THE CORRIDOR: Episode 5
You’ve Got to Fight
People have objected to the toxic side effects of industry in Louisiana and across the country for a long time. A swell of activism in the 70s and 80s connected civil rights with environmental issues and public health, so that by the 1990s, it seemed like the nation was entering an environmental justice renaissance. And yet, low income and minority communities have remained at risk. In this episode, we follow the history of environmental justice activism and how the Corridor became a poster child for unevenly distributed pollution.
Guests
beverly wright
pat bryant
dollie burwell
Dollie Bullock Burwell is a longtime North Carolina community leader, civil rights advocate, and pioneer of the environmental justice movement. A native of Vance County, she rose to national prominence in 1982 when she helped lead the historic Warren County protests against the dumping of toxic PCB-contaminated soil in a predominantly Black community—an effort widely recognized as the birth of the modern environmental justice movement. Dollie has dedicated decades to public service, including working on Capitol Hill for multiple members of Congress—serving as Director of Constituent Affairs for Congressman G.K. Butterfield, District Director for Congressman Frank Ballance, and Director of Field Services for Congresswoman Eva Clayton.
dorceta taylor
Credits
The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is the lead reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. Executive produced by Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
Transcript
[00:00] INTRODUCTION
AMY: You’re listening to The Corridor, presented by Threshold. To learn more and support our work, go to threshold podcast dot org.
CHARLES: As Christians, we dare not deny but openly confess that we have been unfaithful stewards of the earth and poor custodians of nature. We have depleted the soil, polluted the air, and poisoned the lakes and streams, all in the name of progress, production, prosperity, and pride.
JAY: This is Reverend Dr. Charles Adams, a pastor and civil rights leader from Detroit. It’s 1993, and he’s speaking to an audience of Black church leaders in Washington, D.C.
CHARLES: God have mercy upon us and grant us wisdom and courage to turn from our moribund ways of overuse, overconsumption, and economic development, purchased with the non-circulating coinage of an offended heaven and a destroyed earth.
JAY: Standing behind the Reverend is Vice President Al Gore. And Al Gore...is nodding along.
CHARLES: We are also African Americans, descendants of people brought to America in chains as commodities to be exploited, depleted, and destroyed along with the environment. We are the descendants of those who survived the torment of the middle passage, who survived 244 years of slavery, who survived 130 years of only partially and imperfectly fulfilled freedom, who survived 130 years of segregation, discrimination, intimidation, investigation, and dehumanization.
AFFIRMATIVE MURMURING
JAY: The Reverend is picking up steam, and Al Gore’s eyebrows raise as if to say—the Reverend has a point.
CHARLES: Mr. Vice President, we need jobs. We want technologies. We need factories and we want commerce. But only if these things are slaves to nature and humankind, and not the masters of nature nor of humankind. Only if economic growth and trade enhances human life and does not destroy human life, can we accept it. Mr. Vice President, our babies are choking, our children are sick, our people are dying, but we plead no special exemption from environmental disasters. We have met as an exploited people to plead and to work for economic enrichment and environmental enhancement of all the people and places of the world. If toxic waste is not safe enough to be dumped in the United States, it is not safe enough to be dumped in Ghana, Liberia, or Somalia.
JAY: After decades of industrial disasters and toxic chemical exposure in Black communities, calls for environmental justice were reaching a fever pitch. Study after study had shown that pollution was a serious health issue, and that some people were suffering a lot more than others. This conference was the first time Black church leaders met together to explicitly connect the environment to civil rights and economic justice. And Reverend Adams was fired up.
CHARLES: Mr. Vice President, we are here to help pass any legislation to protect the environment, to create any program of both natural and human restoration, to the end that every valley will be exalted, every hill will be green, every river purified, every wrong rectified, all life fortified and God glorified, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.
JAY: The Reverend had good reason to be energized. After decades of activism, it seemed like environmental justice was becoming a national priority.
JAY: In this episode, we’re going to follow the huge groundswell of activism that brought national attention to environmental justice, and gave the stretch of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge a new nickname - Cancer Alley.
JAY: I’m Jaha Nailah Avery and this is The Corridor.
[05:00] A SEG
DOLLIE: My name is Dollie Burwell, and I am a community activist. That's what I call myself, a community activist and organizer. Many people called me the mother of the environmental justice movement.
JAY: Dollie Burwell was there at the start of the movement that brought civil rights and environmental activism together in the United States: the 1982 protests over a toxic landfill in Warren County, North Carolina. The state wanted a place to store 60,000 tons of bad soil contaminated with PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls [bi-FEN-nuhlz] - these petrochemicals were known to cause cancer, but before being banned in the 1970s, they had been widely used in industry.
DOLLIE: I lived in Warren County. And in the evenings when I drive home, I would always listen to the local radio station, W -A -R -R. And then I heard that Warren County was one of the counties that was being considered for the landfill. And of course, I immediately began to talk to other people in the community, and people in my church.
JAY: Dollie and her neighbors worried that the landfill would pollute the water in their wells. But at a public meeting, the EPA told residents not to worry about it. Residents weren’t convinced so they hired their own expert who said the exact opposite. The landfill would threaten their drinking water. Warren County wasn’t the only option for the landfill: there was another site in a majority white county. Warren County was majority Black. It was also one of the poorest counties in the state.
DOLLIE: Well, many people in Warren County felt like because Warren County didn't have a hospital, didn't have doctors, and the soil did not meet EPA's criteria were, that there was no way the state of North Carolina or the federal government would put a PCB dump in Warren County.
JAY: But then:
DOLLIE: I heard on that same radio station, driving from work, that the state of North Carolina had decided to put the PCB landfill in Warren County. And I’ll tell you, Jaha, I had so many emotions at that time. First, it was a sense of just disappointment, fear, agony, anguish. I lived in that community. And I felt like a decision had been made without any consideration from the people who lived in that community.
JAY: Dollie began organizing in her church, and meeting with other people in the community.
DOLLIE: I had been given opportunities with both the United Church of Christ and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to make connections with people from all over the country, as well as learn skills and organize. So I began really organizing in the Black church.
JAY: Things were happening at the state and national level, too. Warren County filed a federal lawsuit to try to prevent the purchase of the land. That slowed things, but didn’t stop the landfill. Then the local NAACP chapter filed suit. They alleged that the Warren County site didn’t meet EPA requirements for a landfill, and that it was actually chosen because the residents were poor and Black. That lawsuit was denied.
DOLLIE: And we decided that the only thing we could do was protest.
JAY: And so in 1982, when the landfill opened, the first truckload of PCB-laced soil was met with hundreds of protestors.
DOLLIE: My daughter Kimberly was 10 years old and on the first day of the march. And I really had gotten her ready for school thinking that she had caught the bus. And when I came back through, she was sitting on the couch waiting for me to go to the march. And of course, when I insisted that she go to school and she was like, well, mama, if you're going to march, why can't I? And I relented and she went to the march.
JAY: The protests continued every day for six weeks. Hundreds gathered at the church each morning and marched to the landfill. Some days, Dollie didn’t just march…she put her body on the line.
DOLLIE: I think it was five of us who decided not to march to the entrance of the landfill that morning but to walk right out in front of the church and lay our bodies in the road to stop the trucks. the trucks were backed up all the way almost back from Colist Rains Church down 401, almost back to Lewisburg because they wasn't going to run over us. And that was the only route they had to get to the landfill.
JAY: Over weeks of protest, hundreds of people were arrested. Dollie herself was arrested five times. People pitched in any way they could.
DOLLIE: The people who were not comfortable getting arrested, they cooked, they fed the protesters, they brought food for the protesters, they prayed for the protesters. I never felt like any harm was going to come to me while protesting because I knew that I had some of the elders at my church and and other churches who were praying. And I had no qualms about laying my body in the road because I knew people were praying that we wouldn't get run over.
JAY: The protests made national news. The Washington Post called it the “Biggest Civil Rights Movement Since the 1960s.”
NEWS CLIP: The signs and chants of the protesters made clear their opposition to having the toxic chemical buried in their county.
ARCHIVAL, PROTESTER: No PCB in North Carolina. We don’t want it. We don’t need it.
ARCHIVAL, POLICE: You’re all under arrest. Let’s load them on the bus.
DOLLIE: The community came together. The whole community came together. We felt like we had no choice but to do. And we were not trying to start a movement. We were just standing up for what we knew was right.
JAY: Despite these efforts, the trucks kept coming. The last truckload of dirt arrived in October 1982, and the landfill was sealed a few weeks later. And officials maintained that it was super, super safe.
ARCHIVAL, NC ATTORNEY GENERAL: It is as safe as can humanly be made possible.
ARCHIVAL, NC GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL: This landfill is safe. If anything this landfill is over-designed.
JAY: But Dollie and her neighbors had been right to worry about the risk. Over the following decades, water leached out of the landfill and contaminated the soil and air. In 2003, more than twenty years after the protests, the landfill closed after a multi-million dollar clean-up effort.
JAY: The protests in Warren County brought national attention to the high levels of toxic pollution faced by BIPOC people and lower income communities. One protester, civil rights leader Dr. Benjamin Chavis, was sitting in jail in Warren County when he coined a new term for this unfair burden: environmental racism.
DORCETA: through history, systematically, we see certain hazards and risks and inequities around environmental issues that are born or foisted off on communities of color, particularly black communities.
JAY: This is Dr. Dorceta Taylor, professor of environmental justice at Yale.
JAY: Dorceta says that what we now call environmental racism has been happening for centuries.
DORCETA: All the way back to 1793 in places like Philadelphia, where when you look at the black communities in those cities, they lived in some of the worst housing. They were experiencing lack of jobs, poor water quality, poor air quality…We also see from very early American cities that industry was allowed to pollute and to deprive black communities of healthy environments.
JAY: And this practice of forcing Black people to live in certain neighborhoods that cities had divested from continued into the 20th century. It was a practice known as redlining - where banks and lenders literally drew red lines on maps around places where Black people lived.
DORCETA: Once those red lines were drawn around in neighborhoods, then those families who lived in the redlined neighborhood could not get a loan to buy a house. They could not get any money to fix up existing houses…Schools were not necessarily built in these neighborhoods. They were completely disinvested.
JAY: Black people were often blamed for creating run-down, undesirable neighborhoods, and for the living conditions that followed, but Dorceta says this belief is backwards.
DORCETA: They blamed those things on being black, but there was nothing about being black that created those things. It's the racism around who gets to live where and whose water is cleaned, who gets streets built for them, who gets to go to school. That made a difference in the environmental outcomes.
JAY: Dorceta and many other scholars have shown that racist policies from the past still shape our lives in the present. Redlining, for example, was outlawed in the 1960s, but the places with the most toxic waste today tend to be places that were once redlined in the past. Addressing that unequal burden, and the policies that created it, is really what environmental justice is about.
DORCETA: It's not just the matter of identifying this is environmental racism, but it's to call attention to it, to get it cleaned up and get communities organized and being in charge of their own fate.
JAY: That kind of justice is what Dollie Burwell and her neighbors were looking for in the 1980s, and it’s what people in the corridor are looking for today.
JAY: But one of the big challenges in fighting environmental racism is that neither civil rights laws nor environmental laws were really designed to address it. And although people experienced it, they didn’t have much data to back them up. But the protests in Warren County triggered a series of investigations into the issue.
JAY: In 1983, a federal study found that 3 out of 4 hazardous waste landfills in the Southeast were located in predominantly poor, Black communities.
JAY: Three years later, a national study found that 3 out of 5 Black and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with toxic waste sites. The report concluded that it was virtually impossible that these patterns resulted by chance.
JAY: And as evidence of this racial disparity started to pile up, so did news of toxic disasters all over the country. Tuning into your nightly news brought headlines like these:
NEWS CLIPS: A toxic time bomb is ticking in California, as the governor and the legislature argue over how to clean up the mess industry has left behind…The toxic fire raged out of control for ten hours, fueled by thousands of barrels of unknown chemical waste. Every time one of these drums went up in the air and exploded and all it did was rain the residue of the chemicals and whatever else were in the drums upon us…The potential for a major chemical explosion and resultant toxic fumes led police to cordon off a half mile surrounding the plant …Burning skin and burning lungs after being soaked in a raining chemical shower…I called the family and and said nobody drinks this water. Brushing their teeth with it or cooks with it until we have it checked out…Hundreds of millions of gallons of an industrial toxic wastes…35 million tons of toxic waste dumped at 50,000 sites…I think we have to stop discharging the toxic organic chemicals into the river…Dioxin, one of the most lethal chemical ever created by humans, raised fears to a new level. The United States Army knew what was in that canal. And still they let them children go to that school. They let citizens build homes over here.
JAY: If you’ve heard of one toxic waste disaster, it might be Love Canal. Love Canal was a neighborhood near Niagara Falls in New York. A company spent decades recklessly dumping there. Then the land was sold. A neighborhood filled in the site. But it became a crisis in the 1970s as lethal chemicals seeped up from the ground.
LOVE CANAL ARCHIVAL: Blue, green and red chemical sludge bubbled up in the backyards and basements of homes in Niagara Falls…Residents are totally disillusioned with the state of New York and feel they may die at love Canal…What are you gonna do for my kids? What are you going to do? The damage is done, man, the damage is done…I'm not a scientist. My data is not useless. It is not pointless. And it's not valid…Finally, in August 1978, the state of New York declared Love Canal an emergency area and offered to purchase the over 200 homes uninhabitable because of chemical contamination.
JAY: Then, in 1984, the worst industrial accident in history happened. A gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Thirty eight hundred people died and more than two hundred thousand got sick. One year later, another Union Carbide plant set off a panic in West Virginia when it also had a chemical leak.
JAY: These horrible accidents got a lot of attention, much more than communities get around the everyday dangers they face from exposure to toxic chemicals. That attention got people talking and demanding action. And it led to new legislation to try to prevent more disasters from happening.
JAY: A big one was the Toxics Release Inventory, which tracks where and when toxic chemicals are released across the country. For the first time, people could find out what chemicals were being released into their communities. It’s probably no surprise that almost every year since the inventory was created, Louisiana has been ranked number 2, just behind Texas, in the amount of toxic chemicals released.
JAY: Louisiana also had many of its own toxic disasters. In 1982, a train with dozens of chemical tankers derailed, setting off a series of explosions and fires that required thousands of people to evacuate.
NEWS CLIPS: Cleanup continues in one of the state's worst rail disasters…Even hazardous materials experts called to the site were unsure of how the spilled chemicals, when mixed, might react. The only solution, in some cases, has been to let certain mixtures burn…they won't say anything about their being good over here or not. They just say that in my area that the air is bad. It doesn't make any sense. How can they cut off one area and not the other? … Residents were advised to throw out any food that might have been exposed to air. Discard all vegetables in their gardens and to completely vacuum their houses and wash all dishes, pots, pans and clothing…Walking in those plants, knowing where that stuff came from. Knowing the danger that they are. I'm sure not satisfied, and watching people talking about it now…The state has no plans to continue regular testing in Livingston after the cleanup is complete. Many state officials involved in the cleanup say they've learned a lot from this first time situation. And apparently, as far as health concerns go, even though they've never handled such an incident. They feel they've learned just about all they'll need to know.
JAY: Gas leaks, oil spills, and explosions occurred all along the Mississippi river corridor. Once, during a hurricane, a barge carrying enough chlorine gas to kill 40,000 people sank in the Mississippi near Baton Rouge. And all over the state, there were open chemical waste pits, so many that the state couldn’t even keep track.
ARCHIVAL, LPB 1978: The Silent Disaster. It moves across Louisiana in a shroud of anonymity, moving unnoticed across the bayous and down the roads. And once behind the high fences and locked gates it's dumped into pits or pumped into the ground. It's the byproduct of a modern society, a witch's brew of chemicals and waste that nobody wants anymore. Even state officials don't know how many waste pits there are across Louisiana.
ARCHIVAL, LPB: They first dump all the waste in the pits. It mixes with whatever else is in the pits. No one in state government knows what's in the pits, but this has been going on for several decades, pumping the chemical pollution and waste in the ground. And nobody ever cared. Nobody was ever concerned. And then love Canal occurred in New York. It's just surfacing all over the country.
ARCHIVAL, LPB: Gentlemen, do you think the environment is becoming a hot issue, or is it just something we've been writing a lot of stories about because it's slow?
JAY: In the 1980s, Louisiana led the nation in chemical accidents. Those that bore the brunt of these accidents started organizing.
PAT: People were asking and demanding that the chemicals be cut back or stopped.
JAY: This is Mr. Pat Bryant. He came to New Orleans in the 1980s to help people in public housing organize for better living conditions. And in Louisiana, that was an uphill battle.
PAT: when you teach people what they can do under the law, and then the people who's supposed to enforce the law are doing nothing. Then you've got to fight.
JAY: Pat himself grew up in a housing project in North Carolina, and gravitated toward the movement for tenants rights.
PAT: I've always been sensitive that where we live was not the optimum environment. We lived near the slaughterhouses, the paper mills, and that was always objectionable.
JAY: Pat started working with public housing residents in St Charles Parish, right outside New Orleans, and began hearing about problems that went far beyond just bad landlords.
PAT: They were living not too far from chemical plants. The poisoning was so bad that the people were replacing shingles on houses about every eight years. People were suffering from various types of cancers and other ailments, respiratory ailments. And people began to tell me, look, we fought the landlords, we can fight these companies that are poisoning us. And that's how I got pushed into it.
JAY: Pat began meeting with other organizers to talk about what they could do to help people in the corridor.
PAT: We saw this as as political. And and we saw it as one of the first things we needed to do was just have a massive education program…
JAY: Organizers like Pat wanted to make this place famous—infamous, really. They wanted everybody to know what was happening here, and they knew part of that was giving it a memorable name. A lot of names and slogans were proposed, but one stood out more than the others.
PAT: And we began to say that, you know, this was cancer alley, which infuriated the companies. And public officials.
JAY: In 1988, they organized the Great Louisiana Toxics March, which was an 11 day protest to educate and raise awareness. The march traveled along River Road from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. It followed, in part, the route of the 1811 slave uprising through the parishes of St John and St Charles, the same parishes that are now the heart of Louisiana’s petrochemical industry.
PAT: We marched every day down the river road. We had meetings in schools and churches explaining the effect of chemicals we had at this point. We had gotten the toxic release inventory in place. And we were able to tell people what chemicals were coming out of each plant and what the impact of those, you know, what those chemicals would do to the body.
JAY: In Baton Rouge, activists hung a banner resembling a giant check. It was made out to the Louisiana legislature on behalf of “Cancer Alley, Louisiana,” and was intended as a criticism of politicians who prioritized industry lobbyists over community.
MARCH SOUNDS
JAY: Thousands joined the march. Jesse Jackson was there. So was Martin Luther King III. So were lots and lots of police.
JAY: Pat himself was no stranger to being arrested while protesting. He’s been arrested more than 60 times in his life, including multiple times during the toxics march.
JAY: Here’s Pat speaking on the roadside during the march:
PAT: This is a little man’s movement…the most powerful part of any movement is when the little people at the grassroots speak.
JAY: And as pressure mounted, national politicians started turning their attention to Louisiana.
PAT: You know, the fight had intensified and we were pushing Congress to pass laws, pass laws that would protect communities. So we were there fighting for the survival of communities.
ARCHIVAL TAPE FROM THE TOXICS MARCH: Fight the power, do the right thing. Clean up the water. Do the right thing. Stop cancer, do the right thing…
JAY: After the break: The national spotlight turns to Cancer Alley.
Break
[28:20] B SEGMENT
CLINTON: I am glad to be here. Just in time for the jazz festival but I left my saxophone at the White House.
Crowd laughter
JAY: Welcome back, I’m JNA and that was president Bill Clinton, visiting Louisiana shortly after his inauguration. Here he is in a different speech around the same time:
CLINTON: When we talk about environmental justice, we mean calling a halt to the poisoning and the pollution of our poorest communities, from our rural areas to our inner cities.
JAY: With marches and protests happening in communities across the country, environmental justice was rapidly moving from a local concern to a national one.
JAY: A few years earlier, President George H.W. Bush had established what became known as the Office of Environmental Justice at the EPA. Its mission was to listen to communities, get their concerns in front of policymakers, and funnel money into local projects.
JAY: It felt like things were really going to change, and one person was right in the thick of it.
BEVERLY: It was like just inertia to a certain extent of some kind that brought all of us together at the same time with the same thoughts.
JAY: This is Dr. Beverly Wright.
BEVERLY: I'm originally from New Orleans, Louisiana. Born and raised eight generations in that city. Can trace my family back to slaves on one side and free coloreds on the other. So we're a mixture of former free colors and slaves in the city of New Orleans.
JAY: Beverly is the founder and executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans. She’s spent nearly all of her professional life studying environmental justice. Like many people who grew up in southern Louisiana, she thought the sights and smells of industry were bad, but were also just a part of life.
BEVERLY: No one ever talked about the health effects and exposure rates to extremely toxic chemicals, most of which were carcinogens to the communities that were nearby. And I can remember riding to Baton Rouge on some Sunday evenings with my father to visit his aunties that lived there with my sister and brother in the back of the car, thinking just how smelly and foul odors we would be running into and just thinking, you know, this must not be good. And my dad would always respond when we would tease one another saying, oh, you pass gas, you know, how children will do. And daddy would say, oh, it smells like money. So my concept of the Mississippi chemical corridor was harmful in any way but something that brought progress to the state.
JAY: Beverly was in grad school in Buffalo during the disaster at Love Canal.
BEVERLY: My major professor’s husband was a psychologist, working on, you know, the psychological impacts of knowing that you've been living in a place that's killing you and your children.
JAY: But it wasn’t until a few years later, when she met pioneering sociologist Dr. Robert Bullard, that she really began to understand the toxic disaster unfolding back home in Louisiana.
BEVERLY: And so he approached me about this book that he was writing, and he wanted to look at Louisiana. And that was kind of my introduction to, quote, cancer alley, you know, like, finally opening my eyes and I'm like, hell, I'm talking about Love Canal. And here in Louisiana, I've grown up in a Love Canal ten times bigger than the one in Niagara Falls,. And so, you know, just a rude awakening of the amount of poison that was being released in the corridor and around the country as the environmental justice movement began to form.
JAY: Beverly spent the next several years teaching and working with Bullard and community groups across the South on environmental issues. In 1991, she served as a delegate to the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.
BEVERLY: And communities around the country began just rising up, you know, they were sick and they were trying to figure out why, but particularly in Louisiana this was happening.
JAY: Beverly’s work on race and pollution got her invited to a federal hearing on environmental equity in Baton Rouge in 1992. The hearing was part of a multi-year fact finding mission by the Louisiana Division of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
JAY: Although the Commission had been around since the 1950s, this was the first time they looked at how environmental policies connect to racial discrimination. It seemed like a sign that Beverly, alongside organizers like Dollie and Pat, were finally getting somewhere.
BEVERLY: I had been asked to testify at a civil rights hearing in Louisiana because the communities that live closest to these facilities were complaining that they had multiple people in their homes dying of cancer, that you know the screens were rusting, falling off their windows every three months, that all the small animals that they used to hunt had disappeared, that the moss was dying on the trees, that their cars had spots on them where it's like the paint was being eaten off the car but just on one side was downwind from the facilities and they really felt that they were sick and dying and all of this destruction was coming from the facilities but they had nowhere to prove it.
JAY: To prepare for the hearing, Beverly decided to do some of her own investigative work. She and some of her students hopped in her minivan and headed to the River Parishes.
BEVERLY: We went up River Road looking at where black people lived, how they were fence lines and these awful facilities and that we couldn't find white people anywhere near the facilities and asking the question what happened to white people. You know why is it just us from what I could see living closest to these facilities.
JAY: Beverly took what she saw and heard from that trip, along with all her previous work, to the Commission.
BEVERLY: I told them what I saw and that I thought that black people were being harmed, that they live closest to these facilities and was basically told Dr. Wright you can't say that, you have no proof of that, so they took it as just anecdotal ragings of you know a community person.
JAY: Even if they came at it from different angles, Beverly and the Commission did agree on one thing - there wasn’t enough research on what was really happening in these communities.
BEVERLY: And my response to them well it's not my job you know to say who's being affected I would assume it's the environmental protection agency's job to protect the health of communities you know living near facilities and you tell us if we're being affected how we're being affected and why we're being affected.
JAY: Dozens of other people spoke at the hearing, including housing activist Pat Bryant. He argued that current laws treated chemicals as innocent until proven guilty, allowing tons of new chemicals to be introduced without any knowledge of their impacts on human health.
JAY: A year after the hearings, the advisory committee released its report. They found that Louisiana allowed industry to disproportionately pollute Black communities in Cancer Alley. They also offered recommendations including creating new buffer zones around residential areas and improving communication with residents about new plants. Hold onto this because it won’t be the last time you hear this type of thing from government officials.
JAY: By the late 80s, people around the state were becoming vocal about the environmental impacts of industry, especially on BIPOC communities.
VOX of archival voices
JAY: Concerns about Cancer Alley were even making their way to the highest levels of government.
BILL CLINTON: I know quite a bit about where you live and I’ve been in that alley between New Orleans and Baton Rouge many many times. The cancer rate there is way above the national average.
JAY: This is President Bill Clinton again, this time during a Q&A with children at the White House. A young boy from Baton Rouge asked what the president planned to do about the high cancer rates in his hometown.
BILL CLINTON: And I think that there are two things we should be doing. We should be doing a lot more medical research to find out what causes these cancers. And we should invest more money there to do environmental clean-up.
JAY: Then a year later, a major announcement.
CAROL: Nobody can question that, for far too long, communities across this country -- low-income, minority communities -- have been asked to bear a disproportionate share of our modern industrial life.
JAY: This is Carol M. Browner, head of the EPA under President Clinton, at a press conference in 1994.
CAROL: Today's executive order is designed and will seek to bring justice to these communities. It will seek to involve these communities in the decision-making of the government, to give them access to the information they need to be real participants.
JAY: Here is the federal government acknowledging that pollution and health burdens were greater in poor and nonwhite communities in the United States.
CAROL: The president, joined by representatives from community groups across this country, just signed an executive order that will require all federal agencies to consider the issues of environmental justice in their decision-making.
JAY: The order directed federal agencies to actively consider the environmental and health impacts of their work on BIPOC and low-income people. It put EPA in charge of coordinating these efforts across federal agencies; and it instructed the federal government to do more research about who faced the biggest health risks from pollution.
JAY: EPA’s new Office of Environmental Justice had formed only the year before and was still - quite literally - getting itself together.
IRA FLATOW: What’s your phone number? For communities that want to reach you with no money and maybe help you get some money by calling their congresspeople or something.
JAY: Here’s the director of that office, Dr. Clarice Gaylord, on NPR’s Science Friday.
CLARICE GAYLORD: Well, just to show you how new we are, I don't really have a phone number, but, let me give you the number where I am now. Okay. I know my boss is going to love that. Okay. I'm at area code (202) 260-4467.
JAY: All of this felt like a big moment for environmental justice. What began in the streets of Warren County, North Carolina, had made it to the White House.
JAY: And more than any of the specifics, the federal government was acknowledging that environmental racism was a problem, and they were acting on it. And they were also saying: we got it wrong on this. Here’s Dr. Clarice Gaylord again, speaking in front of Congress in 1993:
CLARICE GAYLORD: First, you have to realize that EPA only officially accepted environmental justice, environmental racism, environmental equity as an issue in this agency in 1990. All of our risk assessment, all of our rulemaking, all of our policy development acted as if we were colorblind. Our standards were based on healthy white males. And that's how our agency operated. It wasn't until public pressure by outside environmental justice leaders like Reverend Ben Chavis, Bob Bullard, Beverly Wright and I can go on, on and on and on. That brought this issue to a head.
JAY: And not only that: the agency had been missing the forest for the trees.
CLARICE: We would go in and enforce our clean air laws, and leave. We'd go in and enforce our clean water laws. And leave… The agency is now realizing we're dealing with cumulative effects of exposure, not just air exposure, water exposure, contaminated foods. The agency has not thought that way. Another problem, as we're finding out, is that our communities, the communities that are or are at most risk, most times don't even know what their rights are under environmental laws. They don't know that they can review environmental impact statements. They don't know that they're entitled to health and safety data under our community Right to Know Laws. They don't know that they're entitled to public hearings.
JAY: Here is an EPA official saying: we’ve been going about this all wrong. And we’re trying to change. With the federal government focused on environmental justice, people started to realize that there were laws that the government could have been enforcing this whole time. Laws that had teeth.
CLARICE: We have identified the problems that we're facing and environmental injustices…as a violation of civil rights.
JAY: The EPA had been focused on environmental laws, but activists like Beverly, Pat, and Dollie had made the pollution in their communities an issue of civil rights, of basic justice.
CLARICE: The agency has not been effective in using laws on the books that could help this effort. I point to the civil rights laws, title six enforcement.
JAY: Title six, one piece of the massive Civil Rights Act of 1964, had been there this whole time.
CLARICE: Title six says we cannot get federal funds out to anybody that allows discrimination to occur. The agency dedicated only a half of a staff person to worry about the enforcement of this very important law. We have not been able to effectively use title six in our agency.
JAY: She said people in the government were not eager to make this issue about race.
CLARICE: There's just a reluctance to accept this as an issue…we're spending a lot of time educating the people within our agency. They're more able to accept that it might be an income related issue, but definitely it's not racial discrimination…
JAY: But people in the communities affected by industrial pollution thought maybe they could use this part of the Civil Rights Act to make the case that a clean environment wasn’t a side project, but a fundamental right, something that every person deserves. Here’s Dr. Beverly Wright again:
BEVERLY: Environmental justice is the creation of a world where all people are protected from environmental harm. They have access to clean air, clean water. It shouldn't be something we have to fight for, it should be a human right.
JAY: Next time on The Corridor…four decades after the environmental justice movement took its first steps, how one community brought the EPA to Louisiana, and tried to bring the law down on some of the worst pollution in America.
Credits
AMY: The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is our reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
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