On a walk through the Fruit Belt, Walton was anxious to show me two new homes on formerly vacant lots, built in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity. But, every few feet, residents stopped to congratulate her, offer suggestions for Buffalo, or ask for her help on a new program. One resident was armed with a manila folder containing his plan for development: training young men in carpentry. When asked for a moment of her time, she obliged but told him, “I’m not mayor yet!”
In Buffalo, as in many cities, the onset of the pandemic made mutual aid a necessity. Walton, as the leader of the community land trust, was at the center of those efforts in the Fruit Belt. She explained, “Our organization exists to build affordable housing, but our neighbors didn’t know who they could turn to in the pandemic. So they’re calling me: ‘My water’s turned off. Can you help me?’ ‘My refrigerator’s broke. Can you help me?’ ‘I don’t have any food. I know they’re giving away food, but I don’t have a car, can’t get there. Can you help me?’ ”
Walton reached out to friends from biking-activist organizations, who helped deliver food to residents of the Fruit Belt. She recalled, “The mayor’s solution to the pandemic was to put door hangers on doors, saying ‘Check on Your Neighbors.’ ” Comparing the city’s response to her own, she began to think seriously about running for mayor. Walton said, “Why not? I know I can do it. I was not relying on the city for funding my organization. I was not tied into the establishment in any way. The mayor, really—I mean, he can’t do anything to me to stop me from working. I’m a registered nurse. I can always go back to that if that’s what I have to do.”
If the Fruit Belt’s housing crisis catapulted Walton into community organizing, then last summer’s uprising confirmed her desire to run for office. Walton became a regular presence at nightly protests for police reform. “We were out there, hundreds in the street, just begging for someone to listen and act on some very reasonable requests. And we were just straight-up ignored,” she said. Brown announced an executive order on police reform, including enhanced training on the constitutional rights of citizens stopped by police, ending enforcement of marijuana laws for fewer than two ounces, and issuing more tickets, instead of arrests, for nonviolent offenses. But the package fell far short of activists’ requests. Tanvier Peart, who works with Partnership for the Public Good, a Buffalo think tank, said, of Brown’s efforts, “At a time when people are looking for transformational change, reforms that keep police in schools and take incremental steps to create law-enforcement accountability barely move the needle.”
In Buffalo, the protests helped put activists and the newly initiated in touch with one another. Victoria Misuraca, a white local business owner who later became one of Walton’s first campaign volunteers, described how the uprising propelled her into action. Her six-year-old saw Martin Gugino pushed by the police on the news, she said. She began attending protests and concluded “that our city government, our elected officials, were not listening to the concerns of the citizens and were not taking really meaningful steps to address the problems and to make the changes necessary for a more just city.” Misuraca became one of the founding members of a group called the Buffalo Citizens for Council Accountability, “which was basically just keeping tabs on the council members and accounting for what they were doing and how they’re responding to the constituents’ concerns. Fifteen of us met each other in person for the first time in Bidwell Park, with masks. And that was when I met India.”
In November of 2020, Walton declared her intention to run for mayor. “My mind is made up,” she told a Buffalo News reporter. “It’s time for new leadership. It’s time for a person of the people.” The campaign launched in December, with an online event and an all-volunteer staff. “We knew from the very beginning that we weren’t going to have a lot of local support to begin with,” Walton told me. “We always knew that it was going to have to be, if not a statewide conversation, then a nationwide conversation. The strategy was always to get national attention.” To that end, Walton won the endorsements of Bernie Sanders’s political-action committee and the Democratic Socialists of America. But she also had enough connections in the local Working Families Party that, as she put it, “we could organize that crew.”
Since the Western New York Working Families Party was created, in 1998, it had endorsed Brown for every political office he ran for. But, last February, the Party broke with Brown, throwing its support behind Walton. Louisa Fletcher-Pacheco, the chair of the Western New York chapter, said that there were tensions within the group about which candidate to endorse, but the events of 2020 ultimately swung them toward Walton. “The murder of Floyd made people feel powerless, and people wanted change,” she said. “India had been in the streets. She had talked about co-governance and mutual aid.”
The endorsement changed the fortunes of Walton’s campaign, infusing it with political expertise and cash. More money allowed for Walton to air a campaign commercial, signalling to the public that she was a serious candidate they could vote for. Walton also earned the endorsement of the local Black newspaper, the Challenger, which declared, “We endorse India Walton in her noble quest, based on the strength that she dared to step to the plate to give voters a choice.” And, with just weeks to go in the primary, the Buffalo Teachers Federation, with its thirty-eight hundred members, backed Walton. The president of the union, Philip Rumore, said that the Brown administration had not increased funding for Buffalo Public Schools in about four years.
My father, Henry Louis Taylor, is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has been at the university since 1987, and is a keen observer of the overlap of politics and development in the city. He voted for Walton in the primary, not believing that she would win but because he was impressed by her campaign. He told me, “I along with, I think, a lot of other people thought she was going to do what everybody else had done—you know, try to run a campaign on bubblegum and shoestrings and surround herself with a bunch of people with no good ideas. I mean, I’ve seen that movie before. Byron is seeing a movie he thought he’d seen before, too. But this was new.” He added, “You had a sense there was something in the air that says, you know, something is happening.”
On June 22nd, India Walton pulled off what had seemed impossible, beating Byron Brown to win the Democratic Party primary. Walton defeated Brown by four percentage points, winning fifty per cent of the vote. According to an election analysis by Russell Weaver, Walton dominated among renters and young people, winning fifty-six per cent of Gen Z voters, eighty-two per cent of millennials, and seventy-six per cent of Gen X voters. She also won the majority of districts on the West Side, including the neighborhoods that have benefitted most from Brown’s development efforts. One business owner told the Buffalo News, “Buffalo is much better than it was 16 years ago for me and a lot of people I know. . . . That can’t be said for everyone. . . . So here we are. I’m rooting for India Walton.” In the white, middle-class Delaware and Niagara Districts, Walton won by twenty-eight and forty-five percentage points, respectively.
Brown received fewer votes than he had in any previous primary. In Masten, the district that Brown represented on the Common Council, turnout dropped by more than a third from 2017. Still, Brown won Masten and most of the neighborhoods on the Black East Side. “For many of these folks, they are comfortable with what they know and are used to,” the Reverend George Nicholas, the pastor at Masten’s Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church, told me. “Brown speaks their language, and he’s done a good job of hiring Black people in positions in city government.” Even when Brown didn’t deliver for the East Side, the community remained loyal to him, “because, prior to now, the opposition was always coming from whites in South Buffalo, and there was no way we were giving City Hall back to those white boys,” Nicholas said. “So you get used to the status quo.” Such a position can hardly be dismissed as cynicism; instead, it is hard-earned realism, developed over years of institutional neglect. This is the sticky inheritance potentially bequeathed to Walton.
For almost the entire primary campaign, Brown did not acknowledge in any serious way that Walton was running, refusing to debate her and, in caustic commentary after his defeat, declining to say her name. He went on to sue the state to have his name added to the ballot, claiming that a June deadline was invalid, but after two appeals-court rulings he was out of luck. He will now have to rely on the Buffalo public to write his name in. Successful write-in candidates are rare, but Brown has the benefit of powerful supporters. The family of Jeremy Jacobs, a billionaire businessman and Trump donor with corporate ties to the city, contributed nearly thirty thousand dollars to Brown in the week before the primary. The statewide lobby for the real-estate industry has spent more than three hundred thousand dollars in support of Brown’s campaign. In recent days, a conservative PAC called Good Government for New York has spent thirty thousand dollars on anti-Walton mailers and phone calls to Buffalo voters. “This is a general election,” Brown told me. “My campaign has not coördinated with any outside groups—with any entities whatsoever—but we do want people who are eligible to vote in the November general election to vote for me as the most qualified and as the only qualified candidate running for this office.”
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