lens.³

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The closing of the Tops supermarket immediately after the incident drew the public’s attention to how prevalent food apartheid was on the East Side. As the only full-service grocery store in the area, the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue is in the heart of the Cold Springs neighborhood and a resource for the adjacent Fruit Belt community located within three miles. An analysis conducted by Anna Blatto and the Partnership for the Public Good in the aftermath of the shooting found that approximately 22,000 residents in Buffalo lived closer to the site of the targeted tragedy than to any other major grocery store in the city.⁴ In Buffalo, Black residents are six times more likely to reside in a community that is experiencing food apartheid as compared to their white counterparts.⁵ The use of the term food apartheid rather than food desert emphasizes how the lack of food access in low-income and majority Black neighborhoods is by design.⁶

In the spirit of the Black Radical Tradition, Black-led community organizations on Buffalo’s East Side engaged in mutual aid practices in the aftermath of the tragedy. Organizations hosted free farmers markets, delivered free meals and groceries to families in the zip codes directly impacted, and even redistributed a portion of received donations directly to residents so they could access mental health care and other self-care services. Even when the Tops supermarket reopened two months after the incident, Black Buffalo residents still had to mourn the ten lives lost and continue to rebuild their community. 

The #BuffaloSyllabus emerged in response to public outcries for readings that contextualized Black people’s experiences in the city before the attack. By compiling a list of close to 200 sources, the Collective intentionally designed the syllabus to focus solely on Buffalo. Whereas other movement syllabi like the #FergusonSyllabus and #CharlestonSyllabus provide readers with historical context for racial violence throughout the nation, the #BuffaloSyllabus does not extend beyond scholarship on Upstate New York.⁷ BBSC members wanted to craft a document different from and complementary to these more extensive lists. They maintain that Buffalo and other Rust Belt cities have distinctive social, political, and economic contexts that oftentimes get missed in these larger conversations about American racism.

Beginning with the intellectual and methodological significance of the project, this essay explores the “behind the scenes” of the #BuffaloSyllabus. An account of the intricate details surrounding the production of the syllabus offers insight for other collectives wishing to embark on similar city-focused digital resources. Our essay features three themes from the #BuffaloSyllabus to historically contextualize Black residents’ experiences in Buffalo. We also explore examples from our own accounts as scholars and residents throughout the essay as a method of demonstrating how our particular positionality shaped the content of the syllabus. Examining Buffalo’s built environment is among the three topics discussed to demonstrate how state-sanctioned policies have led to deep levels of racial and economic segregation. We then shift our focus to Black resistance in Buffalo and how residents engaged in the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We conclude with a sample of the “Towards an Abolitionist Future” subcategory of the syllabus as a method for imagining collective healing and repair. The Collective views this section as a call to action for readers and engagers of the #BuffaloSyllabus, highlighting the work already being done on the ground and the work that is still needed. 

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The Production of the #BuffaloSyllabus

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When founding the BBSC, members wanted to reserve the Collective for scholars either from or living in Buffalo. This act was political: they wanted to prioritize the lived experiences of people who had deep community roots in Black Buffalo. They were also interested in sustaining these networks long-term. Although the BBSC appreciated the national attention Black Buffalo received immediately after the mass shooting, many of these voices came from outsiders who had no personal investments in rebuilding the community directly harmed. The BBSC viewed its syllabus as a way to continue conversations about racial violence, restorative justice, and community repair beyond the national craze. By limiting the membership to Black Buffalo locals and natives, the Collective was intentional about not capitalizing on the moment or extracting from Black pain. Members channeled their mourning and despair into the #BuffaloSyllabus. 

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A core principle of the #BuffaloSyllabus is the importance of collectivity and knowledge exchange. During the early stages of building the syllabus, BBSC members consulted with local experts of Black Buffalo for feedback on their first draft of the reading list. Scholars across the disciplines of sociology, history, public policy, criminology, and urban planning offered invaluable commentary on the syllabus’s thematic structure, content, and framing.⁸ The BBSC then used social media to crowdsource additional readings before launching the #BuffaloSyllabus website. While BBSC members had a good start in building the syllabus due to their collective knowledge of Buffalo, the contributions they received from scholars and everyday residents of Buffalo were invaluable. 

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From this collective action emerged a living, breathing, crowdsourced document. The #BuffaloSyllabus encompasses a variety of sources in an effort to make it accessible to individuals in and outside of academia. The syllabus includes op-eds and news reports pre- and post-tragedy, a media archive consisting of documentaries and other short videos, peer-reviewed journal articles, policy reports, books, and historical markers. By including a list of historical markers, the BBSC wanted to highlight how Buffalo is a city rich with Black history, dating back to the nineteenth century when it was one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad.⁹ The range of sources and digital presence not only provided greater access for the general audience, but it also facilitated a capacious level of engagement for each reader—one could read, listen, witness, feel, and experience Black Buffalo.

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The #BuffaloSyllabus contributes to the relatively new and burgeoning field of Black Digital Humanities, joining a wave of scholarship using technology, digital tools, and public-facing research to recover Black people’s “full humanity.” Black Digital Humanities historians Kim Gallon, Mark Anthony Neal, and P. Gabrielle Foreman shaped the intellectual foundation of the #BuffaloSyllabus’s survivor-focused lens of racial violence and community harm.¹⁰ In an effort to reclaim Black people’s lived experiences outside the mass shooting, the BBSC dedicated the #BuffaloSyllabus to the community members lost: Ruth Whitfield, Aaron Salter Jr., Pearl Young, Roberta A. Drury, Celestine Chaney, Heyward Patterson, Andre Mackniel, Katherine Massey, Geraldine Chapman Talley, and Margus D. Morrison. The BBSC considers the #BuffaloSyllabus a love letter to Black Buffalo and a tool to empower a community that has experienced perpetual state-sanctioned harm and, most recently, an anti-Black act of violence. As a Black Digital Humanities project, the #BuffaloSyllabus intentionally includes a “Media Archive” section, guiding readers and engagers to other public-facing digital research, such as Foreman’s Colored Conventions Project.¹¹

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While assembling the #BuffaloSyllabus, BBSC members contemplated the usefulness of a localized digital project and how their initiative would build on and diverge from similar online platforms. They studied other movement syllabi for inspiration about how they might structure their resource guide and examined what might be missing from more nationally focused Black Lives Matter syllabi.¹² For example, the #CharlestonSyllabus–housed on Black Perspectives’ online blog, provides a local and national historical overview of racial violence in the United States and Black people’s freedom struggles.¹³ One of the many benefits of this approach is that readers are introduced to the depths and breadths of systemic racism, racial tension, and structural oppression. The #CharlestonSyllabus, along with the #FergusonSyllabus, served as a blueprint for the BBSC.¹⁴ Contributors to these movement syllabi did significant work drawing national and international parallels between targeted racial violence throughout the nation, which, in a way, allowed BBSC members the intellectual space to focus solely on Black Buffalo. 

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A region-specific syllabus affords readers the opportunity to engage deeply with the intricacies, complexities, and nuances of a location and to learn in depth about a place that more than 270,000 people call home.¹⁵ Syllabus engagers have the opportunity to truly experience a place, situating them within the historical, social, cultural, political, and economic environment of those directly impacted by racial violence. While parallels can be drawn between Black people’s experiences in Buffalo and other postindustrial cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Syracuse, Cleveland, and Baltimore, the way Black Buffalo processed the mass shooting offers a unique case study for examining community-led and state-supported initiatives of repair. 

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Racial Segregation and Buffalo’s Built Environment

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The BBSC’s selection of readings was focused on explaining to the general public and local residents why a white supremacist would target the Tops supermarket on the East Side. Members wanted to demonstrate, through a robust list of suggested readings, how Buffalo became and remains the sixth most segregated city in the United States.¹⁶ Coauthor J Coley, an urbanist and sociologist, led this task, having spent the past four years conducting ethnographic research in an East Side Buffalo neighborhood directly impacted by urban highway construction and other urban renewal projects throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Coley’s expertise shaped the syllabus’s extensive coverage of Buffalo’s “City Geography,” which includes over fifty readings. Engagers of the syllabus will develop a deeper understanding of the historical factors that shaped present-day inequities experienced by Black residents of Buffalo. 

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The #BuffaloSyllabus’ “Readings on City Geography” and “Migration Patterns” subsections work together to shed new light on how the city’s geography has been structured and maintained by racial and economic segregation. These readings feature works by Buffalo-based scholars like Robert Adelman, Anna Blatto, and Henry Louis Taylor Jr., who offer an extensive background of past planning decisions that have contributed to the marginalization of Black Buffalo. 

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To grasp the relationship between the city’s geography and the structural oppression Black people face in Buffalo, the BBSC argues that syllabus readers must consider the city’s "built environment," as defined by the National Institute of Health: “the physical space of the environment which is human-made or modifiable and where people live and carry out their daily activities.”¹⁷ In the case of Buffalo, historical migration patterns and discriminatory housing practices have impacted how Black people experience the city. An examination of these subthemes reveals the myriad of factors confining Black people to the East Side, a process that began with the Great Migration. 

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Prior to 1915, Buffalo’s Black population was less than 2,000 people.¹⁸ However, this number climbed to 18,000 by 1940 because of the Great Migration, a term that describes the movement of an estimated six million African Americans from the rural South to the Northeast, Midwest, and Western United States between the years of 1910 and 1970.¹⁹ Despite its small size in comparison to cities like Chicago and New York, Buffalo became a popular destination for Black migrants fleeing the Jim Crow South in search of more employment opportunities. Members of the BBSC are products of the Great Migration, as our parents and grandparents moved from states like Alabama and North Carolina and settled in the Upstate New York region. At the time, Buffalo was an industrial center and considered a major hub due to its location on the Erie Canal.²⁰

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The influx of Black Southerners to cities like Buffalo subsequently informed discriminatory housing and land use policies on the ground. In the late 1930s, with the assistance of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) created residential security maps that divided American city neighborhoods into four categories, with ‘A’ (green) being the most financially stable and ‘D’ (red) being the least financially stable.²¹ The syllabus highlights work by scholars like geographer Russell Weaver, who uses quantitative analysis to provide insight on how past planning decisions like those of the HOLC have contributed to what Weaver calls “geographies of discrimination” in Buffalo.²² The HOLC residential security maps are commonly referred to as redlining maps because of the red lines drawn by real estate brokers and banks on maps to determine which communities would be excluded from receiving home loans and home insurance.²³ City officials and urban planners would also use these redlining maps to make decisions on which neighborhoods would be targeted for urban highway construction and urban renewal projects—shaping the built environment for decades to come. As a result, the predominately Black East Side was redlined despite diversity in the socioeconomic status of neighborhoods. When Black residents sought out mortgage loans for homes located in redlined neighborhoods, they were denied under the guise that their loan would be too risky for the bank.²⁴

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In addition to facing institutional discrimination in housing policies, Black people were met with interpersonal discrimination by white families seeking to sell their homes.²⁵ The use of racially restrictive covenants, which were legally binding agreements prohibiting the sale of property to African Americans, was prevalent in Buffalo.²⁶ Realtors would even use shady practices like blockbusting to spark fear in white homeowners under the guise that the in-migration of Black residents would have a detrimental impact on home values. This commonly known practice of blockbusting allowed realtors to then rent the homes they acquired at exorbitant rates.²⁷

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The legacy of redlining is most evident in the substantial homeownership gap between white and Black people in Buffalo. In the United States, wealth is deeply tied to homeownership.²⁸ While Black Americans who migrated to Buffalo were met with overt and covert forms of discrimination when attempting to make homeownership a reality, white families were granted virtually unfettered access to progressive programs that made homeownership more accessible to them. A recent policy report released by the New York Office of the Attorney General found that Black home seekers continue to experience racial disparities at every level of the mortgage lending process. In Buffalo, whites are twice as likely to own a home than Black people.²⁹ Even in the absence of overt laws and practices excluding African Americans from owning property, there remains a substantial gap that can only be explained by the structural racism still ingrained into our systems.

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While the current iteration of the #BuffaloSyllabus incorporates a section on city geography, a subsection on Black Geographies is noticeably absent. A Black Geographies framework centers Blackness to explore questions of the social, political, racial, ecological, cultural, and economic processes and spatial patterns that constitute the experiences of Black life both nationally and globally.³⁰ As Hawthrone puts it, “Black Geographies is an invitation to consider how an analysis of space, place, and power can be fundamentally transformed by foregrounding questions of Blackness and racism.” The absence of a subsection on Black Geographies from the original publication of the #BuffaloSyllabus in 2022 was an oversight that the BBSC intends to correct as they update the syllabus with new materials. Buffalo has remained an understudied site of Black Geographies and Black resistance, even though it has long since been a site of both. 

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Buffalo’s Civil Rights/Black Power History 

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The shared ideological roots of the civil rights and Black Power movements shaped the Collective’s decision to combine both literatures under one subsection.³¹ Rather than portraying Black Power as the “negative counterpart to more righteous struggles for racial integration, social justice, and economic equality,” historian Peniel E. Joseph’s scholarship charts the overlapping histories of Black people employing different tactics to challenge racism, economic exploitation, racial violence, and sexism in the United States.³² Within the broader fields of Black Power Studies and “the long civil rights movement,” Buffalo and other Rust Belt cities remain on the margins.³³ The syllabus authors considered this oversight when selecting articles and books that capture Black people’s local resistance efforts after World War II. The Collective sought to restore Black Buffalo’s radical tradition by illuminating different case studies of grassroots activism and political mobilization. 

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The “Readings on Civil Rights/Black Power Movement” subsection is small but dynamic and will help readers glean a deeper understanding of how Black people in Buffalo cultivated a sense of racial pride, political empowerment, and cultural nationalism. Before her untimely death, University of Toronto doctoral candidate Rowena Ianthe Alfonso published two articles from her dissertation research on Black community organizations in Buffalo.³⁴ Hopefully, scholars will continue her brilliant research; more work is needed on civil rights and Black Power activism in Buffalo and in the Rust Belt region more broadly. Alfonso’s essays explore how Black people combatted Buffalo’s changing socioeconomic landscape amid deindustrialization. Issues like deteriorating neighborhoods, white flight, the rise of neoliberalism, residential segregation, high unemployment, poverty, and dwindling resources were national concerns, too. However, Black people in Rust Belt cities like Buffalo were severely impacted by large American corporations moving their businesses overseas because industrial manufacturing upheld these cities’ economies and provided crucial job opportunities. 

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As Alfonso explains, these conditions led some Black people in Buffalo to take their frustrations to the streets in the form of rioting—a common trend reflected across American urban cities throughout the 1960s. Historians like Elizabeth Hinton, Thomas Sugrue, Peter B. Levy, and Laura Warren Hill offer new frameworks for understanding these civil disturbances as political acts of insurgency and deliberate, organized rebellions against structural oppression.³⁵ In the case of Buffalo, economic disparity matched with over-policing of the predominately Black East Side led to over one thousand Black residents rebelling from June 26 to July 1, 1967, accumulating “approximately $250,000 worth of property damage done to stores and homes.”³⁶ Police brutality against two Black teenagers sparked the 1967 Buffalo insurgency, but Black residents were fed up with the racist police force that had murdered an unarmed Black youth a year prior. A nineteen-year-old Black youth told a local newspaper reporter, “We could sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ until doomsday and nobody would listen to us. Throw a brick and break a window and the whole world wants to know what’s wrong, as if they didn’t know.”³⁷ When asked about his views on rioting, another young protestor responded, “The United States are [sic] not going to give us our rights overnight. So, there is either going to be a whole lot more rioting or they are going to have to ship us out of the country … It will get the whitey to move faster, because he don’t [sic] want his businesses torn up.”³⁸ These young Black Buffalo residents’ quotes suggest they understood their actions as a part of a larger movement against systemic issues and discriminatory practices that marginalized poor, Black communities.

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Whereas some Black residents participated in demonstrations like rioting, others formed community organizations and institutions on the East Side to nurture Buffalo’s rich Black culture. Throughout the 1960s, Buffalo had active branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Urban League, American Civil Liberties Union, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).³⁹ These civil rights/Black Power groups launched several local initiatives geared toward political, educational, and housing reform. The changing radical political fervor of the late 1960s ushered in a new wave of grassroots activism in Buffalo. For example, in 1967, working class Black neighborhood leaders established an umbrella organization for the 154 block clubs throughout Buffalo, known as the Build, Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity (BUILD). BUILD’s headquarters were located in the heart of Buffalo’s East Side at 588 Jefferson Ave. One of BUILD’s most successful programs was establishing BUILD Academy, a school designed to address the needs of Black children. Unlike other schools in the Buffalo Public School District, BUILD Academy taught Black history. BUILD leaders argued, “One of the great quests of students today is for identity, a place in history. That is one of the most basic education requirements.”⁴⁰ According to sociologist Raymond Owen, “BUILD…managed to carve out a position of influence for itself among Buffalo’s Black citizens.”⁴¹

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The legacies of Black people’s efforts during the civil rights/Black Power era survived into the twenty-first century. Coauthor and BBSC cofounder Wilson, for example, had the fortunate opportunity to learn from Black teachers and principals when she attended BUILD Academy from first to eighth grade. She remembers the rich cultural events and robust after-school programming throughout the year, instilling a sense of pride, integrity, and belonging. Reflecting on her time in BUILD Academy, Wilson noted: “Being in a predominantly Black school, where the teachers, administrators, and staff looked like me, made me feel safe. I enjoyed school. Today, in most Buffalo Public schools, there are police officers, security guards, and metal detectors. I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for young students to enter a learning environment where they’re treated like criminals, unruly beings in need of control.”⁴² Histories on Buffalo rebellions and radical organizations like BUILD are just a glimpse into the many ways Black people challenged the unfair material conditions in Buffalo. Readers of the #BuffaloSyllabus will also find a robust list of museums and historical markers around the city for those interested in experiencing some of these culturally important places. Reading the histories of local resistance struggles is a necessary step in imagining a new society without white supremacist framing of law and order. 

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“Now is the time to renew the call for reparations” 

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The #BuffaloSyllabus section “Readings on ‘Towards an Abolitionist Future’” introduces readers to community-centered frameworks for addressing different forms of harm and violence at the interpersonal, local, and state levels. For example, it features former Buffalo mayoral candidate India Walton’s interview with Democracy Now!, an independent global news organization. Three days after the mass shooting, she discussed how Buffalo residents were processing the attack on and loss within their community. She explained, “We know that 80 percent of the population of the East Side of Buffalo are people of color, are Black people specifically, and they have one place to shop. And now they have zero places to shop, because we don’t know when our grocery store is going to open back up on the East Side.”⁴³ Walton drew connections between issues of systemic racism and structural inequality to help viewers understand how these were not separate from the discussion of white violence and networks of white supremacy. Because these problems predated the mass shooting and were exacerbated in the aftermath, as Walton points out, they require long-term plans and solutions. She ended her interview with an argument for how to combat and dismantle white supremacy in the United States more broadly: 

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“This is not an isolated incident. This is more than half a century of oppression, of systemic racism. And now is the time to renew the call for reparations. I think we need bold, reparative action on the forefront of all of these conversations. Prayers and thoughts are not enough…We need resources. We need money. We need the accessibility and availability of our own things, so we have our own grocery stores. And we need to be able to have the self-determination and autonomy to protect ourselves in our own community.”⁴⁴

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Immediately following the mass shooting, there were local calls for more police in the neighborhood and greater security measures before reopening the Tops supermarket. A police substation recently opened in Tops in the neighboring city of Niagara Falls.⁴⁵ The country’s justice system is ordered by crime and punishment, so it is understandable that survivors in the Fruit Belt and Cold Springs area, especially the loved ones of those murdered, initially called for more police and city protection. However, as Walton notes, increasing law enforcement in the already over-policed East Side Buffalo does not address community needs for greater access to grocery stores, reliable public transportation, adequate housing, and mental health and wellness centers. Inspired by the political work of Critical Resistance and INCITE!, the BBSC thus engaged with the prison abolition tradition of centering “the survival and care of all peoples.”⁴⁶ They designed this section with questions of repair and restoration in mind: what do the Fruit Belt and Cold Springs residents need to emotionally and materially recover from the harm caused by a racially motivated attack? 

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The “Towards an Abolitionist Future” section features various articles, news reports, and policy briefs that provide readers with tangible examples of the work being done in Buffalo to support food justice initiatives, criminal justice reform, and neighborhood revitalization initiatives spearheaded by community members. Organizations like the Black Love Resists in the Rust, founded in 2017, are actively challenging excessive policing and racist police practices in Buffalo by filing complaints with the New York State Attorney General’s Office of Civil Rights Bureau.⁴⁷ As Black Buffalo picked up the pieces of their community’s broken hearts, it was the work of community and mutual aid organizations like the African Heritage Food Cooperative (AHFC), Rooted in Love, Inc., Feed Buffalo, Colored Girls Bike Too, and the Black Monarchy that stepped in and provided Black residents with fresh produce and free transportation.⁴⁸ The AHFC and many others were the leading advocates for pouring more local and state resources into the city following the mass shooting. In 2016, in fact, the AHFC established itself as one of the few Black-owned food retail cooperatives and farms in Upstate New York organized “to serve food deserts and give ownership back to the community so YOU can dictate what foods are available in your neighborhoods!”⁴⁹

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Governor Kathy Hochul answered their calls and, to date, has pledged more than $60 million targeted investments and federal funding to support residents of East Side Buffalo.⁵⁰ Some of these resources target food insecurity by prioritizing access to more food options and free shuttles to neighboring areas that house other grocery stores. Governor Hochul invested $3 million of the funds to the AHFC to help with the organization’s efforts toward building a Black-owned grocery store on the East Side. According to the Guardian, the AHFC also received “$200,000 from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Healthy Food Financing Initiative to enhance their locations on the East Side and in Niagara Falls.”⁵¹ Other investment plans were geared toward supporting small businesses, piloting new workforce training programs, assisting homeowners, and launching door-to-door social services campaigns. For the one-year commemoration of the mass shooting, Governor Hochul announced an additional $4 million federal grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to provide greater access to mental health and trauma treatment in Buffalo.⁵² These federal and state funding initiatives are necessary for addressing some of the systemic issues Black residents experience in the city. 

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Yet these victories would not be possible without the work of everyday people who have worked tirelessly to provide immediate assistance to the Fruit Belt and Cold Springs communities. The rich grassroots organizing that emerged after the mass shooting reveals what is possible when community members pool their resources, collectively mourn, and imagine new realities from the most devastating moments in history. “Towards an Abolitionist Future” looks to these examples as models of how we as a society prioritize the struggles, desires, and aspirations of local communities. Furthermore, it reminds readers that the real power lies not within the attacker but within the people who survive and move forward. The BBSC used an abolitionist framework to galvanize readers to action and community outreach. By assembling an abolition section, they understood theory must be matched with practice. It is not enough to solely read the #BuffaloSyllabus. One must engage, and that medium and level of engagement varies from reader to reader. 

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Conclusion

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As New York State compiles a task force to examine the lasting impacts of slavery in the state, the BBSC hopes the #BuffaloSyllabus will serve as a valuable resource in learning about the racial inequities Black Americans experience in the state’s second-largest metropolitan region.⁵³ Rather than relying on state officials, BBSC members encourage local residents to develop their own task force to study how resources have materialized and changed the lived conditions of Black East Side residents following the mass shooting. Between the AHFC temporarily closing for a restructuring of leadership and the recent opening of the Urban Family Practice at Jefferson, Quest Diagnostics, and the Greater Buffalo United Accountable Healthcare Network,—all located in the Utica Plaza next to the Tops supermarket—more research is needed on who has benefited from these initiatives. The Collective’s call for a community-led investigation team does not come from a place of surveillance but from a spirit of accountability and transparency. When such a document comes to fruition, the BBSC will be among the first to share it with syllabus readers and engagers.

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Since going public, members have participated in several local community teach-ins, online forums, and radio interviews about the syllabus. Their community outreach has raised awareness of the magnitude of resources on Black Buffalo, leading some local educators to incorporate this work into their classrooms. In summer 2025, the BBSC partnered with the Justice for Geraldine Pointer and Martin Sostre campaign to establish a Freedom School, where facilitators used the syllabus to engage East Side youth (ages 16–24) in critical discussions on residential segregation, environmental racism, mass incarceration, and Buffalo’s abolitionist history. We expect the #BuffaloSyllabus to continue serving as an important educational resource throughout the city, the state, and the Rust Belt region more broadly. Teachers in the Buffalo Public School system—which serves approximately 31,000 students, most of whom are racialized as Black or African American—would especially benefit from these readings. As products of public schools ourselves, we experienced firsthand how Black history, if taught, is often only covered during February and regulated to topics revolving around slavery and the 1960s civil rights movement. Local histories of Black people are marginalized and too often obscured within the public school curriculum. 

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Embarking on the journey of maintaining an interminable resource has its challenges. The #BuffaloSyllabus has open submissions, so keeping track of contributions and newly published works on Black Buffalo can be laborious. Although BBSC members view this work as a labor of love and graciously volunteer their time, they find it difficult to sustain such regular upkeep of the website without financial support. The next phase of the #BuffaloSyllabus will involve acquiring grants to expand the BBSC’s community engagement and impact. With appropriate funds, the Collective plans to expand its membership, conduct oral histories of Black elders living on the East Side Buffalo, utilize the syllabus to develop lesson plans for the Buffalo Public School District, and host teach-ins with local organizers and community members. The BBSC is committed to overseeing the longevity of the #BuffaloSyllabus’s utility. We view the #BuffaloSyllabus as an example of digital activism and engaged scholarship, and we hope that it will empower people to also use technology to organize around issues that matter to them and their communities.

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The #BuffaloSyllabus is extensive, but it is far from complete. More work is needed on the histories of Black women’s and queer people’s experiences in Buffalo, the resistance struggles of Black Buffalo, and Black and Indigenous solidarity practices. When compiling the #BuffaloSyllabus, BBSC members also noticed very few studies that place Buffalo in conversation with other Western New York and Rust Belt cities. Scholarly work on Black people’s experiences in New York State outside of NYC and comparative studies on Black Americans in the Rust Belt region will substantially contribute to our understanding of racial violence, neoliberal urbanism, and deindustrialization. Above all, the BBSC hopes their actions inspire other locally focused syllabi that make national and international connections.​​