As an outspoken activist for Gulf Coast residents, Monique Harden has gained a reputation as the first line of defense for the rights of citizens to live in healthy and safe conditions — even during disasters. Through protests, punditry, and outreach campaigns, this attorney fights for communities affected by environmental inequality.

Monique Harden is making history … by calling for justice against environmental racism. As an attorney and co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a Louisiana non-profit, Harden serves as vocal opponent to government practices that put African-American communities at risk. One high-profile case the attorney took on was in Mossville, Louisiana, a predominately African-American town and one of the most heavily polluted areas in the country. Harden works closely with and on behalf of local residents, fighting for increased government regulation of industrial plants close to the town, along with accessible health care and relocation assistance.

Harden has an uncomfortably easy time finding work fighting environmental racism — minorities are 79 percent more likely to live in polluted environments than white people in the U.S., according to an Associated Press analysis of the 2000 census. And these numbers don’t take into account the 2005 catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, or the 2010 BP oil spill, both of which disproportionately affected African-Americans.

Harden continues the diligent fight for the rights of Katrina victims, many of whom are still struggling more than five years after the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. “A good part of the beginning of the human rights violations took place on TV screens,” Harden told the Associated Press in April. “It’s no longer on TV, but those human rights violations have moved into other areas around housing and racial equality, and our government has been called out.”

In her own words …

“It means they are going to have a legal judgment on their right to live in a healthy environment,” Harden told CNN on an international court’s decision to rule on a Mossville court case against the U.S. government. “They are hard-working, good people. And they want nothing more than what anybody would want, which is a safe place to raise their children.”

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