The 350 miles of distance hardly dulled the pain.
Two days after a hate-filled, gun-wielding white teenager launched a heinous attack on Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, killing 10 people, New Yorkers shared in grief at a Harlem vigil for the victims on Monday night.
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“Nothing has changed,” Calvin Hunt, 60, said glumly as a light rain fell outside the Bethel Gospel Assembly Church. “We’ve still got white people that’s like that, man. In the deep South. Right here. Buffalo, New York. He drove miles to kill Black people.”
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The suspect in the shooting traveled some 200 miles from Conklin, in New York’s Southern Tier, up to Buffalo, according to authorities.
“Hatred is something that won’t stop,” Hunt, of Harlem, said.
Naiomi Israel, of the Lower East Side, said she traveled uptown to the vigil because she had been coping by not thinking about the attack and wanted to let her emotions out. She said the recent spate of crime had heightened her fears even before the Buffalo massacre.
“I don’t want to go back there,” Israel said. “I know that it’s there. It’s hard to think about.”
She said the attack brought back reminders an early period in the pandemic, when a series of police killings of Black Americans shocked the country. She said she instantly cried after hearing the news from Buffalo, before trying to hold them in.
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“I can just cry here and then hopefully get all the tears out here,” she added. “Sometimes it’s really hard to live in this country.”
The Rev. Oswald Denis of St. Athanasius Church in the South Bronx said he traveled to Harlem to join in a message that “we need to stop hatred.”
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“We want to bury hate,” Denis, 50, a member of the New York Hispanic Clergy Organization. “We want everyone to love one another.”
He said he was “heartbroken” as he held a poster that carried names of the victims, and he noted that a church deacon died in the Saturday shooting.
“It hits close to home,” he said. “Very close.”
Shamel Lawrence agreed.
“When you see violence happen anywhere in the world, it affects all of us,” Lawrence said. “I fear for my kids. I fear for everybody that’s traveling out in these streets.”
