August 28, 2013 will mark the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, which attracted hundreds of thousands to D.C. to call for economic equality. It was officially titled the “March for Jobs and Freedom,” but as people convene in the nation’s capital this weekend to commemorate the ’63 event with a new march, they will find that the scope of the original march demands have grown.
In addition to expanding to cover the needs of women and members of the LGBT community, the list of official “talking points” for the march on Saturday, organized by the National Action Network, now includes a call for greater environmental justice.
Environmentalism is colorblind
“If Dr. King were alive, he would say we want equal protection from environmental harms like pollution, poison, toxins in the water, and bad food products,” African-American environmental advocate and civil rights activist Van Jones told theGrio. “He would also say we want equal opportunity to the environmental benefits of organic food, solar panels, and clean energy, air, and water.”
Many people consider environmental movements to be “for white people,” and the ability to demand the type of safe environment Jones describes to be a product of white privilege. Most activists fighting global warming, pollution, and calling for food safety are often portrayed as white Americans holding picket signs in school cafeterias, or risking their lives at sea to save whales.
Studies show, however, that environmental hazards disproportionally plague communities of color. In 2005, the Associated Press reported that African-Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order aimed at preventing minority communities from suffering from adverse environmental burdens, but nearly ten years later, environmental justice issues continued to persist, as detailed by the AP story.
This is why the call for environmental equality is an important addition to the list of issues related to Saturday’s march, experts say.
“Black people have just as much as a claim on these issues as any other racial group,” said Jones. “It’s an absurd form of racism on our part to pretend that the only folks who have ever cared about the Earth and God’s creation are white people.”
The history of black environmental justice
In 1982, Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr., co-Founder of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and a former youth coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, coined the term “environmental racism” to refer to racial discrimination resulting from the disproportionate exposure of racial minorities to hazardous environments. These hazards include close proximity to waste treatment centers, landfills, and coal plants that produce toxic air pollutants, and the tendency for communities of color to be situated in disaster-prone areas.
One of the first environmental justice protests to gain national recognition was led by Dr. Chavis. In 1982, Chavis protested the burial of Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a classified toxic pollutant, in poor, rural African-American communities.
Chicago community activist Hazel Johnson became known as the mother of the environmental justice movement because of her work addressing injustices found at the Altgeld Gardens Housing Projects of Chicago’s Far South Side.
In Dreams from My Father, then-community organizer Barack Obama called the Altgeld projects, “a dump – and a place to house poor blacks.” In the 1980s, she learned that Altgeld was surrounded by about 50 documented landfills, and that there were more than 250 leaking underground storage tanks in the area. These toxic pollutants led to cancer deaths.
Johnson wielded the power of her organization, People for Community Recovery, to advocate for safe environmental conditions in the South Side. Her efforts led to President Clinton’s environmental justice executive order, which held the Environmental Protection Agency accountable for preventing hazardous environments from engulfing underserved communities.
In 1988, the North River Sewage Treatment Plant, located in Harlem from 137th to 145th street along the Hudson River, ignited a lawsuit from one of the first environmental organizations in New York State run by people of color – WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
“Certainly, when we first started, we felt that many of the issues that we were dealing with were a result of systemic racism – the fact that facilities could be moved to a community simply because the land was not as valued, and the people who lived there were not as valued,” said WE ACT Executive Director Peggy Shepard.
The plant was constructed to improve overall water quality in New York City, but many considered it to be a dumping ground in poorer communities. As a result of the lawsuit, WE ACT gained settlement funds to abate the environmental impact of the plant.
The need for environmental justice persists
More recent reports show that what some believe is environmental racism still exists.
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina emerged as one of the most glaring recent examples of an environmental injustice in national memory resulting from blacks being relegated to dangerous areas. In 2005, the hurricane devastated the Lower Ninth Ward more than anywhere else in the city, a geographically vulnerable, low-lying area of New Orleans with the highest rate of black home ownership. There was also much discussion of the slow aid efforts made to help this largely black population.
Some environmentalists who focus on race also tackle the issue differently by focusing on access to healthy food. One of the most famous food justice advocates, actor Wendell Pierce, co-founded Sterling Farms in New Orleans to provide fresh food to neighborhoods considered “food deserts.” These areas, frequently inhabited by people of color, often have little access to fresh, affordable fruits and vegetables, another detrimental environmental factor.
“These are issues across the country,” Pierce in an interview with NBC News. “When American industries sit on the sideline, me and my partners are saying it’s time to step off the sideline. We’re coming into those neighborhoods. Two thirds of Chicago is a food desert. Eighty percent of the neighborhoods are considered food deserts in the core of Detroit.”
The march towards environmental equality
Environmental justice advocates, or those organizing to support communities who face heavier environmental burdens, are often excluded from green economy policy decicion-making. Thus, they often call for the civil rights principles outlined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed shortly after Dr. King’s famous speech, to be applied to the greater need for environmental equality across the races.
“I can’t speak for any kind of ‘movement,’ but I would say that, although there is greater overall public awareness of environmental inequality than in the past, the pace with which poor Americans are increasingly burdened by dirty energy fallout is getting worse,” Majora Carter, urban revitalization strategist and radio commentator, told theGrio.
The march on Saturday will draw attention to this environmental inequality, activists believe, just as the 1963 march brought attention to social injustices against African-Americans.
Dr. King’s last speech in Memphis before his assassination, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” addressed the plight of sanitation workers in part protesting unsafe workplace environments. As the March on Washington anniversary commemorates Dr. King’s legacy, many hope environmental justice continues to be a part of it.
“The idea that in an age where we have everything from an asthma epidemic to Hurricane Katrina, that Dr. King wouldn’t have been one of the foremost environmental voices in the 21st century, is just absurd,” Jones stated emphatically.
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