Celebrating Black History Every Month!
This February the Law Center joins the rest of the country and much of the rest of the world in commemorating Black History Month. The Law Center was founded in 1996 to fight for human and civil rights and economic justice in Western New York communities. We have always recognized that there can be no economic justice without racial justice. The legacy of slavery, and of the disenfranchisement and discrimination that continued after emancipation, including redlining by banks to perpetuate segregation, all combined to maintain a racial wealth gap and limit opportunities for Black families to build community wealth or pass on generational wealth through entrepreneurship and homeownership. Today Black people suffer disproportionately high rates of poverty, eviction, mortgage foreclosure, scams, rip-offs, debt collection judgments, and other abuses.
Since our founding the Law Center has worked to right these wrongs. In our early days we handled our first big class action lawsuit challenging segregation in public and publicly subsidized Buffalo housing. We worked to create and lead—for over two decades—the Buffalo-Niagara Community Reinvestment Coalition to fight the lingering effects of redlining and ensure access to banking services in Black neighborhoods. We filed Fair Housing lawsuits challenging racial discrimination by big landlords. And we fought to keep predatory lenders out of Buffalo and instead support community development financial institutions that make fair and affordable loans available to buy a home or start a business.
Our programs today continue to address persistent racial disparities:
· Our foreclosure prevention and generational wealth programs help preserve Black homeownership and make sure families don’t lose the wealth accumulated through homeownership when a family member dies.
· Our consumer debt program helps fight unfair debt collection like the epidemic of improperly entered default judgments that studies have shown disparately impact Black neighborhoods in Buffalo.
· Our eviction prevention program seeks to address persistent racial inequities in housing, considering that Buffalo has the third highest homeownership gap in the country and Black Buffalonians are both far more likely to be tenants and also more likely to face eviction.
· Our School Discipline Project aims to stem the school to prison pipeline that follows from an unfettered use of school suspensions, which affect Black students at five times the rate of white students.
· Our Small Business Legal Clinic helps hundreds of Black entrepreneurs every year to start or run a business.
· Our Vacant and Abandoned Properties program seeks to address the blight caused by vacant and abandoned properties, which cluster in parts of Buffalo’s historically Black East Side.
· Our impact litigation practice includes a class action challenging racially discriminatory traffic stop and ticketing practices in Buffalo that impose an unfair burden on Black motorists through improper or excessive fines and fees.
· We continue to advocate for policy change that will disproportionately benefit Black Buffalonians, like passing a “Good Cause” Eviction resolution, limiting “pretext” traffic stops that have no traffic safety purpose, banning the use of credit scores in pricing auto insurance, and keeping new predatory lending products from entering New York by passing the “End Loan Sharking Act.”
Thought of something you think we should be doing? Let us know! We’re small and we can’t do everything, but we are always open to input from the community.
Matthew Parham, Esq.
Litigation and Advocacy, Director