On April 2, 2021, Erie County celebrated its bicentennial anniversary, kicking off a year of celebration. This significant milestone is an opportunity for the community to reflect on the history, stories, and legacies of the many men and women who came before us.
February is known nationally as Black History Month, a time to celebrate and acknowledge the history and many accomplishments of the Black American community.
Started in 1926 by historian Carter G. Woodson, is was celebrated during the second week of February. The event received crucial support from Black newspapers, who encouraged the teaching of the history of Black Americans in public schools. The reason February was chosen was that it coincided with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and Frederick Douglass (February 14). In 1929, officials within state departments of education made the event known to teachers and literature was distributed.
By the 1970s, the celebration had become Black History Month and was unofficially celebrated in educational institutions across the country. In 1976, during the bicentennial of the United States, President Gerald Ford officially recognized February as Black History Month. He urged Americans to”
Seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.
Erie County has always been home to excellence and history. We have played a rather large role in the history of the American landscape. This area has given birth to authors, politicians, educators, actors and actresses.
The individuals profiled below have made significant contributions in their field; whether its an architect who wanted to make his home a better place, a poet who saw the beauty in her body and would be nominated for 2 Pulitzers in the same year, the first African American woman elected to the Buffalo Common Council or the first black principal in the Buffalo Public School district.
We take this moment to continue to celebrate Black excellence in Buffalo with these four profiles:
Robert T. Coles
Born in Buffalo in 1929, Robert Coles was discouraged by his high school teachers and upon transferring from Hampton University to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in architecture, was the only African American in his class. He would go on to get his Masters from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a combined research and design thesis, Coles created an urban renewal project for the neighborhood in which he had attended high school. Titled “Community Facilities in Redevelopment Areas, A Study and Proposal for the Ellicott District in Buffalo, New York,” the project was created with the Buffalo Urban League as the client. Coles’ thesis reached a receptive audience in Western New York and was widely publicized in Buffalo. While at MIT, he would be the first African American to be awarded the Rotch Traveling Scholarship, which allowed him to travel to Europe. After working for such prestigious firms as Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson, Carl Koch and Associates and Techbuilt, Coles would return to Buffalo to open his own practice in 1963.
Coles would get the opportunity to put his thesis to work when he was commissioned to create the Ellicott District Recreation Center, known today as the John F. Kennedy Recreation Center. During construction of the recreation center, Coles worked as coordinating architect with the firm of DeLeuw, Cather and Brill. Following the completion of the project in 1963, Coles established his own architectural firm, Robert Traynham Coles, Architect pc. Still in operation in 2011, Coles’s practice is the oldest African American owned architectural firm in New York State and in the Northeast. Coles’ career would focus on community engagement while pursuing diversity, inclusion and equity in his work. He would continue to be an outspoken critic in the field of architecture, advocating for better equity and opportunities for both women and minorities. When UB was reviewing where to build its new campus, Coles advocated for it to be built downtown, along the waterfront, citing the downtown campus would be more convenient for the city’s lower-income inner-city residents, who could not afford to commute to the northern suburbs. His firm would later be commissioned to build Alumni Arena on the new North Campus.
Robert T. Coles passed away on May 16, 2020 at the age of 90. In 2021, it was announced that the Utica Station would be renamed in his honor. His house and studio were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.
To read more about his career and accomplishments as well as see a list of his designs, click here.
Lucille Clifton
Born in Depew in 1936, Lucille Clifton (nee: Sayles) was educated at Howard University and the State University of New York at Fredonia. Writer Ishmael Reed would introduce her to her husband Fred while organizing the Buffalo Community Drama Workshop’s production of The Glass Menagerie. They would go on to have six children together.
In 1966, Ishmael Reed presented some of Clifton’s poems to Langston Hughes, who would include them in his anthology “The Poetry of the Negro.” By 1967, the Cliftons had moved to Baltimore, where her career as a poet would finally begin to take off. Her first poetry collection, entitled “Good Times” was published in 1969 and would go on to be listed by The New York Times as one the year’s ten best books. The poems in the book were inspired by her 6 young children and center around the facts of African American urban life. She would serve as the Poet Laureate of the state of Maryland from 1979 to 1985.
In addition to her many collections of poetry, Lucille Clifton is also a highly regarded children’s author. Books like “All of Us Come Across the Water” created context that helped raise awareness of African-American history and heritage. Her most famous creation was Everett Anderson. Everett Anderson would star in 8 titles and would take readers through a journey on what life was like through the eyes of a young African American boy living in a big city.
Her works would focus on the beauty of the black body and her work would explore the relationship between African American women and men, while aiming to reinvent the negative stereotypes associated with the black female body. In 1988, Clifton became the first author to have two books of poetry named as finalists for one year’s Pulitzer Prize. These two books were “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969–1980” and “Next: New Poems.” She passed away in Baltimore in 2010 at the age of 73. In an interview published by the Antioch Review shortly before her passing, Clifton stated that she continues to write because “writing is a way of continuing to hope…perhaps for me it is a way of remembering that I am not alone.” When asked how she would like to be remembered, she stated “I would like to be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being human. My inclination is to try to help.” Her work was recently featured in the NFTA public art project “On the Move.”
Cora P. Maloney
Cora Pleasant Maloney was born in Kansas City, Missouri, circa 1905. Her parents, Robert and Gertrude Pleasant were life-long residents of Missouri. Little is known about Maloney’s early years or family; however she was a graduate of the University of Kansas, School of Pharmacy. She worked as a pharmacist and medical technologist in Kansas City, Missouri, Detroit, Michigan and Albany, New York. Mrs. Maloney met her husband, Clarence, an assistant attorney general, while working in the Bangs Disease Laboratory in Albany, New York. They were married in 1945 and moved to Buffalo shortly afterward. She continued to work as a medical technologist, at the E.G. Meyer Memorial Hospital, after her marriage until entering politics.
In 1957, she was sworn in as a committee woman in the Sixth District of the 13th ward. She made history, when in the same year; she was elected as Buffalo’s first Councilwoman, the first Democrat ever to be elected in the Masten District, and the first African American to be elected in the district in twenty years. She did not have the party endorsement for her first election. She was re-elected in 1959. That same year she refused to attend the U.S. Conference of Mayors in New Orleans. Because of segregation she could not stay in the same hotel as other delegates. She said, “I feel I would abdicate the principles of my group if I went to the conference.” As a result of her stance, Mayor Frank A. Sedita also refused to attend the conference.
Several months prior to her death, Mrs. Maloney was endorsed by the Democratic Executive Committee for Councilman-at-large, making her the first African American to be endorsed by a major political party for a city-wide elective office. Mrs. Maloney expressed her political creed as follows, “I’m a feminist. Women are the watchdogs of civilization. It’s always a feminine voice which cries for better government and better social laws.” In 1965, the Cora P. Maloney Scholarship Fund was established and is given to a young woman studying in the field of medicine.
Claude D. Clapp
Claude D. Clapp, the son of Marguerite Mason Clapp Shannon and Claude D. Clapp, was born in Buffalo, New York on January 17, 1921. He attended Buffalo Public Schools and, for one year, Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky where he lived with his uncle, Leroy Mason. He graduated, in 1940, from Fosdick Masten High School in Buffalo, with yearbook notations of Star Roll, Honor Roll, Chronicle, Hill Topics, Football, and Track. He left Buffalo after graduation to attend Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, turning down an athletic scholarship from the University at Buffalo for the academic scholarship awarded to him by Talladega. There he met his wife of fifty-three years, Ouida Eleanor Harrison.
World War II intervened during his Talladega years, and like most of the undergraduate men, he was forced to leave college when he was drafted into the United States Army to join the World War II campaign. He became a 1st Lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps, serving from 1944 to 1946 as administrative staff officer at Tuskegee Air Base with the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
Claude D. Clapp exemplified an individual blazed a trail for other African American educators in Buffalo. He moved through the ranks to garner historic accomplishments in the city. He and his wife, Ouida, were the first black married couple employed as teachers and he was the first black assistant principal and then the first black principal of a Buffalo Public School. He held both positions at what was then School 29 on South Park Avenue. In 1965, he was appointed as the Director of Finance and Research for the school district. Again, he was the first African American to hold an administrative post within the school district. In 1966, he was named Associate Superintendent of the Buffalo Public Schools. When he and Ouida retired in 1985, he was Deputy Superintendent of the Buffalo Public Schools.