Filmmaker, curator and all-around media guy Doug Ruffin has turned his love for the City of Buffalo into a YouTube channel highlighting the history of the city’s African American community.
Saturday evening Ruffin premiers Buffalo Stories on the Big Screen, a film that takes a look at the historic Michigan Avenue African American Heritage Corridor.
Ruffin is the Founder of Urban Legacy Films.
A Buffalo native currently living in Washington, D.C., Ruffin said snippets, news casts and interviews with prominent members of Buffalo’s Black community—both past and present was put together to create this film.
It’s those old news stories from a time many of us cannot remember or weren’t even alive to witness that Ruffin said need to be memorialized.
“It was a news story from the old television show, Afro Central from 1979,” Ruffin said of one his favorite episodes from his Buffalo History Channel YouTube channel. “They had a news package on the Color Musicians Club. I think they were celebrating their I think 60th anniversary and it just showed old footage of Michigan Avenue and the colored musicians club and some of the past presidents giving the history of it in 1979, which is which was an amazing, amazing film to watch.”
The movie also includes stories about the old Michigan Avenue YMCA and Little Harlem—two buildings from bygone eras that no longer exist.
Also sharing her stories ahead of the screening is Dr. Eva Doyle—a champion for Buffalo’s Black community going back decades.
“This has really been an honor for me,” Ruffin said. “I've known Dr. Doyle ever since I was a child. The significance of it is just be it have the opportunity to share the stage with Mrs. Doyle I mean I'm honored to just do that because she's one of the people that I've learned from.”
What Ruffin hopes people take away from his film is that there is a connection between the past and the present within the Michigan Avenue Corridor and more history to make.
