Garnell Whitfield

Garnell Whitfield’s mother, Ruth, was killed by a white supremacist in a mass shooting at the Tops grocery market in Buffalo, NY. In the wake of the shooting, Garnell has become a vocal advocate against white supremacy and domestic terrorism. He also started Pursuit of tRuth, a non-profit, to honor his mother by educating future teachers about Africana history in an effort to disseminate historically and culturally accurate information to their students.

Please consider making a donation to support Garnell’s non-profit organization.

Please read below for Garnell Whitfield’s Aftermath in his own words.

Buffalo is a very difficult place. And historically, it always has been. I mean, if you understand anything about what happened here, he targeted that market, he came and scouted it out because it's a food desert. Because he knew that on any given day there would be a congregation of folk there because they had nowhere else to shop in that community. So all of those things that caused our community to be segregated, ostracized, under-resourced, undervalued in the first place, contributed to it being vulnerable and made a target. That's why I say you can't talk about what happened on May 14th without talking about this entire issue. But I'm of the mind that if we're going to deal with this, we have to go to the root cause of it. And yes, he did what he did. That was an event that happened, but it happened because of all of these other preexisting conditions.

The event itself was different [from other communities]. It was racially motivated. I use trees as an analogy: In Buffalo, they took out mature trees, which provided sustenance care and protection for those under the trees. They were well connected. They had very deep roots in our community and in our families, and in our lives. That's what happened in Buffalo. I don't think people understand how significant an event that was for this community and for us as people who lost loved ones.

They took out pillars of our community, and it's impossible to replace them. Some of the people here who got murdered on 5/14 were the breadwinner for their households. Were the leaseholders for the places where people lived, people lost their homes. People had to move, people had to, in the midst of all of this stuff, people lost their income, they lost…whatever little security they had, they lost it. We're talking about people who lost whatever you consider normal, when you take that from people, that's a big deal.

My mother was the matriarch of our family. She was the glue in our family. She meant everything. 

She suffered for her whole life. Not only because she was black on Grand Island, but by being dark-skinned as a black person. Even within our own culture, there are some prejudices. She had to fight her whole damn life– and for somebody to come and do this to her, for her to lose her life the way she did, it’s a big deal.

She fought against this her whole life. She was a strong advocate for the least of those, but she died at the hands of a white supremacist. You’re not going to find that in your numbers, in your statistics, but this is stuff that we live with every day. These stories are more than stories. These are our lives we're talking about. 

Ruth Whitfield

Photos courtesy of the Whitfields

My mom was a dark-skinned lady. She grew up in Mississippi. She had a tough life. Her mom and dad didn't make it. They got divorced. She moved to Grand Island, New York with her mother and her stepfather and her family. Grand Island, New York sits between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. It's literally an island. Her family were some of the first black settlers on Grand Island. She didn't get to go to school because she had to take care of her siblings. She was the smartest, proudest person I ever met. That's who my mom was. 

People used to call us the Cleavers, The Brady Bunch. That's the family we had. We had a traditional Mom, Dad, which was rare in our community, where 70% of children come from single-parent homes. We were like this model family. We've always been very close and supportive of each other. And we find out in her absence now that we're different. We have differences that we never knew about. That we never really took into consideration. It's been difficult, it's been difficult, our interpersonal relationships have all been affected.

So my goal is to try to keep our family together. My mom had four kids and then there’s this whole other tier of people in her family who are grieving, who miss their grandmother, who have been traumatized. And I'm very concerned about them. So you have all of these different things happening within the family on top of everything else. Quite frankly, probably the biggest cross I carry right now is, will my family be ok? 

Garnell’s Life Today

I'm here, obviously. I'm stressed, I'm tired. I haven't had a chance to grieve yet. We're 14 months out now, and I don't know when that'll ever actually happen. So, I'm, I'm OK. But I'm not where I would like to be and don't know if I'll ever be there quite frankly. I'm just kinda, I'm kind of like… I use this analogy:

I had 34 years in the fire service and some years in homeland security post that. But as a fireman, you go into hostile environments, you put your mask on and you use all your senses to navigate because you can't see, you have no familiarity with the space. You kind of feel around in the dark, and that's how I feel right now. I’m feeling around in the dark just trying to find my way. 

I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. I was retired. I had a plan for my life, and it's just all going to hell in a handbasket, quite frankly. And so, out of necessity, my family and I decided early on to speak up and to speak out and to not go quietly into the night and to advocate for justice. Not only for my Mother but for all of those who have been impacted, not just by gun violence, but by all of the things that made us vulnerable as a community, which is much larger than the gun violence piece. 

I'm just trying to find my way. I don't know what I should or shouldn't be doing. I know other people have formed organizations. You've got Aftermath, you've got March Fourth, you've got all of these different things that have sprung up in different communities around the country, and I've been in company with all of these people. That's not happened here in Buffalo. Buffalo is very different from a lot of other places in terms of what happened here.

There's such a stark difference in what happened in [Highland Park] and what happened here. If you take March Fourth, maybe two months after that happened, they were walking the halls of Congress. They had a national organization that they put together. They're hitting the ground running, inviting me, thank God, to lobby and work with them. I'm thankful for that. But none of that has happened in Buffalo, and it probably never will because this community is much different in terms of its resources and connections. In Highland Park, it woke up a sleeping monster. They mobilized and they rallied around that, and that’s great. But here, 5/14 was heaped upon already pre-existing vulnerabilities and issues that made it much more complicated, much more difficult, and this exacerbated those issues.

What I want people to know is that this did not start nor will it end with 5/14. This country was founded on racism, was founded on bigotry. It's woven into the fabric of this country, the laws, the policies. Our society has been built on a foundation of discrimination and racism, a caste system, whatever you want to call it. And that's the fact that we have to come to grips with, we have to deal with that.

Obviously, I support sensible gun legislation. I support mental health work. I support all of those kinds of things, but they're all outgrowths of a much more insidious deeper problem which is white supremacy, white nationalism. Unless that gets dealt with, it's just like any other weed that you cut off: It's going to keep popping up.

And so all of those things are part of this issue. What have I found in traveling the country and working with the different [mass shooting communities]? That's what I found. At the end of the day, I think I find it very hard to focus on guns because that's only part of, that's a small part of what we're talking about here.

You're dealing with people who were less than already, who have already been traumatized just by being born black. I'm 66 years old and I've been treated differently every day of my life. Every day. And I've been wonderfully blessed. 

I ran the fire department in Buffalo. I was the fire commissioner for the city of Buffalo. I worked for Governor Cuomo and I was Assistant Commissioner, one of five commissioners, for Homeland Security for the State of New York. I introduced President Biden for the Safe Act when he signed it. I was at the White House two weeks ago for the Juneteenth celebration. So, I mean, I know people, I've been around people, I've had exposure, but at the same time, I'm black in America and I’ve got stories. 

I was picked up, I was arrested, I've been arrested 3-4 times. I was accused of armed robbery. The only way I got off from being convicted for armed robbery was while we were waiting on trial, they moved this guy [plaintiff] to another gas station, someone robbed him again and blew his brains out. So he was unavailable to testify against me at my trial. But I was never exonerated.

So onto the New York State trooper exam, I go to Albany, I'm going to be a state trooper, right? No, I'm not because my case was never adjudicated. I was never proven innocent. The state troopers wouldn't take me. Those are the kinds of things that have happened. 

When I was 13 years old, my mother sent me about 100 yards from my house to the corner store to get milk. On the way back home, the police picked me up, and they drove me around the city. Nobody knew where I was and then they just kicked me out of the car. These things happened to me. Now in hindsight, I thank God because today they would kill you. They let me go, you know, back when I was 13, but today you have an intervention with a police officer or something like that, you don't get home. So I'm thankful that they let me go even though it was wrong, what they did to me, these are the things that we live with every single day.

This country will not let go of this notion of white supremacy and it’s driving everything. That's my perspective. 

The perversion of the second amendment and the first amendment. Other communities globally with other democracies have grappled with these issues, and don't have the issues we have here. There's a reason for that. You take Germany, you take France, they're all considered to be democracies, but you're not allowed to have hate speech– there are laws governing their social media. There are laws governing guns in their countries. They don't have this proliferation, they don't have these issues where gun violence is the number one cause of death in young people in America now. And we have completely accepted these things as facts and just, and decided to live with them. This is insane. 

The truth of the matter is that we have to go way farther than what we're talking about here. Aftermath? There is no Aftermath here because it's still the life we're living in these communities. The trauma from a mass shooting is nothing because we live with that every day.

And now there’s a new definition of a mass shooting where it’s four or more people, but this has been happening in our communities since time immemorial. All of these people are damaged goods. You can't hardly find anybody in this community who hasn't been directly affected by gun violence. Violence by police. These are all damaged people. We're damaged as a community and as a people but generationally, I mean, literally from slavery to now. So we're carrying that baggage and then you take 5/14 and you pile on top of that. It’s like your car. If your car already has damage on it and you have another accident, insurance is only going to cover that new accident, right? They're not going to cover the previous damage to your car. That's how we are. And it's a problem.

I just got a letter from the office of Victim Services saying that they’re not going to reimburse me. I've been paying out of pocket [for therapy] which is what they told me to do, to do a reimbursement. Now, they're saying you have to exhaust all your insurance first. I used to negotiate agreements for therapy for the fire department, the police department and things like that, so I'm very familiar with all of this. I'm a proponent of therapy and a therapist and my son's a therapist. But this has been just completely terrible negotiating this process in this system. If this is difficult for me, imagine for those who have no experience.

And so, I have to go through this whole thing when I finish this call here. If not today, then tomorrow, and try to figure out what the heck is going on here and why am I being denied these services as a card carrying “victim” acknowledged as such. 

When [the Buffalo shooting] first happened, the application from the office of Victim Services sent me this application in the mail. It was eight pages long. They wanted to know all of my bank accounts, mortgages, credit cards. They wanted to know everything financially about me. They wanted a detailed description of the events. It was completely onerous and it was invasive and I told him “no way”. First of all, I have insurance. But why in the world would you need this information? So they reduced it to a two page application and now they denied it.

Garnell Whitfield at an event commemorating the passage of the Safer Communities Act.

I had this conversation with President Biden and Vice President Harris in the Oval Office when we were there. This is the conversation I had with them about what happened. And they've done some things to mitigate some of these issues from where they are since then. That being said, it hasn't trickled down yet. This is still a big issue for victims. Now they're asking me to provide a birth certificate to prove that I am related to the victim. Are you kidding me? 14 months later. Are you kidding me?

Organizations have millions of dollars. Some of them are federally funded. They've got grants, they have all kinds of philanthropic contributors and different things like that. But that money is not finding its way to our community in an impactful way. I mean, and if you're going to filter it through the system, the system itself is corrupt.

The Grieving Families Act in New York State, which we’re lobbying Governor Hochul to sign now, devalues elderly people and young people. If you’re not at an age where you're gainfully employed and can make money, then you’re not allowed to sue for damages when you lose someone. If you’re in those two categories, your damages are greatly diminished.

It’s more than 100 years old on the books in New York State. We’re trying to get it passed where no matter your age, if you die violently like this, then you have a right to sue, you have a right to collect. These things are written into law, this discriminatory stuff and it's because of the insurance companies. It passed the Assembly, it passed the Senate. But Governor Hochul wouldn't sign it. She was lobbied incessantly by the insurance companies telling her the rates would skyrocket if you sign this.

These are the same people who have stolen our generation of wealth, through redlining, devaluing our property. These are the same people who are lobbying the government where they're going to raise the rates. These are the same people who came up with this brilliant scheme to use your credit score to determine your insurability and stuff like that. What does that have to do with it?

It’s just a further tool used to discriminate against poor, underserved and disenfranchised people to make sure because at the end of the day we are, when I say we, because I'm poor too, the economic engine of America and they’re hell-bent on making sure that they keep that engine running at any cost. 

So that's part of the problem, the other is that everybody wants to be comfortable and as long as they can stay comfortable, they send a donation in or whatever, they feel better about themselves. But they don't want to be in your company, they don't want to see you crying, they don't want to do this. They don't really want to have any personal connection. And I think that connecting personally is what drives change.

5/14 is much bigger than me and it's much bigger than my family. And there's nothing bigger to me, but I understand there's a whole world out here and we have to be empathetic. We have to look beyond our own selves and see what else is going on in the world.

I believe in God. My faith teaches me that if I live a certain way and my creator finds it pleasing and right, I will rest with him eternally. I believe my mother is there. And so I want to live my life in such a way as to see her again.

That's my hope, you know, that's my goal for the rest of my life. Which brings me to a thing that we haven't talked about. I think that really, all this is about, all this boils down to is hope. Do you have it or don't you have it? Obviously, if you're living a life of poverty, of destitution, of trouble, of stress, then your hope is just to get through the day. We have different layers of hope. Whereas this person's hope might be about being a doctor one day, or your hope is the elusive American dream which is, for many of those who are in this community, that's actually a nightmare because it will never come to pass.

How do we give people hope? How do we instill hope? Because even if you can't fix everything, hope is looking beyond your circumstances and empowering because it allows you to work towards something other than where you are. It allows you to move and at the end of the day, that's all you can ask people to do is move from where they are and to take a step.

I remember Martin Luther King's speech: He's been to the mountaintop and he's seen the promised land. He may not get there with you, but he had hope. He saw it and that's what we need to be able to do. 

How do we give people in these circumstances hope? My hope is in my Lord and savior, and that I will see my mother again. Everybody does not have the same faith to see it the same way. But I think we need to find out what it is, what drives people, what would give them hope in these circumstances and it may be different depending on where you are and what you went through. But I think that if you could do that, if you can plant a seed of hope, then I think that's as much as you can ask for.  

And that may come from some direct aid, you may be able to mitigate a financial issue, a mental health issue, whatever it may be. But I think it basically comes down to first of all people believing that you really care. And asking that question: What is it that you need? 

I think more than anything, we have to care about each other and we have to talk to one another just like we're doing now. And that, I think that's how change happens. Change doesn't happen through legislation, change happens when people's hearts and minds are shared, one with the other. That's how you change, and one person at a time. So that's my goal. And that's why I think this work is important.