The Sunday Story Presents: Buffalo Extreme

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4.5 • 52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

Exactly one year ago, on May 14, 2022, a young white man walked into a Buffalo, New York grocery store and shot thirteen people. The ten who died were all black. The shooter acknowledged that he was specifically targeting black people that day, trying to kill as many as possible.

The shooting happened a few blocks from a gym, where members of a black competitive cheer team were practicing. Some of the girls at the gym lost family and friends in the shooting. Some did not. But all felt fear and grief and the weight of racism, many for the first time. Today on the Sunday Story, we bring you the first episode of "Buffalo Extreme" from NPR's Embedded podcast. In the series, the girls, their moms and coaches tell us their story of the past year and what it takes to try to recover from a brutal act of racial violence.

Transcript

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0:00.0	One year ago in Buffalo, New York, a white man drove three hours from where he lived.
0:05.5	He went to a supermarket in a mostly black neighborhood and he killed ten people.
0:10.7	All of them were black. Not far from that supermarket is a gym where kids, mostly black girls,
0:16.8	learn competitive cheerleading. To be clear, the gym is not where the shooting happened,
0:22.2	but that's the thing about mass shootings. They don't just affect the people who were there.
0:26.8	They affect everybody in a community. I'm Rachel Martin and this is The Sunday Story.
0:32.0	Today we're bringing you the first episode of Buffalo Extreme. It's a new series from our
0:37.4	colleagues at Embedded. For the last year, Embedded has been talking to the athletes from this gym,
0:42.8	their coaches, their moms, and asking a lot of hard questions. Today, these girls and the women
0:48.4	who support them will tell their stories of what it's like to try and make sense of all this,
0:53.2	race, and hate, but also love and community. The series is hosted by Nikaia McCann. She's 19
1:00.0	years old and a college student now, but Nikaia grew up in the Buffalo gym, competing as a member of
1:06.3	the cheer team. Nikaia McCann joins me now. Nikaia, hi, thanks for being here. Thank you.
1:15.4	I guess the starting point is just really very, very simple. I mean, this awful thing happened
1:21.8	in the community where you're from, but it's a different choice to say, I want to take this
1:27.8	awful trauma and I want to explore what it meant for people in the broader community, not just
1:34.7	for people who were in that grocery store. Why did you decide this was something that spoke to you,
1:40.7	something that you needed to do? I learned that there were a lot of people in my position,
1:45.6	which were people that were directly impacted because they didn't lose a family member
1:52.4	but they did lose the sense of being safe and a lot of people didn't talk about it because they
2:00.3	felt as if their opinions didn't matter because they didn't lose anybody close to them.
2:07.3	I essentially stepped up to the plate and wanted to get our story and my story across to everyone
	...

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