Rod Watson: Buffalo’s racial terrorist didn’t win. Let’s keep it that way

But Buffalo’s racial terrorist, at least so far, did not win. In fact, he lost – big time.

In the year since the white gunman from Broome County drive 200 miles to target Black people in one of Buffalo’s poorest neighborhoods last May 14, his massacre has put a spotlight on longstanding inequities and prompted an unprecedented movement to address them.

I’m sure that’s not what he had in mind. But not only did he fail; he spurred the very opposite of what he undoubtedly hoped would happen: Instead of driving Black and white Western New Yorkers apart, he brought them together in ways he never could have imagined.

One year later, I like to believe news of his colossal failure is somehow drifting into the prison where he sits after his guilty pleas on state murder and domestic terrorism charges while waiting to see if the feds will pursue the death penalty. The best reason not to execute him is to torture him with the reality that his mission of hate did not succeed.

For instance, while Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue has yet to reopen after the 2018 massacre that took 11 lives, the Jefferson Avenue Tops supermarket where he killed 10 and wounded three others reopened just two months later. It includes not only memorials to the victims but enhanced food offerings for the very people the shooter so disdained.

And it surely must gall people who think like him that Kevin Gaughan, a white civic activist, organized the American Food Equity Conference here last fall to bring together local and national experts of all colors to figure out how expand healthy, affordable food options for Black and underserved neighborhoods like the very one he targeted.

Similarly, while efforts like South Carolina’s to remove symbols of racism like the Confederate flag and statues were important after a white gunman…