Timeline: Racial crimes against Black people in the Buffalo region

In the wake of the massacre, in which an avowed white supremacist broadcast video of himself committing the crime, some Buffalo leaders took pains to point out that the suspected gunman came from hundreds of miles away to carry out the attack. He’s not from Buffalo, they said, and the racism that brought him here doesn’t represent this city.

But as reported in The Buffalo News, there has been decades of racist policies, incidents and sometimes outright violence that, according to some in the African American community, have shaped life for Black people in Erie and Niagara counties.

Data show hate crimes in the region are intermittent, though researchers caution that such incidents are widely underreported. The FBI, for one, found 176 hate crimes reported in Buffalo and Niagara Falls over the decade ending in 2019, according to statistics from the Anti-Defamation League that do not detail the incidents.

Below is a timeline of some racial crimes stretching back decades as compiled by Buffalo News reporters: 

1945 – Scores of homes occupied by Black residents on Buffalo’s lower West Side are vandalized.

1953 – Vandals throw bricks and smash the windows of the home of a Black couple on Humboldt Parkway.

1963 – A Black man purchases a home in Lovejoy; the home is vandalized by neighbors. Also that year, someone places a "For Sale" sign outside a Black woman's home in Lancaster. 

1966 – A wooden cross is set on fire outside the home of B. Franklin Bundy Jr. The Bundys were the first Black family to move to the Town of Tonawanda.

1968 – When a Black employee of Bethlehem Steel builds a home on Ludel Terrace in Lackawanna, he and his wife receive threatening phone calls and a death threat. Vandals break their windows and burn racist symbols into the home's brick.  

1980 – Joseph G. Christopher, a white man who came to be known as "the .22-Caliber Killer," terrorizes the Black community by committing a series of murders. He was convicted of three murders in Buffalo but claimed to have killed 13 Black men.

1987 – A Black family is burned out of their home on Military Road in Lewiston.

1997 – Racist graffiti is found in multiple locations on the University at Buffalo North Campus in Amherst.

2005 – Racial tensions flare in the Lovejoy and Seneca-Babcock neighborhoods. In Lovejoy, two white men are stabbed by Black men. In Seneca-Babcock, five white people beat a Black man.

2008 – A South Buffalo man admitted that he burned a wooden cross on the front lawn of a mixed-race family on South Park Avenue.

2011 – Two separate fires break out at the home of a Congolese refugee who moved to Buffalo’s Old First Ward. Prosecutors suspect a hate crime and a white man admits to his role in the arson-for-hire scheme. His lawyer denies race was a factor.

2012 – A group of white people throw chunks of brick, a hockey puck and a baseball bat through the door of an African American mother’s home on Benzinger Street in Lovejoy. Later, carloads of white people drive by shouting racial slurs.

2016 – North Tonawanda’s only Black firefighter is burned out of his home two days after getting a threatening letter filled with racist invective.

2018 – An African American family in North Buffalo has its minivan vandalized, the tires slashed and racist language written on the vehicle.

2021 – Vandals deface a Black Lives Matter sign at the Unitarian Universalist Church of East Aurora.

2022 – A white supremacist shooter kills 10 members of Buffalo’s Black community during racially inspired rampage at Tops Market on Jefferson Avenue.

2022 – A Town of Niagara man is charged with a hate crime after authorities say he spray-painted a stark racist threat on the fence of a Black neighbor. The man allegedly wrote "kill all" Blacks – he used a racial epithet in place of the word "Blacks" – in large letters on the fence of the mixed-race family. The graffiti was discovered two days after the mass shooting at Tops Markets in Buffalo.

Sources: The Buffalo News, Buffalo Courier-Express, Buffalo Criterion, East Aurora Advertiser, Housing Opportunities Made Equal