Buffalo Extreme: Base

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News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Documentary

4.8 • 11.8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Ayanna Williams Gaines is the coach and founder of Buffalo All-Star Extreme, a Black competitive cheerleading and dance team from Buffalo, New York. Williams Gaines started the gym as a space for Black girls to feel safe and to thrive in the predominantly white world of cheer. But on May 14, 2022, a white supremacist came to a predominantly Black neighborhood on the east side of Buffalo and killed ten Black people at a grocery store just a few blocks away from the gym. In the wake of the massacre, feeling like a target, Williams Gaines and her cheer families are faced with the challenge of making sure their cheerleaders feel safe and confident, on and off the stage.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Embedded from NPR.
0:05.7	One year ago, in Buffalo, New York, a white man drove three hours from where he lived and
0:11.4	went to a supermarket in a mostly black neighborhood, specifically because it was a black
0:17.1	neighborhood.
0:19.1	There he killed ten people and injured three more people.
0:23.3	And not far from the supermarket is a gym where kids, mostly black girls, learn competitive
0:28.9	cheerleading and dance.
0:31.8	The gym is not where the shooting happened, but that's the thing about mass shootings.
0:37.5	They don't just affect people who were there.
0:40.6	They affect everybody in the community.
0:42.9	So we followed the girls and their mothers and their coaches for a year, and now they are
0:48.0	going to tell their story.
0:49.3	We're only using first names for most of the people in the story because what happened
0:55.3	last year made them really scared and they didn't want us to use their full names.
1:00.8	Nikaia McCann, who is 19, will be your host for this series.
1:05.9	She takes the story from here.
1:09.0	My cheer journey started very early.
1:12.6	I wasn't as tall then.
1:14.6	Just too low peak tails, too puff balls.
1:16.9	I had the biggest knockers in my hair.
1:19.1	There are like little balls that you loop around your hair.
1:22.3	It was yellow and had smiley faces on them.
	...

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