Best of WNY: Community Activism
To Him, Nothing Is a Done Deal
Read More Community Activism StoriesBy Anna Geronimo Hausmann
 |
In fact, in some ways it wasn’t until Rose had developed roots in his Parkside neighborhood and come to love Buffalo that he was ripe for activism. Not that he doesn’t get at least a portion of it from genetics. Rose grew up the nephew of communists in the McCarthy era in a small city in Tennessee, and his family were witnesses to blacklisting. His father became a believer in the hard facts of science. “My father was a physicist and all he was interested in was physics,” Rose says. “When I left home for college, the last thing my father said to me was ‘don’t join the socialists,’ and I never did. I did join SDS, though.”
But Rose locates his current activism in his growing attachment to his house and neighborhood: “Like so many others of my generation, I had been an activist in the Vietnam war, but for me that was compartmentalized in time.” Shortly afterward, Rose says he became enmeshed in the stuff of everyday life, “I got married, had a family, a job, a divorce.”
It wasn’t until after settling in Parkside and beginning to care deeply for that neighborhood that larger, community issues rose to the fore. “I had this beautiful old house, and as I researched it I also found out a lot about the neighborhood.”
Rose began to get very invested in his community. “I joined the board of the Parkside Association in 1992 or 93 and was active on the Crime Prevention Committee.” He also represented Parkside on the Citizens Advisory Group to the police commissioner, a position he still holds today.
But it was in 1997 when his own community was threatened that Rose’s activism led to a transformation that has had ripple effects throughout Western New York to this day. “It was in 1997 that the zoo issue arose,” he recalls.
Then zoo director Thomas Garlock and the zoo board announced that the zoo planned to relocate downtown on the Buffalo River. Rose notes that although there were certainly strong feelings that arose in the Parkside community against the idea of the zoo moving, the issue quickly became more than a neighborhood issue: “It quickly became seen as an issue that affected the whole community, not just the neighborhood.”
Rose says the zoo campaign was a “classic case of people fighting city hall successfully. I’d see people when I was out walking my dog, and we’d start talking, total strangers, and so often the person would rant and rave and end up saying ‘it’s a done deal.’ But I came to see that there was no such thing as a done deal.” Rose says that the campaign was “really a rough democracy in the sense that the desires of ordinary people were felt in the decision making process and ultimately carried the day.”
Rose, like so many other local activists, cites the zoo campaign as the template for subsequent local grassroots campaigns. Not just a template, but a watershed event that—like that seminal moment in The Wizard of Oz, when Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal that the power behind the Great Wizard is a paunchy, sweaty, balding little old guy—transformed regular people’s sense of where power lies in our community.
“After the zoo issue came the Peace Bridge issue, Children’s Hospital, the Erie Canal issue,” Rose recalls. “In some of these issues it wasn’t only the substance of the decision but the legitimacy of the process. Ordinary citizens were able to seize control of the agenda and change our local history.”
Which is the reason why people felt empowered to rise up in the most recent local grassroots campaign—the anti-casino gambling effort. Rose got involved in this cause early on, when the efforts were being carried on largely by members of the religious community, called the Western New York coalition Against Legalized Gambling, headed by Reverend Dr. G. Stanford Bratton, the co-Executive Director of the Network of Religious Communities. Rose became aware of the group’s activities mostly because Bratton is his neighbor and they would meet out walking in the neighborhood; Bratton also serves with Rose on the Citizen Advisory Group.
But while this group represented citizens, it wasn’t really a venue of individual participation so Rose suggested the formation of a more broad-based grassroots group. Bratton facilitated the formation of Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County. Rose, due to his experience on the zoo campaign, was drafted as “convener” and eventually as co-chair of CACGEC.
Rose notes that although the casino issue was initially championed by the religious community, “people have different motivations and reasons for getting involved.” And he quickly found that the idea of a casino has many facets to it.
“It’s changed the way I see even the lottery, or any state-sponsored gambling. This issue has made me angry because it represents a bankruptcy of spirit. The government is so empty of vision that the only way it can see to finance itself is through the old ‘something for nothing.’ The state is supposed to protect its citizens—no matter your political beliefs, that’s been part of the government’s job for centuries. But here we have the spectacle of the state as vulture. To me, it’s immoral for a state or city to finance itself by preying upon its weakest and most vulnerable citizens.”
Rose says he’s encouraged by the polls that have been published in the last several months in The Buffalo News that found a majority of residents, in the county as well as in the city, opposed to a casino in the city. Rose notes that “the fact that there’s been no real public debate or referendum, despite strong evidence of public opposition, shouldn’t be lost in the next election.”
In terms of politicians, Rose says, “I can see politicians asserting their own positions or beliefs, or deferring to popular will, but not deferring to the powerful people in town. There’s entirely too much of that in the Buffalo area.”
But Rose is optimistic about not only the anti-casino campaign, but for the future of grassroots campaigns locally in general. “People here have learned that they don’t have to just accept things as they are.”
Rose says that while people in Buffalo certainly have the right to be skeptical, he doesn’t see them this way. “I give the people of Buffalo a lot of credit for fighting and putting their foot down.” Rose says grassroots activism is hard, “the natural tendency of people who haven’t been active is to come to a meeting and say ‘you know what you should do,’ then they rattle off a list of ideas. But what any organization needs is people to do things. If you’re going to make social change, someone needs to lick the envelopes.”
Rose points to activist models like Rosa Gibson, who has been active for years, and the late Donald Dade, who was Director of CRUCIAL human services agency and a life-long community activist. Rose cites Dade as a true inspiration, recalling “the thing about Donald was his unique combination of brilliance and humility. He had been everywhere, done everything, and worked with virtually everybody one could work with, and yet he would keep his counsel until he had something important to say. I wish I could learn from that....Really, you should do a piece about him!”
Anna Geronimo Hausmann is associate editor of Buffalo Spree.
Back to the Table of Contents
Back to Top