It wasn’t until years after I left Buffalo, while researching what I called my “neo-slave novel,” Flight to Canada, that I discovered its rich history. The city’s first non-Indigenous occupant may have been a Black man named Joseph Hodge. Buffalo in the nineteenth century was a center of antislavery activity. In 1843 the city hosted a convention attended by stars of the movement: Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and the Buffalo resident William Wells Brown, whose 1853 novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter is still in print.
The biggest surprise of all was that A. J. Smitherman, the editor of The Empire Star, where I had worked as a teenager and again in 1962 after his death, was a hero of the 1921 Tulsa rebellion. It’s been called a riot, but it began as an uprising by armed Black men against the proposed lynching of a Black teenager, nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland, who had inadvertently bumped into a white teenage girl in an elevator. Though someone heard her scream, even she said that Rowland’s contact with her was accidental. As usual, it was the press, which continues to encourage anti-Black violence, that helped foment the riot. A mob egged on by a headline in The Tulsa Tribune—“Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator”—gathered to lynch Rowland. Smitherman, a crusading young editor of The Tulsa Star, led an armed resistance against the lynching. A fight started. Smitherman’s account, rendered in a poem, is quite different from popular representations of the fight that cast Blacks as passive victims. They fought back:
“Stand back men, there’ll be no lynching”
Black men cried, and not in fun
Bang! Bang! Bang! three quick shots followed,
And the battle had begun.
In the fusilade that followed,
Four white lynchers kissed the dust,
Many more fell badly wounded,
Victims of their hellish lust.
The armed Black men were outgunned, and the mob burned down Smitherman’s house and publishing company—along with thirty-five city blocks in the Greenwood District, the hub of Tulsa’s affluent Black community. Smitherman and his family fled to Boston, then to Buffalo. He was a fugitive like the thousands of fugitives from slavery who had passed through the town, Buffalo being the last stop before Canada, and freedom.
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.