COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Buffalo leads the way in history
You can’t see Darnell Martin’s “Cadillac Records” in Toronto. You never could.
Buffalo? Of course. It’s been playing here since early December — but not Toronto, where the acclaimed film history of Chess Records never opened.
So a few bitter e-mail correspondents in Toronto have been telling me for weeks.
Here we all think of Toronto as the very essence of moviegoing civilization, with the greatest annual film festival on the North American continent. And for some reason Buffalo is where a film studio has no difficulty opening Martin’s fast, compelling B-movie mythology of the Chess Blues legends, not Toronto (to me it was one of the year’s 10 best).
So help me, we’re really in desperate need of a major overhaul in community self-image — and I certainly don’t mean Chamber of Commerce “talking proud,” either. It just won’t do anymore to have Buffalo’s settlers from other cities’ suburbs scoffing at the troubled lakeside city they’ve wound up in.
Too much extraordinary pioneering has been done here for years, and it’s high time it was common community knowledge, no matter what anyone else might think.
Who says so? History, that’s who.
I discovered that on Friday with the most wonderful front page of this newspaper I’ve seen in decades.
That’s because I never knew the full story about the University of Buffalo’s football team voting to turn down its 1958 Tangerine Bowl bid because a mixed-race football team couldn’t play in Orlando, Fla., in that pre-King, pre- Selma era. There were two African- Americans on the UB football team in 1958. And so, for solidarity’s sake against racism, the team unanimously said “no” to the Tangerine Bowl, despite the unprecedented rarity of UB getting any sort of bowl bid at all.
I don’t know that I can reproduce my reaction to Rodney McKissic’s story on that front page, but in your mind’s ear, hear Marv Albert hissing “yessssss!” the way he does when a New York Knick sinks a 30-foot three-pointer and then multiply Marvelous Marv’s volume level by four. Then I quieted down, lest I wake anyone else up.
When, the next day, I read that Jesse Jackson paid tribute to the team’s collective heroic refusal of Southern racism and said it was a key forerunner of the civil rights movement of the ’60s, I thought, “well, YEAH!”
If it hadn’t have been for UB’s amazing season and the International Bowl, I’d never have known that extraordinary story from UB’s history. And I’ll bet I’m far from alone.
The question then becomes, “Why on earth is THAT?”
How in heaven’s name did that immensely inspirational bit of local history get buried under the commonplace reflex obloquy of media and sports itinerants who land in Buffalo and decide that civilization hasn’t made it here because — as one moronic football player once put it on his way out — “they’re just getting a Dave & Buster’s” (a fine place, Dave & Buster’s, but I’ll stack UB up against it as a marker of civilization any day of the week).
It’s an old story in the culture of Buffalo. You tell people the things that happened here just within my lifetime, and they simply don’t believe it.
Or they simply don’t believe it matters, when a city is struggling with poverty and blight as much as this one now is.
Well, it does matter.
And that’s the point. Until there is a general understanding of little facts like Buffalo moviegoers being able to see movies that Toronto moviegoers aren’t, we’re condemned to the jock’s-eye-view of Buffalo from inside Dave & Buster’s.
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