Buffalo is a border city. From the observation deck at the top of Buffalo City Hall, you can look across the Niagara River to Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. We even fly the Canadian flag in front of City Hall.

Ferry service between Buffalo and Fort Erie began around 1795, to be replaced by the opening of the Peace Bridge in 1927. Many Buffalo families own vacation homes on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. Before 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic, a daily summer commute across the Peace Bridge was common and casual.

This easy border access positioned Buffalo to be an important stop on the Underground Railroad. which I have already written about. Historians and laypersons continue to seek evidence of the efforts and lives of freedom seekers and their allies.

In my own lifetime, Buffalo was likewise well-positioned to enable another movement of fugitives. I refer to young American men who avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and settled in Canada, either permanently or until President Carter granted amnesty. Most entered Canada illegally. The legend is that Ontario understood what was going on and the officers at the border turned a blind eye. I don’t know if this legend is true or false.

There is a lot I don’t know about how the mechanics of how these men entered Canada. For example:

1. Did they act independently and take their chances at the border?
2. Or did they have help from friends or relatives?
3. Or did they get advice or assistance from organized groups on how to get past customs & border officers? If so, who were these groups? Do their records survive?
4. What communication networks informed those deciding to leave the US at this time?
5. What were the most heavily-used crossing points?
6. Once they were in Canada, what assistance did they find?

These questions are critically important to answer now, while so-called draft dodgers are still living and can be interviewed. Why does this matter?

Because we’ve seen what happens when participants in major events begin dying off. This is when popular culture worship and wishful thinking begin. Underground Railroad efforts began to be romanticized in the 1920s and 1930s, 60+ years after the end of the Civil War, when few witnesses were left to refute anyone’s stories. This is when some claims about Underground Railroad sites first appear in print, to be treated as gospel truth ever after.

Across the Northeast, when people discover that a building predates the Civil War, they are eager to claim it for the Underground Railroad, without being expected to produce any evidence.

Vietnam-era draft evaders are due for a romantic revival in popular culture. When it happens, I predict that we will see the same phenomenon with automobiles that we see with old houses. Everyone near the Canadian border with a 1960s or ’70s junker in the garage will be eager to claim that it was used to sneak draft dodgers into Canada. Every activist who led anti-war protests will be lauded as a Draft Evasion Agent.

The best way for historians to head off these retroactive bids for glory is to find and interview draft evaders now, and get detailed accounts of the process of crossing the border, while they can still speak for themselves.

Do you know of oral history interviews with draft evaders? Suggested reading? Please drop it in the comments.

Photograph of Peace Bridge by By Óðinn, 2008 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3621392

Originally published as a My Voice column in the Buffalo News, December 7, 2017. It has since been lightly edited. Portrait of Edward Obertean courtesy of the Buffalo Courier, Sept. 3, 1924.

As white supremacists and neo-Nazis explode across headlines and screens, I thought back to events in Buffalo from 1922-1925. We were one of several otherwise progressive Northern cities that experienced a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

One of the most inspiring books about Buffalo history is Shawn Lay’s Hooded Knights on the Niagara (1995). He recounts the full story of Buffalo’s successful battle with the Klan. I am indebted to him for these highlights.

The Buffalo Klan members were not rural, undereducated whites with poor economic prospects. Here, the Klan’s 4,000 members were drawn mostly from the Protestant, educated, professional and merchant middle class. Their office was in the Calumet building on Chippewa and their base was the Delaware District.

This demographic joined the Klan because it picked a very specific battle that resonated with them. The Buffalo Klan apparently decided that it would not gain much ground by attacking African-Americans or Jews, though these communities did organize in opposition to it. Instead, the Buffalo Klan focused on lax enforcement of Prohibition.

The 18th Amendment, banning the production and sale of alcoholic beverages, was heavily supported by Protestants, who associated alcohol abuse with Roman Catholics and immigrants.

Buffalo’s first Catholic mayor, Francis X. Schwab, had just been elected. Schwab, who was German-American, owned a brewery that was caught selling alcohol. During Prohibition, the booze flowed freely in Buffalo. This incensed the city’s Protestant elites. They flocked to this new organization, which promised civic improvement and fraternal fellowship.

The battle lines were drawn: Protestant vs. Catholic; native vs. immigrant; upper class vs. working class. Recognizing the Klan as a mortal enemy, Schwab recruited an undercover officer to infiltrate the Buffalo chapter. Someone, probably recruited by Schwab, burgled the Buffalo Klan office and stole the membership list. It ended up on display at police headquarters. Buffalonians flocked downtown by the thousands to look for names of friends and associates. It was then published as a pamphlet, a copy of which survives in the Buffalo History Museum and is now online at NYHeritage.org.

Embarrassed by the exposure, the Klan sent its own investigator, Thomas Austin, to Buffalo. Austin soon figured out who Mayor Schwab’s spy was: Officer Edward Obertean. On Aug. 31, 1924, in front of 128 Durham St., Austin confronted Obertean. Both men drew weapons, exchanged gunfire, and died. Edward Obertean was 35 years old. He was Catholic.

Buffalo has never properly recognized our martyr in the fight against the Klan and the bigotry and hatred for which it stands.

As plans proceed to convert the Dillon Federal Courthouse on Court Street into Buffalo Police Department headquarters, I propose renaming it the Edward Obertean Building. It would be a powerful statement that we embrace the highest and best American values in the City of Good Neighbors. Let’s give our hero something more lasting than a column in the daily newspaper.

Sign the petition to name the new public safety building after Edward Obertean

If All of Buffalo Read About the Klan

Buffalo Takes on the Ku Klux Klan