103 YearsYoung!

LEGACY! BUFFALO ENTREPRENEUR CELEBRATES 103RD BIRTHDAY!

Thomas C. Brown, a long time Buffalo resident and entrepreneur, celebrated his 103rd birthday on May 27th! Mr. Thomas is pictured above surrounded by family and loved ones. For many years he owned and operated several businesses on the East Side including Brownie’s Bar, Liquor Store, Furniture Store and laundromat. During his birthday celebration he was awarded a plaque from the Masons, which he has been a member since 1948. His son Rick also shared a photo of his dad during his time as a soldier during World War II (inset) . Recalled Rick: “He and the other Black soldiers turned over the base bus after having the all white bus pass them by too many times. They only wanted to get off the base just like the white soldiers but racism and discrimination followed them to Europe and they had enough!!" Birthday Blessings Mr. Brown!

I recall Smitherman as a sad, contemplative man who spent time in his office in a rundown building on Broadway near Saint Mary’s Church. He wore a Stetson hat and a brown overcoat and owned a beat-up car. He struggled to publish his newspaper. Sometimes when we drove back from the suburban printing plant he’d fall asleep at the wheel. Smitherman’s obituary in The Buffalo News noted that he “struggled against adversity.” They had that right. A time came when Smitherman couldn’t pay me. He asked me to make the sacrifice. If I’d known that he was an important historical figure, I would have stayed on. I should have taken a hint from the number of notable citizens who visited him, including Reverend J. Edward Nash, pastor of the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church, which had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. But I knew little about Black history and Smitherman’s place in it, because our school’s mission was to convert us into facsimile Anglos. I quit.

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Black Americans have noticed that white backlash occurs whenever they are making progress. At a discussion sponsored by the Buffalo Urban League on December 14, 1961, I debated the white politician James Griffin, who was councilman-at-large-elect in a largely Black district. I said that he didn’t understand the Black experience and that a Black councilman should have been elected. He replied that as long as he could create jobs, race didn’t matter. Yet when he became mayor it was his ethnic group, Irish-Americans, to whom he gave the choice jobs and appointments. I was twenty-three at the time, but from his comments that night, I figured out the direction he was headed. In the 1970s, when Black politicians such as Delmar Mitchell, George K. Arthur, and Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve were on the rise, Griffin saw an opportunity and played to the fears of the white working class. He was elected mayor in 1977, defeating Eve, the Democratic nominee. He went on to serve four terms, the next sixteen years. “He by and large gave the back of his hand to the black community,” a white Buffalo resident told the scholar Diana Dillaway, “and didn’t depend upon them for votes.”

In her scathing study Power Failure: Politics, Patronage, and the Economic Future of Buffalo, New York (2006), Dillaway describes blunder after blunder wrought by the city’s white leadership, including the “Group of Eighteen” that emerged in the 1970s from the city’s new business elite. That group’s “master plan” for the city, she shows, failed to “include a plan for neighborhood development.” By the 1990s the Group of Eighteen had been replaced by more recent arrivals. Byron Brown, who came from Queens, was sworn in for the first of his four mayoral terms in 2006. In 2008 The Buffalo News reported that he was “refusing to comment on his Police Department’s decision to withhold basic crime information from the public.”