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National Geographic : 2015 Apr
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44 national geographic • April 2015 Nationally renowned activists and preachers spoke in the handsome, sun-drenched sanctu- ary; fugitive slaves took shelter in the basement. Over the next century, a neighborhood of shops, restaurants, and clubs grew and flourished in the surrounding blocks. Today Buffalo is one of the poorest cities in the nation and among the most racially balkan- ized. The old church stands marooned in a bleak urban landscape. Its present-day pastor, Bishop Clarence Montgomery, tells me that only half of the city’s young African Americans finish high school. Despite a few glimmers of hope— such as a historic jazz club that now houses an impressive museum of Buffalo’s rich musical heritage—most of the surrounding blocks are dominated by vacant storefronts, public housing, and shotgun-style houses. I’m surprised when, just a few blocks north along Michigan Avenue, the urban decay gives way to another world: a strip of gleaming hospital buildings and offices, with more under construction nearby. It’s the city’s new medical corridor, a promising sign of economic recovery—except that almost ev- eryone I see, from the patients to the medical workers to the construction crews, is white. “Michigan Avenue is becoming our Mason- Dixon Line,” says George Arthur, a former city council president and longtime leader among local African Americans. “The medical corridor is bringing prosperity to the white community, but almost none of that reaches our black com- munity, which has one of the highest unemploy- ment rates in the country.” Indeed, Arthur tells me that when it comes to racial disparities, history seems to move backward as often as forward. “One of the first lawsuits in America to integrate public schools started in Buffalo in 1868,” he says. That ef- fort succeeded, but by the time Arthur entered politics nearly a century later, de facto segrega- tion had long since returned to the schools. He helped lead a successful movement to integrate them in the 1970s. “But now the schools have resegregated again, and we’re back in the same boat as in the ’60s,” he observes. “Both the 1960s and the 1860s, take your choice.” On its journey up the Hudson River, across the Empire State, and down the shores of Lake Erie, Lincoln’s funeral train rode the same rail corridors that Amtrak now uses. In fact, even as the journey unfolded, the railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt was at a critical moment in his struggle to forge a single corporate dominion out of antebellum America’s dozens of small local lines. In 1860s America the railroad was more than just a new technology—it was a kind of national cult. A few months before the end of the Civil War, the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Gar- rison waxed mystical about the revolution that trains had brought, fostering not just economic prosperity but also human connection on a vast scale: “So may the modes of communication
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