New York's Buffalo city has history of racism behind cloak of unity: New Yorker

NEW YORK, June 14 (Xinhua) -- Buffalo in U.S. state of New York is known as the City of Good Neighbors, nationally and internationally, but racial segregation is seriously noticeable here for decades, reported The New Yorker magazine last week.

With a large Black population constituting more than a third of the city, "there is severe residential segregation, which keeps Black and white residents living in different social, economic, and political realities," it said.

In 1993, a writer in the local daily, The Buffalo News, compared Main Street, the central dividing line of the city, to the Berlin Wall, "dividing rich from poor, the haves from the have-nots," according to the report.

Buffalo is one of the poorest cities in the country, and the hardship is not evenly shared. A disproportionate number of the have-nots live on the East Side, where over three-quarters of its African American residents live, said the report.

In 1990, Black unemployment stood at 18 percent and 38 percent of Blacks lived under the poverty line. There were more African Americans who had dropped out of high school than who held a college degree; and less than 35 percent of African Americans owned their own homes.

By last year, Black unemployment was 11 percent, some 35 percent of African Americans lived under the poverty line, and only 32 percent owned their homes, added the report.