CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE

By EDWARD BARNES/BUFFALO

DISCRIMINATION WAS ONCE DEFINED by where you were allowed to sit on the bus; today it may have more to do with where the bus is allowed to go.

Cynthia Wiggins was a 17-year-old single mother struggling toward a better life. She was engaged to be married and had dreams of being a doctor. Every weekday she boarded the No. 6 bus in her predominantly black Buffalo, New York, neighborhood for the 50-minute ride to Cheektowaga, a white suburb, where she worked as a cashier at Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips in the glittering, white-marbled Walden Galleria Mall. Often during the day, charter buses would pull into the Galleria parking lot and disgorge shoppers from as far away as Canada. But the city bus wasn't allowed on mall property. Wiggins had to get out 300 yards away on Walden Avenue, a busy seven-lane highway with no sidewalk. On the morning of Dec. 14, mounds of snow lined the shoulder. Wiggins was almost across the highway when the light changed, and she was hit by a 10-ton dump truck. She died of her injuries on Jan. 2.

Soon after her death, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which oversees public transportation in the area, released internal documents to show it had tried for more than eight years to get the mall owners, the Syracuse-based Pyramid Companies, to allow the No. 6 bus to stop in the mall's parking lot. A Pyramid official blames the N.F.T.A. for not moving the bus stop to a safer spot on the mall's perimeter. But a former owner of a shoe store at the Galleria came forward to say that in his lease negotiations with the mall, a Pyramid official had assured him that "you'll never see an inner-city bus on the mall premises." Henry Louis Taylor, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, calls this "sanitized, guiltless racism." According to Warren Galloway, head of Buffalo's Operation PUSH, "It is a kind of racism that is often played out in battles between cities and suburbs. It doesn't directly say no blacks allowed, but the effect is the same."

For years, Galloway says, the mostly white suburbs around Buffalo have been hostile to minorities. Security guards and police keep blacks under surveillance, he claims, and even have a special lingo for this detail. "Radio calls would say, 'We are stopping a unit," Galloway says, "which is an acronym for 'Unwanted Nigger In Town.'" (Police deny using this term.)

The cruelest injustice, however, involves public transportation--because jobs in Erie County, as elsewhere around the country, have been migrating to the suburbs, where they often become inaccessible to inner-city blacks. Several new industrial parks north of Buffalo, for example, have roads that are too narrow and have no turnaround room for the cumbersome buses that ply big city routes. Kenneth Cowdery, who runs a job-training center in Buffalo, says he saw more than 100 jobs go unfilled last year because his mostly black clients couldn't find a way to get to work.

Buffalo is hardly unique in this respect. In suburbs across the U.S., "there is a tendency to want to form separate localities so you can regulate who lives there and who shops there," says Margaret Weir, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Communities can't do it by racial restrictions because that's illegal. But they can do it through other rules and regulations." Says Henry Cisneros, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: "Success and prestige today means not having to look at people who are poor. That's what that bus stop at the mall said: 'Don't remind us; don't force us to see it.'"

In Cobb County, Georgia, Speaker Newt Gingrich's district, Republican state senator Chuck Clay fought unsuccessfully to prevent the intermingling of the county's transit system with that of metropolitan Atlanta because he feared that the local mall would be invaded by "bands of urban Atlanta teenagers...who aren't there to try on suits." In Pelham, New York, the mayor recently called for the demolition of a footbridge that spans the Hutchinson River Parkway and links wealthy, largely white Pelham with poorer, racially mixed Mount Vernon. And Washington's exclusive Georgetown neighborhood, home to many members of Congress, opted out of the district's Metro system.

Now, in Buffalo at least, things may be starting to change. After Cynthia Wiggins' death, most citizens declared themselves to be horrified and shamed by the mall's policies. Perhaps because of a threatened boycott by the Urban League, the N.A.A.C.P. and the Buffalo Teachers Federation, the Galleria and two other local malls all quickly agreed to put city bus stops on their property. The No. 6 now has a convenient stop in front of Kaufmann's, just a few steps from Arthur Treacher's. But Cynthia Wiggins will never get to use it.

--With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and Greg Fulton/Atlanta

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN/WASHINGTON AND GREG FULTON/ATLANTA