We Will Not Forget

Something For Sunday

By Rev. Julian Armand Cook

This article is an excerpt from a sermon titled “We Will Not Forget.” It was preached by The Rev. Julian Armand Cook, M.Div, Senior Pastor of the historic Macedonia Baptist Church of Buffalo, NY shortly after the shooting of 13 Black people at the Tops Friendly Grocery Market in the heart of Buffalo’s historic black community—the East Side. 

“Remember the former things of old…” — Isaiah 46:9 

​On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. When the announcement of Kennedy’s assassination was made, it is said that Coretta Scott King found Martin Luther King, Jr. watching the news coverage and shaking his head. 

Finally, after silence, Dr. King said, “This is a ten-day nation. In ten days, this won’t even be a story. We’ll move on to something else.” From the looks of things in Buffalo, it appears that Dr. King was right. Was he prophetic? Have things not changed? 

​There is an impulse in our nation—a drive deep within our collective consciousness—to forget. We celebrate the strength of “moving on.” We praise broken people for somehow “getting back to business as usual.”  

The other day I listened teary-eyed to a Black woman who is a survivor of the Tops massacre; she is a Tops employee. She described how she felt rushed back to work before she was ready. 

I’ve heard people say that we just need to “move on” to the next thing because we are strong. Someone even invented a phrase to describe our community’s superpower—”Buffalo Strong.” But the truest test of any community’s strength is not its ability to forget; our moral fortitude is in our commitment to remember. To remember uncomfortable things. To remember and retell the truth of our own violence—both the violence we’ve experienced and perpetrated. To remember ourselves and to face ourselves. To decide that long after the cameras are gone, after this bloodshed is no longer a headline, and when it is out-of-date to talk about anti-Black violence, we will not forget. 

It is a part of America’s DNA to move on. The Chicago Massacre of 1919 happened, and we moved on. The Tulsa Massacre of 1921, the Rosewood Massacre of 1923, the Mother Emmanuel massacre, the Tree of Life Synagogue Massacre, the Sikh Temple massacre, the Charlottesville massacre, the Gold Spa massacre, Sandy Hook and the Pulse Night Club all happened, and we moved on. We face the perpetual temptation to discard remembering to pursue the veneer of comfort and normalcy. 

​That’s what the Prophet Isaiah was writing about in Isaiah 46. God’s people had been captured by Babylon. Instead of remembering and resisting their oppressors, Isaiah warns that they have done what is tempting to do today: they have taken up the gods of their oppressors. They said, “Since we can’t beat our oppressors, we’ll join them and just move on.” They betrayed themselves because they refused to remember:

We too have little gods that we run to in the name of just moving on… 

The god of comfort at the high cost of truth

The god of apathy

The god of approval at any price

The gods of greed 

The god of going along to get along

There is a nagging enticement to bow before gods who not only do not know us but who do not have our best interests at heart. People in high places who are not working for our good, but for our destruction. For this reason, at the dawn of the 20th century, during the age of the Black Renaissance and the emergence of what philosopher Alain Locke called the “New Negro,” the poet James Weldon Johnson wrote a love song to our people:

Be careful, some want us to forget because they will profit from our forgetting. Yes, don’t ever forget Saturday, May 14, 2022, but also don’t forget what the East Side of Buffalo looked like before May 14th. Don’t forget the racialized food apartheid that relegated our community to one grocery store and made a white supremacist attack as easy as a Google search. Don’t forget that white supremacy was alive and well in Buffalo before May 14th. Peyton Gendron may have traveled from hours away on a hate-filled mission, but he did not import a new anti-Blackness to the “city of good neighbors.”

​We must never forget Celestine Chaney, Katherine Massey, Pearl Young, Heyward Patterson, Roberta Drury, Margus Morrison, Ruth Whitfield, Aaron Salter, Andre Mackneil, Geraldine Talley and those who by some strange miracle escaped with their lives. Long after their names stop appearing in the headlines, we must declare that we will never forget. 

​Our culture pushes us to move on to the next story. You can see it in our nation’s resistance to nuance. You can see it in our refusal to hold together after what happened in Uvalde, Oklahoma City and Buffalo. Instead, it has felt like we must choose which story deserves the forefront.  

These are not dueling narratives. This is not some oppression Olympics where we compete for who has it worse. One faction says that this is about anti-Blackness while another says it is primarily about guns. You cannot substantively protect Black people from anti-Black violence without recognizing that the AR-15 is the weapon of choice for white supremacist gunmen. 

The lynching tree used to be white supremacists’ weapon of choice for killing Black people, now it’s the AR-15. Until we take these weapons of war out of the hands of these people, our nation is arming white supremacists for their next attack. As Rev. William Barber says, “The shooter has been apprehended, but the killer is still on the loose.” 

​If we want to make sustainable change, we must focus our attention. It’s not going to happen all at once, so we can’t give up. We get tired sometimes, but we ask God for a fresh filling of the Holy Ghost and keep going. Our ancestors sang, “Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” Join together with siblings who are not only serious about our struggle but dedicated to our flourishing. 

​For ten days in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, I took a walk down Jefferson Avenue where the now infamous Tops Market is located. The street was blocked; no cars allowed. People walked freely, building a sacred community at a site of terror. 

I was moved by the creative genius of Black people in reclaiming that space. Adults were weeping and children were playing. Sworn enemies greeted one another with the dignity that we all deserve as children of God. For a moment, Black men resisted the bonds of toxic masculinity and wept because they were broken. Elders received medicine that they couldn’t afford before. Hot food was served to people who hadn’t had a meal in awhile. 

On one corner, saints of God converted a street into a sanctuary. The other corner had been turned into a juke joint and folks were celebrating the divinity of gyrating Black flesh. And for a moment I saw a glimpse of that new Jerusalem. A place where death was swallowed up by life. A place where streets once marked by disinvestment were paved with resources. A place where we beat our swords and our AR-15s into instruments of peace. I said to myself, “My God, we’ve done it. We can create it, but are we willing to pay the price to keep it? We can imagine it, but can we actualize it? We can make it a one-day event, but can we make it a way of life?” 

My God answered me and said, “That’s up to you.” That’s up to us. What type of world could we be if we didn’t wait for somebody to build it? What type of world could we be if we didn’t wait for God to send it? What if we took the hands God gave us, answered our own prayers, and built it ourselves?

Cover Photo: Mourners hold hands near a Tops Grocery store in Buffalo, New York, on May 15, 2022. – Grieving residents from the US city of Buffalo held vigils Sunday after a white gunman who officials have deemed “pure evil” shot dead 10 people at a grocery store in a racially-motivated rampage.(Photo by USMAN KHAN/AFP via Getty Images)