On the evening of July 14, 1967, Geraldine Pointer met Martin Sostre at his Afro-Asian Bookshop on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, N.Y., one of two bookstores he ran. Pointer, who usually managed Sostre’s store on High Street, was helping him close up when a dozen plainclothes police officers and FBI agents descended. She thought the men were robbers and tried to pull them off Sostre. Both Pointer and Sostre were arrested.

A mother of five, Pointer was 23 years old and had been dating Sostre for almost a year. She had started working with him because she believed in his vision of empowering the Black community through literature. Sostre was well known in Buffalo: His bookstores had become key to facilitating Black power and community building in the city. In addition to being Black-owned, his bookstores were significant because they symbolized the Black radical tradition in Buffalo. Although Buffalo had active chapters of the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Urban League, and other civil rights groups, intergenerational differences and class conflicts divided Black politics along middle-class and working-class lines. Buffalo’s CORE branch publicly rejected the philosophy of Black Power. Aside from BUILD (Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity), there were few Black radical organizations in the city. The SNCC newspaper The Movement called Sostre’s bookstores “the only disseminator of revolutionary Marxist-oriented Black Nationalist literature, art, and music in the Western New York area.” The educator and storyteller Karima Amin remembered the bookstore as a library where Sostre would allow her to sit for hours reading books without pressure to purchase when she was a student at the University of Buffalo. Sostre’s bookstores anchored Buffalo’s East Side in political education, Black history, and revolutionary ideas, all of which the state viewed as a threat.

Despite dubious evidence framing Sostre and Pointer, including testimony from an informant who later recanted, the two were found guilty. After a six-week trial beginning in May 1969, Pointer was given a seven-to-15-year suspended sentence for selling drugs and a one-to-three-year sentence for “interfering with an arrest.” The judge denied her attorney’s motion to appeal the $10,000 bail and instructed five guards to remove her from the courtroom. As she looked around and saw the faces of her supporters, friends, and family, including two of her children, Pointer held her head high, raised a clenched fist, and said, “Don’t waste any tears, and please take care of my children. Continue the struggle!”

An all-white jury had convicted Sostre the year before of selling narcotics, inciting a riot, arson, and assault, and sentenced him to 31 to 41 years. Amnesty International deemed him a “prisoner of conscience,” and people across the globe protested his incarceration, leading Gov. Hugh Carey to commute his sentence on Christmas Day in 1975. Sostre was released in February 1976, after serving nine years. He died in 2015, at the age of 92. Now an exoneration campaign that I am part of seeks justice for him and for Pointer, pushing the city and the state to acknowledge their violent actions that robbed Black Buffalo of its revolutionary intellectuals, organizers, and community-focused institutions. The Martin Sostre Institute, along with a forthcoming biography of Sostre, has sparked a renewed interest in this history among scholars, activists, and community members. This surge of attention has led Geraldine Pointer to make just one request: assistance with “clearing her record.”

I had been searching for Pointer since I came across her name while compiling the Buffalo Syllabus, a list of almost 200 sources that contextualizes Black people’s experiences in the city before the mass shooting at a Tops supermarket on May 14, 2022. I could find little information about her and worried that her story had been forgotten, overshadowed by Sostre’s towering legacy. As a historian of Black women’s radicalism, I am trained to read between the silences of the archive to interrogate what is and is not documented and why. Why had the Martin Sostre Defense Committee, formed after their arrests, not organized under Pointer’s name as well? Why was she considered apolitical when she had left the courtroom with her fist raised? And then I wondered how she had felt being taken away from her five children, and what impact her incarceration had on her personal and political development.

Two years later, my collaborator on the Buffalo Syllabus sent me a flyer announcing the July 14, 2024, launch of the Justice for Geraldine Pointer and Martin Sostre exoneration campaign at the radical bookstore Burning Books. Pointer was in attendance. Her radiant energy matched her gold-patterned dress and wooden giraffe cane as she stood with her children and grandchildren. When I said I wanted to write an article about her and join the campaign, she embraced me warmly and thanked me.

This was the first time in my academic career that I would study someone whose personal background overlapped so intimately with mine. After Pointer’s release, she raised her children in the Kenfield-Langfield projects, the same public housing development I grew up in. When I invited my grandmother to a panel discussion I held with Pointer in August 2024, imagine the shock on my face when the two women recognized each other. My grandmother had been friends with Pointer’s two younger children, Exzertios and Christa, as a child, and remembered Pointer as an amazing cook and hairstylist. When I talked to Pointer a few months later, she explained how she had made friends while incarcerated through her work in the prison’s beauty parlor.

Unlike Sostre, Pointer was not well versed in radical literature, nor did she pen political essays or start newspapers. Her relationship with Sostre developed her radical consciousness, however, and led her to work at one of the most revolutionary establishments in Western New York. Pointer’s direct confrontation with the criminal injustice system was a proving ground for her politics and dedication to the freedom struggle independent of Sostre. When I think of Pointer’s case, I am reminded of Claudette Colvin, who inspired Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott — yet her age, darker skin, and pregnancy out of wedlock meant civil rights leaders and organizations did not view her as the ideal figure to challenge racial segregation. The bravery of Colvin, Pointer, and women like them in the face of racist judicial systems should be honored. We must not forget the sacrifices of the everyday people behind momentous demonstrations and movements.

Being affiliated with Sostre cost Pointer two and a half years away from her children and estrangement from her family and friends. From his prison cell, Sostre wrote that “never in her life” had Pointer “been involved in any criminal activity or arrested for a crime or violation of law.” He protested what had happened to him and his bookstore, which had been “sacked and totally destroyed by the white police agents of the racist power structure.”

The “riot” that Sostre was charged with inciting was the Buffalo Rebellion, which began on June 26, 1967, when 200 Black locals, primarily residents of the Lakeview projects on the Lower East Side, protested the police’s use of excessive force on two Black male teenagers. It is estimated that the group increased to 350 people by the evening and swelled to 1,500 the next day. Most of the rebels carrying out strategic attacks on police stations, public housing administration offices, and white-owned stores in the area were young people, including high school students. The uprising lasted five nights and resulted in 60 injuries, over 180 arrests, and approximately $250,000 worth of property damage.

Residents’ frustrations extended beyond police brutality to the lack of public facilities, recreational centers for youth, and drug and rehabilitation programs. Unemployment was a particularly difficult struggle in their Rust Belt community. The Black unemployment rate was double that of white people, reaching 16.3 percent in 1960. The Black population in Buffalo had climbed from 18,000 in 1940 to 94,000 in 1970, yet racism, residential segregation, and deindustrialization limited their social mobility. The closing of Buffalo’s major flour mills and manufacturing cutbacks at Bethlehem Steel and Republic Steel disproportionately affected the Black migrants who had relocated to Buffalo for these factory jobs. Sostre’s own employment at Bethlehem Steel had allowed him to make enough money to open his bookstores. Disinvestment, blockbusting, and white flight confined Black residents to Buffalo’s East Side, leading them to be physically separated from white people and trapped in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Today, Buffalo remains one of the most segregated cities in the country.

The student newspaper of the State University of New York at Oswego reported that during the rebellion, Sostre kept the Afro-Asian Bookshop on Jefferson Avenue “open all night and spoke to crowds, using pictures from magazines and the white cops, running hog-wild in the streets outside, to illustrate his points about white colonialism and the need for black self-determination and socialism.” It was one of many Black-owned businesses left untouched by the rebels, but the student newspaper found that “the cops smashed the front windows of the store and firemen hosed down the inside of the store, destroying most of the offending literature.”

The FBI had been coordinating with local and state police to monitor the store before Sostre’s arrest. Sostre remembered officers harassing him about the literature he sold, suggesting that he “was looking for trouble” and telling him to sell something other than “communist stuff.” He replied, “I have a constitutional right to sell this, and no one determines what types of books I sell.” Then the police coerced Arto Williams, who was in the Erie County Jail for allegedly stealing an air-conditioner and had visited Sostre’s bookstores, into setting Sostre up as a drug dealer in exchange for release. The day of the raid, Sergeant Alvin Gristmacher released Williams and provided him with a handful of cash, including marked bills. Williams then went to the bookshop under police surveillance and gave Sostre the money, asking him to hold the cash for him; he had his hand in his pocket as he left the store. He later recanted his testimony that Sostre had sold him drugs.

Within a few weeks of Pointer’s and Sostre’s arrests, UB students and organizers with Youth Against War and Fascism, an affiliate group of the Workers World Party, formed MSDC to demand their release. MSDC raised $5,000 for Pointer’s bail, enabling her, a single mother, to return home to her children while awaiting trial and sentencing. While out on bail, Pointer joined other defense committee members in marching in front of the Erie County Courthouse to demand Sostre’s release and helped run the Afro-Asian Bookshop in Exile on the university campus.

When Pointer first appeared before a judge on Dec. 18, 1967, she announced her decision to defend herself. The judge questioned whether she was intellectually prepared to do so. Pointer insisted that she read books and would consult with her lawyer friends on trial procedures, saying, “I don’t think I’ll get a fair trial with a public defender — that’s why I don’t want one,” in a deliberate challenge to the carceral state and a reclamation of her autonomy.

While she was in and out of the courts leading up to her trial, Pointer faced harassment from Child Protective Services, which accused her of “fail[ing] to properly care for her home and its conditions.” The case supervisor even ridiculed her for feeding her children white beans for dinner. Pointer explained that she was making ends meet while waiting for her next welfare check. Social Services mentioned the Sostre case in court proceedings, misrepresenting the bookstore as a place where “narcotics are sold.” Pointer successfully defended herself in family court and maintained custody of her children.

After Sostre was convicted, Pointer worked with the defense committee to request assistance from the NAACP, and Charles T. McKinney of the NAACP’s New York City branch became her defense attorney. (McKinney would go on to establish his reputation among activists when he successfully led the Panther 21 trial two years later.) The defense committee’s letter to the NAACP explained that Pointer was “only a victim in the police effort to frame Sostre. Her case cannot be understood apart from his,” even though they were tried separately. Even though Pointer took brave stances and was radicalized by her arrest, the defense committee wrongly continued to paint her as a helpless victim in the state’s attack on Sostre, not as another political prisoner. One committee coordinator told The Buffalo News, “Hers is the classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” While casting her as an innocent victim was a legal and publicity tactic to garner supporters and pressure the district attorney’s office to drop charges, it overlooked her sacrifices for the movement and the ways she challenged state repression. Other committee members explained that she was “not ‘political’ like Mr. Sostre”; instead, she was “just a woman who is proud of being black.”

McKinney’s cross-examination of Williams and other police officers raised doubts that Pointer had even been present at the time of the alleged drug sale. In his closing statement, he pointed out, “You cannot resist an arrest unless you’re under arrest or told that you’re placed under arrest.” His robust defense sowed hope for Pointer, her family, and her supporters, who were devastated when the jury handed down a guilty verdict.

When Pointer and I spoke, she said that being forcibly separated from her children was the most challenging part of this ordeal. Her two daughters lived with Pointer’s mother and her three sons were put into the foster system during the two years she was imprisoned. She was granted custody of all her children upon her release but made sure they all went by her children’s father’s last name, Robinson, lest they face bullying because their mother had been locked up.

When she began serving her sentence, Pointer was so depressed that she could not eat anything. “I was so distraught,” she said. “I didn’t want to be bothered with nobody.” But an older inmate named Beatrice Simmons helped her, telling Pointer, “You got to start eating,” because she could be sent away to a mental hospital if she didn’t. She held Simmons’s advice — “Do this time. Don’t let this time do you” — close to her heart as she navigated prison.

While she was incarcerated, both the state and her own family pressured her to accept a plea deal that would free her if she incriminated Sostre by falsely claiming that he sold drugs at the bookstore. Every time she appeared before the parole board, the commissioners repeatedly asked if she was ready to tell the truth — or, as Pointer described it, “tell a lie on this man so he can stay in jail for the rest of his life” — and she steadfastly refused to do so. Her resistance was rooted in her belief that the state had targeted Sostre for his community work. “I knew it wasn’t right for me to tell a lie on somebody,” she told me. Sostre was “doing things in the community, like making sure our community got Black history.” She said the state had “invaded our privacy, arrested us, and charged us with something that we didn’t do.” Pointer’s mother once brought her children to a visitation to try to sway her to accept the deal. She told me, “I ended the visit before it was over because I was so pissed and hurt that she would do that when I told her I don’t want my kids up there. I don’t want them to see me like this. I don’t want to hurt my children.” Back at her prison cell, she remembered “banging and kicking the door,” yelling at the guards to “open this motherfucker.”

Pointer managed to avoid any further encounters with the police or prisons, which was difficult in a city known for its racist police department and abusive cops. Although the Buffalo Police Department has attempted to rebrand itself in recent years by sponsoring summer youth programs and recruiting Black residents and other people of color, Pointer’s and Sostre’s cases remind us of the police’s true intentions: surveilling and suppressing the kind of revolutionary ideas for Black liberation outside the construction of the state. It is no coincidence that Pointer and Sostre’s 1967 arrests occurred 0.3 miles away from the 2022 mass shooting at Tops. They were organizing in the heart of Black Buffalo.

It is unfortunate that it took a mass shooting for a racial reckoning, but New York State government pledged $50 million in investments and federal funding to support East Buffalo a month after the mass shooting. Although some residents called for more police officers in the neighborhood and greater security measures, demands for more mutual aid, food co-ops, and community-led initiatives won out. Yet almost three years later, we do not know how that money was spent or who received funding.

The exoneration campaign aims to pressure Buffalo to acknowledge the direct role it played in oppressing the city’s Black intellectual and political life. It extends the legacy of the Afro-Asian Bookshops by highlighting the importance of community-centered physical and intellectual spaces as necessary meeting grounds for people to strategize, exchange ideas, and fellowship with one another. A central campaign demand is for the city to return the vacant plot of land where the Jefferson Avenue bookstore was situated to local residents for community purposes. In collaboration with the Buffalo Syllabus, the campaign will run a freedom school focused on systemic issues plaguing Black Buffalo and solutions for imagining an abolitionist approach to community harm and repair. Black Buffalo’s survival depends on recovering what the police tried to steal from us: the revolutionary possibility of community building and political study.

What happened to Geraldine Pointer and Martin Sostre reminds us never to underestimate the lengths to which the state will go to violently attack dreams of Black liberation and the power of everyday people to courageously resist such oppression.