Buffalo Mayor to Appear on NNPA Live Morning Show

Mayor Byron Brown, the first African American mayor and the longest-serving mayor in Buffalo’s history, plans to appear on the National Newspaper Publishers Association’s live daily news program, “Let It Be Known,” at 7:30 a.m. Friday, May 20.

Mayor Brown

Brown, who has served as mayor since 2006, called Buffalo a resilient community.

“This community has been through a lot. But, before the pandemic, Buffalo has been going through a renaissance,” Brown stated during a recent national television appearance.

“We’re a mid-sized American city of over 278,000 people. And this part of the city, 80 percent African American but diverse with people of many different backgrounds living in this community, we are certainly saddened that someone drove from hundreds of miles away, someone not from this community that did not know this community that came here to take as many Black lives as possible, who did this in a willful, premeditated fashion, planning this,” Brown remarked.

Payton Gendron, the self-avowed white supremacist, entered the Tops Supermarket on May 14 and shot 13 people, killing 10. Among the dead, Katherine Eleanor Massey, a longtime freelance writer for The Challenger Community News in Buffalo.

The publication is among the 230-plus African American-owned newspapers and media companies that comprise the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA).

The NNPA represents the Black Press of America.

Gendron’s purported 180-page manifesto revealed troubling perceptions he possessed.

He complained of the dwindling size of the white population and included his fears of ethnic and cultural replacement of white people.

Gendron described himself as a fascist, a white supremacist, and an anti-Semite.

“We are a strong community, and we will keep moving forward,” Brown asserted.

“This is a community that is experiencing development. People have been hoping and waiting for investment and growth, and opportunity.”

He concluded:

“We are beginning to see that in this community, in all parts of the city, and we won’t let that progress stop. We won’t let hateful ideology stop the progress that we are seeing and experiencing in the city of Buffalo.”