-------------------------
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 -

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