Michigan Street Baptist, Mary Talbert, the Niagara Movement and the Colored Musicians Club.
Michigan Street Baptist Church
Built in brick in 1845, Michigan Street Baptist Church is a historic African American church in Buffalo, a city just across the water from Canada. Its pastor Samuel H. Davis gave the welcoming address at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens of America, held in Buffalo. The church joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
The Niagara Movement
In July 1905 W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter and their fellow organizers called a conference in Buffalo to launch a new civil rights movement. At the last minute, to avoid disruption, they moved it across the border to the Erie Beach Hotel in Fort Erie, Ontario. Twenty-nine people attended, Du Bois became general secretary, and the Niagara Movement became the immediate forerunner of the NAACP.
Mary Burnett Talbert
Buffalo's Mary Burnett Talbert co-organized the Niagara Movement and in 1910 co-founded the city's first NAACP chapter. She led the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs from 1916 to 1920, directed the NAACP's national anti-lynching campaign in 1921 and in 1922 became the first woman to receive the NAACP's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal.
The Colored Musicians Club
Because the musicians' unions were segregated, Buffalo's Black players had their own, Local 533, and in 1935 its members founded the Colored Musicians Club. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Earl Hines all passed through. In 2018 the building joined the National Register of Historic Places, and a museum on the club's role in jazz and in Buffalo opened on its first floor.
Black Buffalo Today
On May 14, 2022, a gunman murdered ten Black people at the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue on the East Side. Two years later the 5/14 Honor Space, a sculpture and ten granite bollards, was dedicated on the corner of the store's lot. The East Side's churches, clubs and Black-owned restaurants, salons, shops and brands are part of everyday Buffalo.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Buffalo on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
Michigan Street Baptist Church. Photo: Reading Tom from Reading, UK, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons The Colored Musicians Club at Broadway and Michigan Avenue. Photo: Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons