------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the April 12, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- BUFFALO CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS CALL CHEEKTOWAGA BUSINESS BOYCOTT By Leslie Feinberg "Boycott!" Buffalo civil rights leaders held an April 3 news conference to call on residents of all nationalities to boycott every business in nearby Cheektowaga in which Black shoppers have experienced racist treatment. Rev. Darius Pridgen said that his group, the Coalition Against Racial Injustice, was calling for mass informational picket lines outside Walden Galleria mall in Cheektowaga beginning April 7. Pridgen is pastor of True Bethel Baptist Church and a member of the Buffalo School Board. The Rev. William Gillison, pastor of Mount Olive Baptist Church, is also a coalition leader. Because of widespread evidence of the systematic targeting of African American drivers in Cheektowaga, Pridgen announced that picketers will meet in Buffalo and be bused to the location. Black civil rights leaders and organizations have increasingly condemned mall officials, Cheektowaga officials, cops and judges for racist profiling in recent months. A bodacious anti-racist protest inside the mall on March 31 helped lend momentum and solidarity to the call for the boycott by the African American community. Cheektowaga is virtually an apartheid town. It sits alongside Buffalo, a city that is one-third African American. Of the some 100,000 Cheektowaga residents, it's estimated only five percent are people of color. The town board, town supervisor, both judges and the police chief are all white. So is the entire 133-member police department. Buffalo lawyer Roland Cercone told the media that the coalition had amassed enough data about racist discrimination and harassment to warrant a class-action suit against the town. On Feb. 26, Black area residents packed a Cheektowaga Town Board meeting. One woman described how she was arrested while shopping for her mother, who is stricken with cancer. She was arrested for trying to use her mother's credit card. When she returned with cash, six security cops surrounded her while she cradled her infant in her arms. She was later banned from ever returning to the mall. "It's not just you," Buffalo resident Billy Howard told the Town Board. "It's Kenmore, Lancaster--all the outlying areas me and my people fear going to." The day of the Town Board meeting, the coalition set up two phone lines for residents to lodge complaints about racist abuse in Cheektowaga. By the next afternoon, more than 120 people had called with personal accounts--about half of which occurred at Walden Galleria mall. Hundreds more people have called since. On Feb. 27, Black motorists--a 70-year-old woman worker and a young college student--filed two suits against town police charging racist harassment. Cercone recounted some of these racist horror stories. 'JUSTICE FOR CYNTHIA WIGGINS!' Pridgen called for public hearing to allow many others to come forward about racist treatment at the hands of mall security, town police and judges. In December 1995, Cynthia Wiggins--a young Black mother--was a passenger on a city bus coming from the African American community in Buffalo that wasn't allowed to stop on mall property. She was killed trying to cross seven lanes of traffic on Walden Avenue to get to her job at the mall. Lawyers for her estate argued that the bus was barred from stopping at the mall to discourage inner-city residents from shopping there. Mall owner Pyramid Corp. settled the suit for $2.55 million in November 1999. Yet last year more than half of those arrested at the Galleria mall--54 percent--were African Americans (Buffalo New, March 4) "Now, years later, there has been absolutely no known move to change the atmosphere nor the fear that inner-city residents experience when shopping or driving through Cheektowaga," Pridgen told the Buffalo News on Feb. 27. Frank Mesiah, head of the Buffalo NAACP, said his group is also investigating a Feb. 3 incident in which mall security reportedly waded into a large crowd of youths, throwing out Black teenagers while bypassing young whites. The 20-member mall security force, dressed to look like state troopers, is beefed up with Cheektowaga cops. The Buffalo NAACP also filed a complaint against the town's two judges last year with the state Commission on Judicial Conduct. Mesiah said the complaint "documents the disparity of treatment" between Black and white defendants by Cheektowaga Town Justices Ronald Kmiotek and Thomas Kolbert. "To us, this is blatant racism," Messiah told the commission. While the Cheektowaga Black community is numerically very small, more than half those arrested for driving with a suspended registration last year and about 85 percent of those arrested for driving with a suspended or revoked license were Black. And Black motorists are not just getting stopped more frequently. Rod Watson wrote in the March 8 Buffalo News, "many say they're being hit with racial slurs or the classic 'What are you doing out here?'" Put on the spot for a response about the disproportionate traffic arrests, Erie County District Attorney Frank J. Clark admitted, "There aren't that many Black people, driving around in ... Cheektowaga any one time. It just doesn't make sense, unless you are indiscriminately checking plates of these people simply because they are Black." However Clark himself should be made to answer why in neighboring Buffalo, where Black people make up one-third of the population of the city, two-thirds of those arrested last year were African Americans. (March 4 Buffalo News) According to a report in the March 14 Buffalo News, Buffalo has the country's 8th-highest segregation index for African Americans. Systematic discrimination and police brutality inside of Buffalo act as a boot heel on the necks of the Black community. Apartheid conditions in the suburbs are meant to keep the outlying areas all white. Clearly it is time for people of all nationalities-- especially white residents--to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the call from the Black leadership for an economic boycott. And community control of the Buffalo and suburban police is long overdue. Jim Crow must go-- from Cheektowaga to Buffalo! - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. To subscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
