A Buffalo pastor's dilemma: Healing a neighborhood split by grief and relief

Published May 18, 2022, after I spent a few days in Buffalo after the wake of the Tops Friendly Markets shooting.

BUFFALO — For hours on that incomprehensible Saturday, the Rev. Julian Cook and fellow members of the clergy had been outside the Tops Friendly Markets store that was the city's open wound, moving among an increasingly anguished crowd.

So?many questions . Some were asked through sobs, others borne on a rising tide of anger.

Why shoot people who were just grabbing a few things at the store —?charcoal and hot dogs, a birthday cake?

Why was the accused gunman treated so well by police after coming to Buffalo to hunt down Black people?

Why their store, their street, their city? Why Buffalo??

The reverend understood that the pain and anger was natural — necessary, even — so he and his fellow clergy went among the people, to listen, to counsel and to calm.

Cook was just one person, standing in a crowd filled with despair. But he carried with him a mission of hope.

He offered to the angry young people he met a vision of a future with promise, with healing: “I don't want to see you in jail. I want to see you become a lawyer. I want to see you become a pastor. I want to see you become a viable part of this community.

"And if you make this decision right now that you think will bring you temporary satisfaction," he told them, of choosing a path of immediate violence in response to violence, "you won't be able to realize that. So for the sake of the hopes and dreams that this community is holding for you, I don't want you to do that.”?

They listened. To Cook, and to their own hearts.?

The only violence at the Tops that day was?the unspeakable bloodshed ?police say was perpetrated by an 18-year-old with an assault rifle, bringing horror through the doors of the most ordinary of places.

But Cook's work that day had only begun.

Hours after the gunfire had ended, after an afternoon of questions sobbed and shouted, Cook and his fellow clergy were called to The Stanley Makowski Early Childhood Center on the corner of Best Street and Jefferson Avenue, about 1,500 feet from the store.

They were called to the school because it had become the place where people would learn the answer to the?most desperate of questions:

Dead or alive?

2 rooms: one with agony, the other relief

Back in the day, families would flock to see the Buffalo Bills play at War Memorial Stadium, directly across Jefferson Avenue from where the Makowski school stands, in what is now Johnnie B. Wiley Amateur Athletic Sports Pavilion. Families would arrive game-day ready, including those who could walk to there from Macedonia Baptist, Cook’s church, up on the hill.

But the families arriving at the school on Saturday approached in shock and sadness. Here, they would learn whether their worst fears had been realized.

Pastor Cook has seen a lot of pain in the past two years, burying too many members of his congregation lost to coronavirus, and young members lost to gang violence. Each loss has left its mark on the young pastor, who is just 31.

None of it compared to what he saw on Saturday.

“The most pain that I’ve ever dealt with as a clergy person,” he said without a moment’s doubt.

The families were guided to two rooms, where detectives spoke and clergy stood by to comfort and counsel. In one room, shock and relief at the news their loved ones were safe. In the other, shock and anguish at the news?their loved ones were dead .?

In both rooms, tears overflowed.

“That was the strange mix,” Cook said. “At one point, we're supporting families who are celebrating. And then in the very next room, we're supporting family members who are finding out the worst news.”

Cook and other clergy would stay till midnight, talking, listening, praying, crying, their voices becoming strained from use and emotion, hearts heavy as they headed home.

Tomorrow was Sunday, and there were sermons to write.

Tomorrow, Cook would be one person standing before a crowd, struggling to send his message of hope into a sea of grief. His text would be Psalm 137:4.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

It's a text well-known in Black churches, the go-to in times of tragedy the church has known too well. It's about the people of Israel striving to keep their faith while suffering. How to believe despite bondage.

A divided city, a divided time

Cook had invited all the city’s faith leaders to come to Macedonia Baptist for a service held 26 hours after the shooting. The governor and the county executive and the attorney general and the mayor attended, too — and altogether more white people, Cook said, than had ever been in the big brick church next to the massive Masten Avenue Armory.

But he was nervous as the 4 p.m. vigil approached on Sunday.

He would not bring his toddler to church that day.?

"Think about that," he said. "The?pastor?left his 20-month-old at home because I was afraid that, ‘Hey, there may be something that happens at this church because we're all here.’ There were threats, endless threats.”

The pastor knows he lives in a divided city in a?divided and violent time .

“When you say 'East Side,' you are almost always saying 'African-American,'” Cook said.

Other cities have seen their segregation lines fall, he said. His native Chicago had State Street. Boston had the old Roxbury dividing line. But Buffalo, the city of good neighbors, has managed to hold on to its dividing line.

“Main Street has been the racial dividing line in Buffalo," he said. "Many people on this side of the community do not go across Main Street even now. They don't cross Main Street.”

The East Side’s history is the stuff of lost legend, with Black-owned businesses lining Jefferson Avenue, the Black Main Street.

When the Bills played at the all-cement War Memorial at Jefferson and Dodge Street, lovingly nicknamed "The Rock Pile," the folks on Riley Street — where the Tops is today?— could hear the roars when their team scored.?(Their children learned best ways to sneak in to catch the action firsthand.)

Standing on the hill by the armory on a summer night and looking north in the '60s and '70s, Jefferson Avenue was lit up like Las Vegas, long-time residents recall, with grocery stores and restaurants, hat shops and haberdashers, barbershops and beauty salons.

Jefferson hummed.?

But policies and neglect have rendered the street inert and abandoned, its lots vacant, lawns overgrown, a faint shadow of what was, just as all that remains of War Memorial — after the Bills moved to the greener, cleaner pastures of suburban Orchard Park — are two stone facades and fading memories.

Measuring success, in multiple grocery stores

The Tops Friendly Markets store on Jefferson is a source of East Side pride, a store that was lobbied for for decades before it arrived about 20 years ago. It is?the only grocery store ?in a two-mile food-desert radius, a de facto community center where prescriptions are filled and Cook’s older congregants — who want nothing to do with paying bills online, thank you very much — can pay their utility bills at the store.

Saturday was the day after many East Side had received their SNAP benefits, making it a heavy shopping day.?

And security guard?Aaron Salter Jr. ?was always at the door, to compliment an outfit, or notice new sneakers, or offer a kind word to those arriving at Tops with worries on their faces. Pastor Cook remembers him commenting when he was wearing something particularly sharp.?

Salter would trade gunfire with the assailant — whose writings suggest he?chose the store ?because it was the heart of the Black community — and?died of his injuries.

That the gunman chose such a simple, everyday space to unleash his horror struck home immediately for Cook.

“If I cannot shop at the one grocery store that exists in my community, where in the world can I go, where white supremacy cannot interrupt my life, disrupt my life, change or end my life?” he wondered.

If you were to drive up Jefferson today — if there weren't still a huge police presence and crime-scene tape and a tent-city of media bivouacked across the street — you’d be forgiven for passing the Tops without giving it a second strip-mall glance. But the everydayness of that stretch of Jefferson belies its value to the East Side.?

One of the city’s leading black pediatricians has an office there. There’s a Quest Diagnostics center where Cook’s congregants get bloodwork done. And across the street is the Frank Merriweather Jr. Library, another East Side hub.

There will be funerals in the coming days and weeks. And there will be justifiable pain and grief, Cook said, that cannot be rushed.?But he added this: The work to repair the long-neglected East Side?must?be the next step, repair that he suggests should bear real fruit, within six months, and build on the resources and commitments promised from his pulpit by the governor and the mayor, and from the federal government the next day.?

Success means having more than one grocery store on the East Side, he said.?

“We should not be talking about shuttling people to a whole other area of the city to get their groceries,” he said. “The fact that we have to do that, we can't say: ‘Go up the street or around the corner.’ That cannot happen again."

Asked if it's reasonable to expect a grocery store within six months, his response is swift.

"Of course it is. But the question is: Will we make that investment? Will we make the demand? I would love to see a Wegmans in this community. Yes. Why not a Wegmans? Wegmans is everywhere else, and the headquarters of Wegmans is right up in Rochester."

The promised resources, he said, should take Buffalo beyond the immediate crisis and become an investment, in the economic and mental health of the East Side.

“It's not just a matter of keeping young people from doing violent things. No. How do we create a pathway for flourishing?" he asked. "How do we get these mental, emotional and spiritual health care supports to students and young people, sustainably, so that six months from now, that same young man who started counseling today can still receive free counseling because he's been dealing with a lifetime of trauma?”

The power of one

Cook isn’t kidding himself. He’s certain there will be another mass shooting. Buffalo wasn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. He worries about the toll the drumbeat of violence will take on young people on the East Side, that they’ll lose hope.

That’s why he was outside the Tops on Buffalo’s worst day, to hear the anger and recognize it, but also to channel it. And why he was at the school to help people in both rooms begin to process the shape of the new realities ahead. And why he gathered 100 or so faith and political leaders to his church.?

Because it doesn't take 100 people to ignite change, the pastor said. To spark hope and watch it grow, a light warding off the shadows of injustice, neglect and hate.

It just takes one.?

"I'm sorry, but I still believe in that because I'm a church pastor," he said. "That's why I preach to 100 people on a Sunday. If I don't believe in that, I need to pack up and go home.

"I still believe there is power in mobilizing one voice to go out into a community and make an impact. If one person can wreak that much destruction, why can't one person bring about that much hope?"