It's a typical weeknight in the Burch home in Amherst. Mom has just rushed in from a busy day at work. Dad is in the kitchen while 10-year-old Bridget plays with her Game Boy in the dining room.
"Put that game away," Bridget's father scolds, then directs the girl into the family room.
"But Da-a-a-addy-y-y-y," Bridget pleads. Eventually she does as she is told.
A few miles east, still also in Amherst, the Masseys settle in for the evening, too. And farther south -- in nearby Cheektowaga -- so do the Jenkinses and the Huffs.
There is nothing exceptional going on in any of these households, except that these are African-American families in the suburbs.
The two rarely are synonymous in the Buffalo area.
Yet these families and others like them are part of a small but steadily growing African-American population trickling ever so slowly into Buffalo's suburbs -- defying the black-white dichotomy that makes this the eighth-most-segregated metropolitan area in the United States.
| Continue "Suburbs in black and white," Deidre Williams and Harold McNeil's Buffalo News article, the first in a three-part series on demographic shifts in Erie County, N.Y.'s suburbs
Also: "'The romance of having black folks who are very influential has to pass away'"
posted in articles on March 15, 2004 2:58 AM | t (1)
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