Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Last week, Dr. Jonathan Metzl from Vanderbilt University joined us to discuss the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. During our conversation, Dr. Metzl said something that stuck with me.
Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Mass shootings are often escalatory and they often respond to one another. I think the timing is potentially not happenstance because it does, just to be crass about it, steal the headlines from the mass shooting that happened the week before.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, of course, for the people of Buffalo, the 10 community members slain at the Tops supermarket are not headlines. They're family, friends and neighbors.
Speaker 3: We're going to stand here unified and we're going to stand here love and we're going to respect our elders and we're going to honor these families. Somebody can hate that young man's heart, but we are not a hateful community.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Joining us from Buffalo is Kelly Diane Galloway, President and Founder of Project Mona's House and she helped to organize a vigil in Buffalo shortly after the fatal shooting last month. Welcome to The Takeaway, Kelly.
Kelly Diane Galloway: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell me a bit about when you first learned about the shooting.
Kelly Diane Galloway: That was Saturday, May 14th. I run a program for girls who are at risk for a lot of different things, like maybe mostly human trafficking, any type of violent crimes or anything like that. We call them our empowered girls and they had their graduation tea party that day. We took pictures, we took videos and as soon as the tea party was over, everybody looked at their phones and they saw bodies on the concrete. It wasn't news, it was so many people just going live on Facebook. The bodies hadn't even been picked up yet that were killed out in the parking lot.
From there, our girls who were super excited about graduating that day, became super somber because it was people on the concrete that were dead, not because of who they were or anything that they had done, but because their skin looked just like my girls. That day 40 girls who were celebrating, became super sad and that's how we found out. Then shortly after, some of the girls who live in that neighborhood went down to the Tops along with myself because we didn't know who was still inside. We didn't know if we had family members or friends in there because not all the victims had been identified.
Those girls, seventh graders and eighth graders, they stood there behind the yellow caution tape, staring at dead bodies on the pavement because the bodies were still there. Even some of them watched that dreadful video and been traumatized ever since.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: One of the first things you did was to organize a vigil, talk to me about that decision.
Kelly Diane Galloway: One of my best friends, Jamele Cruz and I were just like, "Kelly, we believed that healing helps when everybody or healing is more progressive when we all heal together because we're all hurting." In just about 24 hours, we organized the vigil, put every key person in place and talked to the land owner and we organized the vigil and it was about a couple 100 people there, almost a 1,000. It was a moment where we got to cry together. Some of us were still angry, but it was a safe space that we created outside for people just to feel however they felt, only to realize that if you look to the left of you and you look to the right of you, it's somebody right there that loves you and that can hug you and that can support you. That was the beginning, for me, of our healing process for Buffalo.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to go back for a moment, Kelly, to your girls who you were with, it's still so raw this violence, but have they found a way to find some joy in their accomplishments despite what they're living through in this moment?
Kelly Diane Galloway: A couple days later, we decided that we were going to post the pictures and just post us being happy. Because I think that what that terrorist did wanted our community to be divided and to be sad and to be mourning and a way to resist that is to exemplify Black joy. We were like, "Be happy in the skin that you're in. Be happy that you look so beautiful with your fascinators on and you went to charm school and everything to prepare for this day. Just tell your parents and tell everybody, we're going to post all our pictures on this day."
A couple days later, maybe about four or five days later, we celebrated with our online community and with the girls had done in-person. For right now, especially for the girls who literally in-person saw bodies on a concrete, we decided to-- even though they graduated, we're opening the program back up because we had to provide some mental health counseling and training and healing groups. Because a lot of people are not thinking about how this affects our children, how this is affecting the younger generation, who will never forget this because that's the only grocery store in their neighborhood.
They walk there by themselves, they ride their bikes by themselves. I'll never forget the moment where I hug the mother of a eight-year-old girl who was hiding in a freezer, just to survive. At eight years old, can you imagine the type of trauma she has just hearing gunshots and hiding in a cold freezer, scared, not really knowing when she could come out, when it's safe to come out? How is her eight-year-old mind supposed to process that? What about her friends? Her mother knows that her daughter is safe right now, but she's still traumatized just at the thought that my daughter is still in that grocery store and I'm out here and I don't know if she's alive because we got separated.
So, we're holding healing circles for the children, not just in that neighborhood, but all around the city because they all are feeling something. We want to help them navigate through that healing journey themselves.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: It's almost unthinkable that that kind of trauma could no longer even be much of the focus of our attention because of what happened just 10 days later in Texas. I'm wondering if the people of Buffalo and the people of Uvalde have in any ways, perhaps, the community-based organizations like yours, if you all have been in contact with each other, given that this is a moment when there are children in both communities needing to heal from such trauma?
Kelly Diane Galloway: I personally have not been in contact. We've been thinking about them, praying for them, posted on social media about them, but we have not been in personal contact. I have not been in personal contact with them. I know that the media attention has gone to other places, but we're still healing. We stood here in Buffalo, we still don't have a grocery store in our neighborhood, you know? We're working diligently.
I also serve as the President of the board of Feed Buffalo and we've been working on our sustainability plans to make sure that everybody in that community and other communities are dependent on that Tops, not just for food, but for essential items, has access to them. We've been working around the clock, not just with that vigil that brought our community together, but also with providing, like I said, supplies that they need. Because that is also something that's super important to make sure people have got food at night.
One of my friends, her son was shot there. He did not die and we just celebrated his 21st birthday the week after. I just think about it like, "Well, what does he need? What do the survivors need?" We've been finding out a lot about their needs and working diligently and partnering with other organizations to meet those needs as well.
I think in Buffalo, we're still figuring it out. I know the headlines are switching to other places, but we're still here, we're still sad, we still don't have a grocery store and, like I said, we're still in the healing process.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Kelly Diane Galloway, President and Founder of Mona's House in Buffalo. Thank you for taking the time with us today.
Kelly Diane Galloway: Thank you.
[00:08:44] [END OF AUDIO]
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