How We Got Here: Structural Racism and the Rise of Metropolitan Buffalo

The Buffalo metropolitan region is the fifth most segregated metropolis in the US according to a study by Professors John Logan and Brain J. Stults, This presentation by Professor Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. examines the interplay between black community development and the rise of Buffalo’s urban metropolis.

Today, Main Street is viewed as the symbolic racial dividing line that separates the city’s black and white communities. This was not always the case. Racial residential segregation is not in Buffalo’s urban DNA. Historically, blacks shared residential space with working class white ethnics in the City lower East Side. In this setting, blacks not only lived together with Germans, Irish, Polish, Italians and Russians, but also they often lived with them in the same boarding housing.  The break-up of these neighborhoods of shared space was not the product of individual dispositions, but rather they were driven by forging of a new vision of the city by elites and the creation of new urban metropolis, according to Professor Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., Department of Urban and Regional Studies, UB Center for Urban Studies, University at Buffalo.