On December 23, 2016 the Buffalo free newspaper Artvoice published an article where several local activists and community leaders answered a series of questions about what they want for the region in 2017. Carl Paladino, a businessman, Trump lackey and member of the Buffalo city school board, was one of the people interviewed for the article. His answer to the question about what he would most like to see happen in 2017 included a wish that President Barack Obama were to die from mad cow disease. His response to the question about what he would like to see go away in 2017 was a transphobic and racist remark about First Lady Michelle Obama.
Paladino made national news for these racist and anti-trans remarks. The Buffalo school board called for his resignation calling his statements, “unambiguously racist, morally repugnant, flagrantly disrespectful, inflammatory and inexcusable.” They also said it reflected negatively on “the Buffalo Board of Education, the City of Buffalo and its leadership and its citizens, the State of New York, and every decent human being in America and abroad who has been shocked and offended by his words.”
It certainly shocked residents of Buffalo whose children attend Buffalo City Schools to realize that their children are in Paladino’s charge. How can a racist like Paladino have the interests of Buffalo City School District students at heart when the student body in BCSD is 51 percent Black?
It is concerning to know that according to the NY State Education Department, BCSD did not reach Average Yearly Progress criterion for graduation rates of Black students in 2015. Additionally, an article published in the Buffalo News in 2014 reported that school segregation had again reached the level it was at in the early 1970s. Also in 2014, NY State was declared the most segregated state in the nation by the Civil Rights Project.
Outraged Buffalo residents resolved to do something about this. On Jan. 12, South Buffalo residents rallied at Cazenovia Park and marched to Paladino’s house to speak truth to power. The original call to action read in part: “To Carl Paladino, we have a message for you. What you’re doing? No. Not in OUR South Buffalo.”
Buffalo residents did not stop there in their opposition to Paladino, Trump and the racist agenda of the radical right. On January 20, Inauguration Day, a rally and march of about 200 people was held in downtown Buffalo in solidarity with actions in Washington, D.C., to tell the Trump regime and the world that the people of Buffalo are not with Paladino and Trump, but with LGBTQ folks, Black folks, Latino folks, women, Muslims, immigrants, workers and students. On January 20 a clear message was sent that the people of Buffalo will not back down, but will ramp up the resistance to the Trump agenda and to the bigotry of racist/fascist elements in America. The chant that closed the march was an inspiring, resounding and audacious repetition of “I believe that we will win!”
On Saturday, January 21, a march was also held in Buffalo in solidarity with the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., that also went through downtown Buffalo making clear that women who are under attack by the sexual predator Trump are not afraid to stand up to his chauvinistic foulness and through solidarity with other oppressed groups they will not stop fighting until they are successful in stopping Trump’s reactionary, regressive policies.
