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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. Everyone who opposed the war will be claimed 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.

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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.

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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.

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If All of Buffalo Read About the Klan

Buffalo Takes on the Ku Klux Klan

Originally published in the Buffalo News, June 13, 2013 with the headline Search Through Time Turns Up Surprises. It has since been updated and expanded.

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The proud new owners had been told that Grover Cleveland was a regular guest at their property. I helped them find the building permit for their address—dated 1915. Grover Cleveland died in 1908.

In my own family, we learned of a half-sibling whose existence was secret for 50 years. It was a shock to discover that I was the 4th of four daughters instead of the 3rd of three. We found our new sister and it has been a joy.

Not everyone is so fortunate. I know of genealogists being shunned by relatives after discovering inconvenient facts that toppled beloved family legends. For decades, the descendents of Thomas Jefferson indignantly rejected the story that he had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, until DNA evidence proved the Heming descendents right.

Our city faces a similar conflict over history. The professional historians who compiled the 2013 Historic Structures Report of the Michigan Street Baptist Church were unable to find any period evidence that the church served as a hiding place during Underground Railroad days, though it furthered the cause in other equally important ways. 

Providing concealment is not the only possible way to assist someone who is escaping from slavery, someone who could be hungry, thirsty, cold, or sick. The report rightly documents and emphasizes the church’s local and national significance, which dwarf this one claim.

I assisted with research for this report and my peer-reviewed article on the Underground Railroad in Buffalo is cited in it. Around 2005, I started looking for eyewitness or period accounts confirming the church’s story, which first appeared in print in 1936, 70-plus years after the fact. Wouldn’t that be one of the greatest discoveries in Buffalo history? I also came up empty-handed.

Instead, I found a revealing counter-narrative. Frederick Douglass Paper of January 4, 1855 carried an extraordinary letter mentioning the Underground Railroad by name, signed by George Weir, Jr. of Buffalo. Weir described eight “passengers” from Kentucky appearing at his doorstep at “an early hour.” He conducted them to “a public house kept by one of our people.” He and Phoenix Lansing, a barbershop owner, then had a sleigh take them to the Black Rock Ferry, whereupon they were delivered to Canada.

We learn four important things from this letter:

1. George Weir, who was African-American, could read and write. Recent suggestions that oral legend is the only possible evidence of the church’s history underestimate the level of literacy in this community. Buffalo’s African-Americans first established literary societies in the 1830s.
2. George Weir felt safe publicizing his and Lansing’s efforts and full names. Indeed, the Provincial Freeman, a Canadian abolitionist newspaper published by Mary Ann Shadd Carey, the first African-American woman to publish a newspaper in North America, reported on Dec. 8, 1855, that the Fugitive Slave Law was “a dead letter” (not being enforced) in Buffalo.
3. George Weir took his guests to a public place, making no effort to conceal them.
4. Most importantly, George Weir’s father was Pastor George Weir, Sr., of the Vine Street AME Church, known today as Bethel AME. Why didn’t Weir use his father’s church? I believe that it was because the church lacked what his guests needed most: food, drink, and in the middle of a Buffalo winter: heat. In 1855, safe 24/7 mechanical heating systems were not invented yet. Heat came from wood or coal stoves. Left unattended in an empty building, a burning stove not only wasted expensive fuel but might ignite your building.

Nothing in Weir’s letter disproves the Michigan Street Baptist Church’s hiding place story, but it does challenge almost everything we think we know about the Underground Railroad in Buffalo. History sometimes behaves in unpredictable ways.

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More about the Underground Railroad from this author. Lead photograph courtesy of Wikipedia.