He wasn’t the first to do so…..
One would think this was a thing of the past…
They would be wrong….
The gunfire on Saturday afternoon forced the Masten Park neighborhood in East Buffalo to become the latest place — after El Paso; Christchurch, New Zealand; and Charleston, S.C. — to grapple with a mass killing driven by white supremacist ideology and the wave of attention that follows mass shootings.
But for many residents, the experience has prompted fury at what they see as the hypocrisy of a world that turns its eyes to their neighborhood only when the racism they’ve witnessed for years has become violent.
For many Black people living here, the effects of discrimination have been felt much longer — and the violence represents a uniquely harrowing moment in a lengthy history of trauma.
“The pain is in our DNA at this point,” said Earlene Patterson, 64, who bought milk and other food from the Tops grocery store days before the attack. “It’s in my great-grandfather, my father. It’s in me.”
The suspect in the massacre, Payton S. Gendron, 18, embraced white supremacist ideas in a 180-page document posted online before the attack and named his top goal as killing as many Black people as possible, the authorities said. Mr. Gendron pleaded not guilty on Saturday night.
In the document, he said he would travel hours to Buffalo from the Southern Tier of New York. And while he wrote that he hoped for the toll to be much larger, the damage inflicted was immense….
image…Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times