Caitlin Hartney

‘Separate but equal’ is business as usual in Buffalo and elsewhere. A regional solution could fix that. The idea that separate is inherently unequal entered our collective consciousness in 1954. That year, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of...

Do you remember the moment you realized that the sexual revolution and the liberation it long purported to offer women is (and always has been) a fallacy?

When my editor asked me to write about afternoon tea in Western New York—the British-pedigreed sort taken leisurely between lunch and dinner with a light repast of sandwich points and dainty sweets—I was a little hesitant. “Why is afternoon tea worth...

On October 2, 1851, Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist newspaper ran a scathing denunciation of then-sitting president, Millard Fillmore. The lede was prophetic: “A curious task will be his who, in future time, attempts to write the history of the...

“Women wouldn’t sit at bars if they knew how they looked.” Or so opined a bartender at a “swank” Delaware Avenue cocktail lounge in 1944. His notion of gendered respectability appeared in the Buffalo Courier-Express in March of that year amidst a...

Last month at a community swimming pool in a mostly white neighborhood in McKinney, Texas, a bikini-clad 15-year-old black female, Dajerria Becton, was violently wrestled to the ground by a white police officer. Once subdued, he proceeded to kneel on...