By Elmer Ploetz

Jerry Ross has been in “exile” from Buffalo for roughly 50 years now, but one of his paintings has come home. 

Ross’ portrait of the late Martin Sostre was acquired by the Burchfield Penney Art Center in 2021 and is on display as part of the exhibition “The Unseen: Works from the Collection,” which is on display until Oct. 27. The painting was based on Sostre’s mugshot. 

The painting is on display along with artworks from Ross’ sister, Diane Bush, a prominent artist as well. (More on their artwork HERE).

The exhibition of the Sostre painting is particularly timely because a movement has been growing to vacate the convictions of Sostre and Geraldine Robinson Pointer. Sostre, who ran the Afro-Asian Bookstore, a black radical bookstore, and Robinson, who helped hi with the store, were arrested in 1967 and convicted of selling drugs. 

Sostre later received clemency after a key informant recanted and light was shined on police behavior during the case. One of the police officers involved in Sostre’s case was caught stealing drugs from police storage to plant on another person, Ross said. Robinson, meanwhile,  served her shorter prison term and suffered the loss of custody of her children for 2½ years. 

There is an effort underway to vacate the convictions, and a short documentary on the case will be shown tonight (Aug. 15, 2024) at the Merriweather Library, 1324 Jefferson Ave., in Buffalo. Robinson has been attending events in the efforts to clear her name. 

The library is roughly a block away from where the Afro-Asian Bookstore was in 1967. You can find out more about Sostre’s legacy HERE. 

For Ross (who was known as Jerry Gross during his growing up in the Buffalo area), the story is personal. He was a friend and supporter of Sostre and led the effort to support Sostre as leader of the Martin Sostre Defense Committee. Ross was also a member of “The Buffalo Nine,” a group of anti-draft protesters who stood trial after they were arrested when U.S. marshals, federal agents and Buffalo police stormed the Unitarian church on Elmwood Avenue where they had sought sanctuary. 

In a recent long-distance conversation with Ross and Bush, they laid out the narrative of those intense and tumultuous years. 

“I was active against the war, and I was chairman of Youth Against War and Fascism, which was a socialist youth group,” Ross said. “We’d go downtown to look around, especially in the black community, to see what was going on. 

“We came across Martin’s bookstore, and I went in. I was surprised to see all these books that you could not find in the UB bookstore, ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ writings of Ho Chi Minh, books on black history, a lot of books on black history. It was just a wealth of radical books.”

But in 1960s Buffalo, that brought unwelcome attention from the authorities. Ross said that a Buffalo police officer came to Sostre’s store and and told Sostre, “Martin, we don’t like you selling these kind of books. And if you continue, there might be some problems.”

Not long after, there was a fire in a nearby tavern. Ross said the Buffalo Fire Department took the opportunity to break the windows of Sostre’s store and soak his inventory of books, records, carvings and memorabilia – despite the fact there was no fire there. 

“When I found this happened, I rushed down there,” Ross said, “and I said, ‘Martin, what can I do? I know the students at UB, my group, each of us have a collection of radical books. We could contribute them to you.’ And he said, ‘Please, please, do whatever you can.’ So we all brought boxes and boxes of books from campus and from our own collections to restore his bookstore. It took a little while.”

Then came the riots of 1967, a violent urban outburst that reshaped Buffalo and Western New York – and that has been largely ignored by mainstream media in the region as decades and anniversaries have gone by. Sostre always called it the Black Rebellion, Ross said. A brief and inadequate history of the Buffalo riots is on Wikipedia. 

In the fallout and fingerpointing afterward, Sostre and his girlfriend, Robinson, were arrested and charged with selling heroin and manufacturing Molotov cocktails. 

“We woke up to find the headlines, ’Martin X arrested for riot and heroin.’” Ross said. “And I knew it was a complete frame-up, because just the kind of person Martin was. He wasn’t a drug user or seller or anything like that. So it looked like it was a political hit. 

“So I rushed down to the courthouse. And when he was being arraigned, I actually got a few feet away from him in the very front row of the court, and I said, ‘Martin, can I form a defense committee to defend you?’ He said, ‘Yes, Jerry, do whatever you can.’  … And that was the beginning of my being chair of the Martin Sostre Defense Committee.”

The trial dragged on. Buffalo Police Det. Mike Amico (later the Erie County sheriff) said at the time of the arrest that there was film evidence of Sostre selling drugs, but there was no film to be found when the trial arrived. 

Ross sat through the entire trial and saw Sostre gagged and bound after – serving as his own attorney – he referred to the “lily white” jury and compared the city to the southern states. Sostre eventually received a sentence of 43 years; Robinson was convicted of other charges and sentenced to 1-3 years in prison.

Ross, meanwhile, faced his own legal problems. He was part of the “Buffalo Nine,” a group of anti-war, anti-draft students. When two draft resisters sought refuge in the Elmwood Avenue Unitarian Church, Ross was one of the people joining them for support. 

When law enforcement stormed the church, Ross was among those arrested and charged with assault. Two hung juries later, Ross was a free man … but not really. 

He says he fled Buffalo because of constant harassment by the FBI. According to a 1988 article in the Buffalo News, an FBI memo had described him as “scurrilously critical of U.S. policies in Vietnam.” The FBI repeatedly visited the local draft board to try to get it to induct Gross into the military, but Gross’ repeated arrests for anti-war related activities complicated issues and helped him avoid the draft. FBI agents even visited his boss at the grocery store where Gross worked. 

The mainstream media added to the pressure.

“They ran cartoons all the time in the Buffalo News depicting protesters as scruffy hippie anarchist types that were dangerous and making us look like the worst characters in the world,” Ross said. “That was the daily pablum fed to the masses of Buffalo.” 

After the second trial, the government decided not to pursue another trial and Gross left town. He took Sostre’s case to Amnesty International, which wound up declaring Sostre a “Prisoner of Conscience” after Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov took up his cause. That eventually led to the case coming to the attention of Gov. Hugh Carey, who granted Sostre clemency in 1975, with his release in 1976. 

Ross, meanwhile, changed his name from Gross to Ross; he felt the FBI seemed less inclined to hound him after he did so. He traveled to Europe, Arizona and, eventually, Oregon.  

He turned to painting and built a career doing that (see accompanying story), while also maintaining some contact with Sostre until Sostre’s death in 2015 at age 92. 

He painted Sostre based on Sostre’s mugshot, he said, and the painting was purchased by Ron Ford, a mutual friend of Ross and Sostre. Ford donated it to the Burchfield Penney. 

Ross said that other than for a reunion of the “Buffalo Nine” in 1988, he hasn’t returned to Buffalo since the 1970s.  

But his portrait of Sostre has.