This story is adapted from the book AFRICATOWN, which was published this week by St. Martin’s Press.
Four years ago, an announcement from the Alabama Gulf Coast shocked the world: The wreckage of the Clotilda, the last slave ship ever brought to the U.S., had been identified in the muddy depths of the Mobile Delta. The slavers had burned the ship after its 1860 voyage to erase evidence of their crimes, but those they took captive kept their memories alive in Africatown, a neighborhood at the edge of Mobile that they established after their emancipation. Those survivors included Cudjo Lewis, who lived to be nearly 100 — long enough to share his experiences with Zora Neale Hurston, who interviewed him for what became her book Barracoon.
Africatown is the only American community established by West Africans who survived the brutality of the Middle Passage, a distinction recognized by its inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. Descendants of the voyage still live in the neighborhood today, though its population is a fraction of what it once was.
Throughout its history, Mobile’s white power brokers have treated Africatown as an industrial dumping ground. For years it was hedged in by two paper factories that released vast amounts of pollution into the air and waterways. It’s now surrounded by other industrial businesses, including a chemical refinery and an asphalt plant. Many residents believe there is a cancer epidemic. With help from activists, some are trying to transform the neighborhood into a destination for heritage tourism, which they see as the only hope for preserving it. Despite the national attention Africatown has received since the Clotilda’s discovery — which culminated in the release of the recent Netflix documentary Descendant — the community’s very existence remains in peril.
In many ways, the environmental harm in Africatown mirrors what’s happened in other communities of color, from ‘Cancer Alley’ in Louisiana to ‘Asthma Alley’ in New York City’s South Bronx. For Americans, race is one of the most powerful predictors of exposure to pollution. Because of its long and dramatic history, Africatown provides a unique window for understanding how these inequities have developed over time.
In particular,Africatown’s history reveals just how far into the past American environmental racism stretches, even though the term itself didn’t enter the lexicon until just a few decades ago. It was the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, which coincided with the early days of Jim Crow in the U.S. South, when something that looks distinctly like the environmental racism of later years first took hold — and when the mechanisms were established to reproduce it for decades to come.
By and large, the dawn of the 20th century was characterized by campaigns for more professional government, cleaner cities, better schools, and improved public health. Though many national commentators portrayed these reforms as limited to the country’s northern industrial heartland, Southern cities from Dallas to Atlanta also gave rise to Progressive movements of their own. But theirs was a Progressivism, in the words of historian C. Vann Woodward, “for white men only.” Between 1890 and 1908 — the period when modernization campaigns first started up — most Southern states also enacted policies that stripped African American men of their voting eligibility. Disfranchisement severely limited the avenues available for Black communities to stand up for their rights. Nowhere was this more true than in Mobile.
As of the 1890s, Mobile had failed to regain its pre-Civil War position as one of America’s largest port cities. Thanks to the new national railroad network, much of the cotton that had once traversed Mobile’s docks was now being diverted to other ports. The city’s population also stagnated, leaving it smaller than New Orleans, Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Nashville, and Memphis. Erwin Craighead, the editor of the Mobile Register newspaper and the city’s most prominent booster at the time, admitted in 1902 that Mobile had “fallen behind in the race to the front rank of Southern cities.” Reading his editorials, which constantly predicted that Mobile was on the verge of “greatness,” it’s easy to see the origins of the city’s derisive nickname among locals: the City of Perpetual Potential.
Nevertheless, Mobile was modernizing. Electricity was introduced by a private company between 1893 and 1906. Craighead boasted in 1902 that sewers had been installed “with a completeness not found elsewhere,” and for the first time the city assigned 20 men to clean streets, gutters, and drains on a daily basis. It also purchased one waterworks system and built another, giving the majority of residents something they’d never had before: a dependable supply of clean water. The city’s public parks were improved and expanded, and its first ballpark opened in 1896. By 1915, roughly 40 miles’ worth of roads had been paved, replacing the streets of dirt and oyster shells. Most important for the city’s growth was the expansion of electric streetcars. As commuting became easier, new neighborhoods flourished around Mobile’s periphery.
But the expansion of plumbing, sewage, and paved roads generally stopped at the borders of the city’s Black neighborhoods. As a result, Mobile’s Black wards were effectively left in the 19th century. Dr. Charles Mohr, the city health officer, described the results in 1915: The Black wards had come to be seen as “the least desirable” in Mobile, “far removed from the better residential districts” and “unfrequented except by those who, from choice or necessity, have their homes there.”
While the examples of environmental racism that are most familiar today involve communities of color being actively polluted — whether by factories, landfills, or exhaust from highway traffic — the kinds of planning decisions that Mobile and countless other Southern cities made in those years resulted in neglect and underdevelopment that could be just as deadly.
Africatown’s Old Plateau Cemetery in Mobile, Alabama. Google Maps
The experience of Clotilda survivor and Africatown founder Cudjo Lewis suggests the personal devastation that this could cause. When Zora Neale Hurston interviewed him in 1927 and 1928 (starting when she was an anthropology student at Barnard College), Lewis described a rapid and rather shocking succession of deaths in his family.
Lewis’ wife and all six of their children died between 1893 and 1910. At age 15, his daughter became bed-ridden with a sickness that was impervious to the doctor’s medicine, and she died soon afterward. The death of Lewis’ son Jimmy unfolded just as quickly and mysteriously. His wife, Celia, passed away in 1908 without any symptoms that were obvious to Lewis. And his son Aleck died the following month, though Lewis didn’t say how.
Clues about what might have happened can be found in health reports that were written during the same period, which are on file at Alabama’s state archives in Montgomery. It was evident to Mohr and other local doctors — if not to Mobile’s political leaders — that the city’s Jim Crow planning strategy posed serious threats to public health everywhere. In 1913, two doctors took blood samples from residents of Plateau, a subset of Africatown, and concluded that 3 percent of residents had latent cases of malaria. One physician wrote that “the colored race” was contributing heavily to the spread of malaria throughout Mobile County, as it was found in “proportionately greater” frequency in their ranks than among whites. The doctor recommended mosquito eradication and drainage programs for Africatown and the surrounding area.
Statistics from 1914 also show that Mobile’s Black residents were dying from the disease at almost four times the rate of white residents. Other illnesses were lurking in Black neighborhoods as well: That year, 112 Black residents within the city died of tuberculosis (to say nothing of those outside the city limits), compared to 55 white residents — despite whites making up 56 percent of the broader population. Another 39 Black Mobilians died from pneumonia, 17 from pellagra (a disease associated with malnutrition), and 16 from influenza. In all these categories, the mortality rates for white residents were much lower. There’s little question that the Lewis family fell victim to this larger phenomenon.
Dr. Mohr warned in 1915 that unsanitary conditions in Black neighborhoods posed a “constant menace to the white community.” Belatedly, the city did extend sewage and other services to its Black wards. But even then, Africatown was left out, because it was outside the city — and political leaders had no interest in annexing the Black neighborhoods that dotted Mobile’s periphery.
White authorities also took measures to make sure the racial power balance that cemented these injustices would not be disrupted. The changes they made on this front would be felt most acutely by the generations that succeeded Cudjo Lewis and Africatown’s other founders.
Mobile’s electoral districts had long been gerrymandered to guarantee that Black citizens didn’t make up a voting majority in any given ward. Craighead, the newspaper editor, was frank about this in a 1907 editorial: “It is a well-known historical fact,” he wrote, that when the districts were drawn in 1879, the point was to “preserve white supremacy” in government.
However, in 1910 there was a push to do away with electoral districts altogether. Businessmen, represented by the local chamber of commerce, wanted to restructure city government, replacing the city council with a city commission. Instead of two dozen or so leaders, there would be only three, and in all likelihood they’d be businessmen or attorneys. Cities across the nation were making the same switch. The idea was to refashion administrations in the image of corporate America, so they’d be less prone to patronage and more concerned with sound budgeting. Craighead championed the proposal, saying Mobile needed a “business administration.” The “city with the best government,” he predicted, “will attract the most new people.” Montgomery and Birmingham had already made the conversion.
After a lobbying campaign in the state legislature, the change was made in 1911. Under the new system, the city elected its commissioners at large, rather than on a ward-by-ward basis. For city leaders, this was an insurance policy: It meant that as long as conservative whites made up more than half the city’s total vote share, no Black candidate would ever be elected to the commission. (Mobile’s city commission wouldn’t be abolished until the 1980s, when the issue went to the U.S. Supreme Court and the system’s racist and unconstitutional origins came into full public view.)
In the decades after the Progressive Era, environmental racism in Africatown would only get worse. Two of the largest paper factories in the world were installed on either side of the neighborhood, emitting untold amounts of chloroform, hydrochloric acid, and other pollutants into the air and the waterways. Ash from the paper mills blanketed residents’ vegetable gardens and ate through their cars and roofs. Many residents living there today think the pollution created a cancer epidemic. At least one of Cudjo Lewis’ descendants — his great-great-grandson, Garry Lumbers, who grew up in the house Lewis built — has survived the disease.
It’s unlikely that anyone summed up the legacy of the Progressive Era in Alabama better than John Knox, a wealthy corporate lawyer who was active in state politics. In November 1901, when he was trying to build support for the new state constitution that had been drafted that summer, Knox addressed a crowd of white voters near Tuscaloosa. “It is as if we are going to build a great house,” he said, “a house in which we are all to live — not for a few years, but perhaps as long as we do live — and not only those of us that are here, but our children and our children’s children.” The idea, he said, was to consolidate political power “where God Almighty intended it should be — with the Anglo-Saxon race.”
Many of the racist policies established in those years have since been overturned, and today there are remarkable efforts underway to rejuvenate Africatown’s economy with heritage tourism. These projects are being led by those who grew up in the neighborhood, including some who trace their lineage back to the Clotilda. Descendant, the Netflix documentary, has helped bring an influx of resources and attention. But if progress has been slow and arduous — and it has — that’s partly because the roots of these problems run extraordinarily deep.
Human Rights Watch also demands trial for ‘appalling colonial crime’ of expulsion – and continuing ill treatment – of Chagossians
The UK should pay full and unconditional reparations to generations affected by its forcible displacement of Chagos Islands inhabitants in the 1960s and 70s, an action that constituted a crime against humanity, Human Rights Watch has said.
The NGO said that individuals should be put on trial for the expulsion of Chagossians when the UK retained possession of what it refers to as British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT, after Mauritius gained independence in 1968.
On Friday, February 10, 2023, experts from the United Nations expressed grave concern over the January 3, 2023, death of Keenan Anderson at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department and the death of Tyre Nichols on January 10,…
Appeals court submission exposes racial toxicity in case of Black man John Balentine, sentenced to death for 1999 triple murder
In April 1999, John Balentine, a Black man on trial for murder in Amarillo, Texas, sat before an all-white jury as they deliberated whether he should live or die.
Should he be given a life sentence, in which case he would likely end his days behind prison bars? Or should they send him to death row to await execution?
On February 23, 2023, from 11:00AM to 12:30PM EST, join the American Society of International Law for a webinar panel which will address three main topics: 1) reparations for the injustice against enslaved Africans and their generations; 2) reparations for…
By Michael Nunn, 2L at Brooklyn Law School Historic biases against women and people of color have repeatedly been shown to contribute to long-term economic instability. Despite laws such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Lily Ledbetter…
Penelope Andrews, A Commission on Recognition and Reconstruction for the United States: Inspirational or Illusory?, 66 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev 359 (2022). Abstract below. In this article I suggest that President Joe Biden issue an executive order to establish a…
Johanna Bond, Foreword: Centering Intersectionality in Human Rights Discourse, 79 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 953 (2022). Abstract below. In the last decade, intersectionality theory has gained traction as a lens through which to analyze international human rights issues. Intersectionality…
On January 27, 2023, from 3:00PM to 6:00PM EST, join Temple University Beasley School of Law’s Institute for International Law and Public Policy, the Blacks of the American Society of International Law, the Temple Law School Black Law Students’ Association,…
According to a new report, 4 in 10 English and Scottish people still “hold racist beliefs” – for example, that some ethnic groups are “naturally more hard working than others”. That’s one of the headline findings of a new study into racism in England and Scotland.
New research from #ReframingRace shows both a bedrock of deeply racist thinking among the public and language that campaigners can use to rally people around serious anti-racism. https://t.co/iaQxRa0ezh
Telling Black and Brown people what they already know?
A study in 2014 found that 30% of people said they were “very” or “a little” race prejudiced. In a more recent study, 84% of Black and Brown people said they still think racism exists in the UK, and “very or somewhat” so. What this new research looked into is whether people’s minds can be changed from holding racist beliefs. Research organisation Reframing Race, which conducted the study, described it as the “largest, most comprehensive study of its kind”. It conducted its research in two waves. Reframing Race said in a press release that:
The baseline findings of this research… collected by leading research agency Savanta, relate to a control group of 1,000 people and reveal widespread racist beliefs and assumptions.
Meanwhile, other sample groups (which together add up to a participant list of 19,990 people) were shown various different messages before answering the same questions, which has allowed us to understand what type of language and information can move audiences towards a more anti-racist position.
The Paul Hamlyn Foundation and think tank the Joseph Rowntree Foundation funded the research. Overall, Reframing Race’s findings were mixed. Some findings showed that racism is still prevalent. For example:
41% of people in England and 38% of people in Scotland think that “some ethnic groups are naturally harder working than others”.
29% of people in England and 19% of people in Scotland think that “someone’s race tells you something about their character”.
19% of people in England and 11% of people in Scotland think that “some races are born less intelligent than others”.
demonstrates the strong roots of bogus ‘racial science.’
However, the report claims that when it showed participants facts about how racism is institutionalised and systemic, some people’s views changed.
The possible
The report’s authors took a positive approach towards their findings. Report author and director of Reframing Race Sanjiv Lingayah said:
If we want to end racism and entrench anti-racism it is critical to build public demand for deep and irreversible progress. Testing Times shows there is still a way to go. The data shows significant attachment to deep-seated and debunked myths about ‘race’.
More positively, the findings show that the public can understand systemic racism and that they can be rallied around far-reaching anti-racist solutions that will help to make it possible for all people to live well.
Associate director of public engagement at Joseph Rowntree Foundation Husna Mortuza said:
As this report highlights, the public’s understanding of race and racism is complicated and inconsistent. Many people hold contradictory positions – for example believing in racial hierarchies while simultaneously supporting action to tackle racial inequality.
In a period of heightened polarisation, finding ways to overcome these contradictions and build support for anti-racism is increasingly important. This research provides much-needed tools to understand and shape the public conversation on race and racism and we are proud to support it.
Nina Kelly, co-author and director of content and communications at Reframing Race, said:
To see these statistics, which reveal that so many among us make deeply racist assumptions, is meaningful beyond the potentially racist behaviours of a few.
Racism is fundamentally about structures and institutions, but those structures are made by design, and those institutions are run by people. So, what people think and believe matters, and has a real-world impact on how our society is organised.
The good news – and there is plenty – is that we have some strong indications of how we might speak to people and bring more of them with us.
Kelly has also recently spoken about the intricacies of how to successfully convey a message of anti-racism that proves effective:
Great insight into how words impact the effects of anti-racism work.
It's hard to think objectively when you work on something that affects you. And sometimes thinking objectively involves masking the truth.
When Hurricane Ian hit Central Florida last fall, Milly Santiago already knew what it was like to lose everything to a hurricane, to leave your home, to start over.
For her, that was the outcome of Hurricane Maria, which struck her native Puerto Rico in September 2017, killing thousands of residents and leaving the main island without power for nearly a year.
So in September 2022, nearly five years to the day when Maria tossed her life apart, Santiago was in suburban Orlando, visiting a friend. As torrents of heavy rain battered the roof of her friend’s home, and muddy waters flooded the streets, she realized they were trapped.
And that her life was going to change, again.
“It created such a brutal anxiety in me that I don’t even know how to explain,” she said in Spanish.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Santiago was one of more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans who left Puerto Rico and relocated to places like Florida, seeking safety, economic opportunities, and a place to rebuild their lives. Only now, with displacement caused by Hurricane Ian, as well as one of the worst housing crises in the country, the stability for Puerto Ricans in hurricane-battered Florida has never felt more at risk. With those like Santiago twice displaced, many are finding their resilience and sense of home tested like never before.
Homes damaged by Hurricane Maria stand in an area without electricity on October 15, 2017 in San Isidro, Puerto Rico.
Mario Tama via Getty Images
Santiago’s life right before Maria was based in Canóvanas, a town on the outskirts of Puerto Rico’s capital of San Juan. There, she lived with her teenage daughter and son. Hurricane Irma visited first, grazing the United States territory in early September and causing widespread blackouts. When Hurricane Maria hit on September 20, it ultimately took the lives of more than 4,000 Puerto Ricans, making it the most devastating tropical storm to ever hit the region. It would take 11 months for power to be fully restored to Puerto Rico’s main island, home to the majority of the territory’s population of just over 3 million.
Santiago lost her business as a childcare provider in the wake of the devastation to Puerto Rico’s economy and infrastructure. She decided she had no other option but to leave. By mid-October of that year, Santiago, with her children — and their father —relocated to metro Orlando.
It took her years to adjust to her new life. And then Ian happened.
“It was already a nightmare for me,” said Santiago, “because it was like reliving that moment when Maria was in Puerto Rico.” In the aftermath of Ian, Santiago was displaced from a rental home where she had lived for only a week.
Santiago’s déjà vu is not unique among Puerto Rican survivors of Maria living in Central Florida. Many are still reeling from the trauma of economic hardship, poor relief efforts, and displacement that was only now starting to be addressed in Puerto Rico itself.
“There are people who feel like, ‘Man, I just came here from Puerto Rico and here I am in this situation again,’” said Jose Nieves, a pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Kissimmee, a suburb of Orlando. Nieves’ work in recent years has extended to supporting immigrant families affected by natural disaster displacement in Central Florida.
Central Florida is home to large Latin American and Caribbean communities. Many members work in low-wage and low-skilled jobs in the area’s robust tourism industry, which is nonetheless vulnerable to the economic fallout from natural disasters like Ian. Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans are also among the millions of Florida residents who live in homes without flood insurance.
Earlier waves of Puerto Ricans had relocated to the mainland primarily for economic reasons. Along with those who came to Florida directly from the main island, thousands more had moved in recent years from other long-established Puerto Rican communities in New York and other parts of the Northeast.
By the time Santiago and her family arrived in Orlando in 2017, the metro area was already one of the fastest growing regions in the country. Over one million people of Puerto Rican origin now live in Florida, surpassing the number in New York. In Central Florida, Puerto Ricans make up the largest community of Latinos. Among them are sizable Colombian, Venezuelan, and other Latin American nationalities.
The Super 9 motel in Kissimmee, Florida, which became home to a number of Puerto Rican families displaced by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda via Getty Images
Like many other Puerto Ricans who had come before her, Santiago thought that a new life in Florida would provide what Puerto Rico couldn’t: wages that they could live well on, stable housing and infrastructure, and a local government that was responsive to their needs and that would uphold their rights as U.S. citizens. There was also the benefit of a large network of Spanish speakers who could provide support and share resources on how to navigate social and civic life on the mainland. And perhaps above all, there was also a sense that in Florida their vulnerability to the devastation of tropical storms like Maria would be lessened.
At first, Santiago and her family settled at her sister’s house in Kissimmee. World famous theme parks like Walt Disney World and Universal Studios were minutes away, as was Orlando’s international airport. In December 2017, after finding out that the local government was providing hotel accommodation for those displaced by Maria, Santiago and her family moved into a local Super 8, one of several motels along Highway 192, Kissimmee’s main drag. Its concentration of hotels and motels has earned Kissimmee the moniker of “the hotel capital of Central Florida.”
In August of 2018, after more than eight months living at the Super 8, Santiago and her family started looking for more permanent places to stay. “By then the rents had skyrocketed and they were asking for $50 to $75 [a night] per head of family,” Santiago said of the motels. Landlords were also asking for two to three months rent for a deposit, a standard practice in Florida but one that took Santiago by surprise. “We said if we plan to stay we are going to [need] that money,” she said, “because we left Puerto Rico only with what little we had.” The family eventually settled in an apartment in Orlando.
Ian hit at a time when the cost of living in Central Florida had soared, housing had become more unaffordable, and wages had stagnated. “We’ve just seen this massive spike in the cost of rent and in the cost of everything else,” said Sam Delgado, the programs manager at Central Florida Jobs with Justice, or CFJWJ, an Orlando-based workers’ rights organization.
“They say we have California’s expenses and Alabama’s wages.”
Sam Delgado, program manager at Central Florida Jobs with Justice
Delgado explained that the timing of Hurricane Ian at the end of the month left many local families struggling with whether to prioritize emergency expenses or rent. In the wake of the storm’s devastation, many households were forced to use rent money to buy non-perishable food items and gasoline, or temporarily relocate their families to hotels. “People just don’t have enough money for an emergency,” he said.
Florida’s affordable housing crisis, as in the rest of the U.S., is the result of several factors: limited housing stock, zoning laws restricting construction of new rental housing, and stagnant wages that have not kept up with the cost of living. “They say we have California’s expenses and Alabama’s wages,” said Delgado.
Central Florida’s low-income Latino communities are among the hardest hit by the state’s housing crisis. They have some of Florida’s fewest financial and social resources to both prepare for disasters before they happen and to respond adequately after they do. Many live in properties such as mobile homes that are more affordable but less resilient to wind or flood damage.
For families that have previously been evicted or have a poor credit history, it’s even more difficult to secure housing in the traditional rental market. Throughout Orange County (of which Orlando is a part), Osceola County immediately south (home to Kissimmee), and even the Tampa Bay area along the Gulf Coast, the last option for these families is to move into hotels or motels. A number of such makeshift apartment complexes also became micro-communities for Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria. The award-winning 2017 film, “The Florida Project,” dramatized the life of a family living in a motel in Kissimmee. But few see this trend as sustainable. “It’s expensive to be poor here because it costs way more to rent a hotel [room],” said Delgado.
And it’s only getting more expensive, as more extreme weather and displacement is putting pressure on the rental market. Prices for apartments are rising higher and higher to meet this demand. After recently looking for an apartment for she and her daughter, Santiago returned to her friend’s home, having had no luck at finding anything affordable. One place she looked at was asking $2,500 per month. “I don’t know what they were thinking,” she said.
In many ways, the housing crisis has faced no greater urgency. Coupled with the lack of affordable housing, many in the Puerto Rican and larger Latino communities feel that the local and state government is not doing enough to support those who have been displaced.
“If you were out of your house for 15, 20 days because of the flood, because you didn’t have electricity or services, it shows that [the state] was negligent,” said Martha Perez, who is a resident of Sherwood Forest, a RV resort community in Kissimmee. Perez was forced to leave her home, where she lived alone, after Ian’s floodwaters made her community uninhabitable for weeks. Both Milly Santiago and Perez, a Mexican citizen, have received material support from Hablamos Español Florida, a social services organization geared to Latino immigrant families in the state.
“When our community gets hit by a hurricane, the recovery doesn’t take days or weeks. I mean, the reality is that many of those families are going to be struggling with the effects of the hurricanes for the next two years,” said Nieves of First United Methodist Church in Kissimmee. He says that the damage from Hurricane Ian has taken hundreds of homes off of the housing market, further exacerbating the affordability crisis.
For many locals and advocates, the needs that have arisen around housing, wages, and climate resilience are effectively the result of an unwillingness from those in power to address the needs of the state’s most vulnerable communities. And social support organizations and volunteers can only do so much. “Every time it’s a nonprofit organization responding to these immediate needs in communities, it looks more like a policy failure than it does a community coming together to help people,” said Delgado.
“What do I want from the government?” said Santiago. “I want them to be more fair with us, because there is a lot of injustice.”
Duke and Duchess of Sussex honoured for their activism days ahead of revelatory Netflix show
A US human rights charity has awarded Harry and Meghan its Ripple of Hope award for their activism on racial justice and mental health.
In a statement celebrating their award, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said “a ripple of hope can turn into a wave of change”. The couple received the award on Tuesday night in New York, two days before the release of a tell-all Netflix show expected to include damning revelations about the royal family.
Dr Mike Diboll on our complicity in human rights abuses, Karl Eklund on apartheid South Africa, Antony Barlow on the UK’s own failings, and Stan Labovitch on why he won’t boycott watching the World Cup
Nesrine Malik is correct: Putin’s Russia does “hunt” its exiled dissidents (It’s not just Qatar hoping we now ‘put politics aside’. It’s the hypocritical west, too, 21 November). Saudi Arabia does so too, for example Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Yet Saudi Arabia still gets to host a Formula One grand prix, so-called Clash on the Dunes boxing matches, and international golfing. The 2012 Bahrain grand prix went ahead amid torture and the shooting dead of unarmed protesters. Malik is also right to stress that our governments arm the Gulf states, provide them with surveillance technology, PR, political and diplomatic cover, and – in a situation where sovereign wealth is often hard to distinguish from private hyper-wealth – safe havens for blood money.
In return for turning a blind eye to grotesque human rights abuses and institutional homophobia and misogyny, “we” get cheap hydrocarbons, “inward investment” that melds our economy with those of the Gulf states, a regional “security” stance and, in the case of Bahrain, a Royal Navy base. Gulf sportswashing has a wider context, and it is a sad reflection on us that human rights abuses only occasionally come to the fore during sporting events, and media debate is so often mired in anti-Arab racism.
On December 6, 2022, from 12-1pm ET, please join Northeastern University School of Law, the Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers’ Network and Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy (PHRGE) for an event featuring speaker Professor Tendayi Achiume. Professor…
Queensland’s human rights commissioner, Scott McDougall, says “clear” and “pervasive” cultural problems are plaguing the state’s police force after leaked audio revealed violent and racist conversations by Queensland police staff.
Police service officers at the Brisbane city police watch house can be heard using racist slurs and offensive language while working in the holding cells, referring to Nigerians as “jigaboos”, and raising fears that Australia “will be fucking taken over” in a series of leaked tapes published by the Guardian Australia on Sunday.
Oladeji Omishore fell to his death after Met police Tasered him on Chelsea Bridge on 4 June. His bereaved family now hopes to take legal action against police watchdog the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).
Oladeji’s family has launched a CrowdJustice campaign. They’re trying to raise funds for the court case challenging the IOPC’s decision not to investigate the conduct of the officers involved.
Death following police contact
Oladeji died in June having fallen into the River Thames after police Tasered him multiple times. He was near his home and experiencing a mental health crisis at the time.
The IOPC’s own data shows that police disproportionately use Tasers against Black people, particularly those experiencing mental health issues.
Oladeji’s recently bereaved family joined the United Family and Friends Campaign (UFFC)’s annual protest on 29 October. Since 1999, the coalition of bereaved families which makes up the UFFC has organised a procession and rally each year. The families aim to remember their loved ones and demand justice for those killed at the hands of UK police in prisons, immigration systems, and psychiatric custody.
Speaking to protesters on the day, Oladeji’s father told the crowd:
My son was caring, compassionate, giving and artistically talented, with a deep appreciation for nature. But on that fateful day he was vulnerable, in mental health crisis, clearly distressed and in painful agony. He needed support and medical intervention but was instead met with brutal, brutal excessive force.
The recently bereaved family of Chris Kaba, whom Met officers shot and killed in September, also attended the UFFC rally. Their presence reflected the ever-increasing number of deaths of Black men at the hands of police.
Taking the IOPC to court
Oladeji’s family states that police responded to their loved one, who was evidently in need of support, with “repeated, excessive, unjustified force”. The bereaved family is concerned by the watchdog’s “unlawful and irrational decision” to treat the two officers involved as witnesses and not investigate them for professional or criminal misconduct. Through this case, Oladeji’s family seeks transparency and accountability.
INQUEST is a charity which supports the bereaved families of people who have been killed due to state violence and neglect. Underscoring the significant impact that a successful legal challenge against the IOPC could have in this and other cases, the charity tweeted:
HELP
Deji Omishore's family want to legally challenge the IOPC. This could lead to more justice & accountability for police in their case & many more.
End Taser Torture, a grassroots campaign group established and led by the bereaved families of Adrian McDonald, Marc Cole and Darren Cumberbatch, has launched a petition to ban the police’s use of Taser against people experiencing mental health crises. All three men were experiencing mental health crises and died following police use of Tasers. Urging people to donate to the fundraiser, End Taser Torture shared:
Please Retweet: We just supported this case!
Can you spare a few quid to bring this urgent Legal challenge against the IOPC? Community support will help to secure justice for Deji and many many more families @justicefordejihttps://t.co/WmBPCFeM5C via @CrowdJustice
Oladeji’s family seeks to raise £10,000 by midday on Wednesday 16 November. Supporters can donate via the CrowdJustice campaign page. You can also follow the family campaign on Twitter at @justicefordeji.
When it comes to storm damage, Los Angeles County may not be the first place that comes to mind. But according to a new study, the area’s “hundred-year” flood risk is far greater than what the federal government currently estimates — and a disproportionate danger for Black residents in certain key areas.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency considers a relatively small section of L.A. County to be at high risk of flooding. Researchers estimated that these tracts — mostly along the coast and around Lake Los Angeles — are home to just over 23,000 people. These zones would be especially vulnerable during a so-called “100-year flood” — an event with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. But while FEMA only bases its assessment on potential flooding along rivers and coasts, a team at the University of California, Irvine identified additional high-risk areas based on the flash flooding caused by rainfall. This inclusion, they argued, is crucial, as global warming will increase the volume of runoff, and there’s often insufficient drainage in urban areas.
According to the resulting analysis, published Monday in Nature, up to 874,000 people in the county could be exposed to a similar level of flood risk — a nearly 40-fold increase from the population estimate based on government assessments.
And it may not just be L.A. County that is vastly underestimating its flood risk: “Across the U.S., we witnessed one city after the other get hit by flooding and be seemingly unprepared for the amount of flooding that happens,” said Brett Sanders, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine and the study’s lead author.
In addition to noting the increased risk, Sanders said it is crucial to understand who within a community is most exposed to these types of events and may face the longest road to recovery. The team at UC Irvine measured the likelihood of different groups in L.A County experiencing each type of flooding — coastal, river, and flash flooding — based on measures of vulnerability, such as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
The researchers found that the county’s non-Hispanic Black residents are 79 percent more likely than non-Hispanic white residents to be exposed to flooding greater than 100 centimeters, roughly three feet. Hispanic residents are 17 percent more likely to be exposed to these levels of flooding when compared to non-Hispanic white residents, and Asian residents are 11 percent more at risk.
The hope, Sanders said, is for communities across the country to replicate this type of analysis in order to better understand where governments should focus flood mitigation or recovery efforts.
These flood events “wreak a lot of havoc,” he said, adding that federal flood assistance programs often fail to reach those who need it most. That’s because those programs often look to states, which in turn often distribute support to communities that already have the resources to advocate for it.
“If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and you’re renting your apartment — your employer may go out of business, your housing may be unlivable, and you’ll quickly find your life really upended and unable to recover,” Sanders said. “We have a problem in the U.S. because the most vulnerable communities have no resources and have very little expertise to ask for help. So we don’t know where the hotspots of vulnerability are across the United States. We only know of and hear from the communities that have resources to ask for help.”
Sanders and his team have made their data and analysis public to encourage communities around the country to replicate their model to better understand urban flood risk on a neighborhood level.
Still, “this type of tool can’t be the last work on where money needs to go,” he said.
On November 10, 2022, the Human Rights Clinic and Program at the University of Miami School of Law, in collaboration with the Human Rights Society at the University of Miami School of Law, the National Right to Food Community of…
Less than 1 percent of the nation’s roughly 500,000 school buses are electric or run on low-emission fuels. That’s about to change.
Nearly 400 school districts across the United States, including in several Indigenous tribal lands, as well as in Puerto Rico and American Samoa, will receive around $1 billion to purchase new, mostly electric school buses as part of a Biden Administration grant program.
The program aims to reduce children’s exposure to harmful exhaust from diesel buses that serve their schools and communities. It is also part of a broader effort by the Biden Administration to address climate change and environmental justice by making it easier for vulnerable communities to have access to zero-emission vehicles.
The grant program’s funds come from $5 billion that the EPA received as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. With the grant money, recipient school districts will be able to purchase nearly 2,300 electric buses, quadrupling the nation’s current number. While these lower-polluting buses would make up a small portion of school bus fleets, environmental and public health advocates argue that the positive impacts on children’s health would be profound.
In a press release, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a Harlem-based organization, praised Wednesday’s announcement and the program’s reach, saying that it would improve air quality and “reduce children’s exposure to asthma-causing pollutants while also protecting the health of drivers and the communities these buses drive through.”
The Biden Administration expects many of the new electric buses to be available to the winning school districts by the start of the next school year, with the remainder available by the end of 2023.
Air pollution remains a major contributor to poor respiratory and cardiovascular health, with vehicles a main culprit. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation make up the highest portion of total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., at 27 percent. The World Health Organization estimates that 93 percent of the world’s population breathes air that exceeds its public health guidelines.
Children are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of poor air quality. A 2021 study found that even brief exposure to air pollution, including wildfire smoke and car exhaust, can alter a child’s DNA and increase their risk of heart and lung problems as adults.
Seventy percent of students from low-income families take a bus to school, increasing their exposure to diesel exhaust. Children of color, in particular, are more likely to live near heavy transit routes, industrial facilities, and other sources of vehicular and industrial pollution. This is in large part due to historic housing, zoning, and transit policies that left Black and Brown communities with few other options. As a result, children of color have higher rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses than white children.
Air pollution also poses other unexpected health risks to children of color. A 2017 study on Latino children in low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles found that exposure to air pollution during childhood may cause damage to the pancreas — the organ that produces insulin, increasing their likelihood of becoming obese and developing Type 2 diabetes.
It’s a time of crisis. The coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, plummeting living standards, capitalist decay, and the climate emergency affect us all. But it’s not quite that simple. With xenophobic populism and nationalism on the rise around the world, class analysis alone isn’t enough for us to understand the world.
Now, a timely and free week of lectures by the Stuart Hall Foundation can help provide critical insight into how class and race interact and intersect. The late Stuart Hall was arguably the foremost cultural theorist of his generation. He was also a political campaigner and a founder of the New Left Review.
The lecture series laid on by his foundation will run from 31 October to 5 November, between 5pm and 6.30pm every evening:
Racial Inequality in Times of Crises
A week-long conference exploring the impact of present-day crises on ethnic minority people in the UK, in partnership with @EthnicityUK
While Covid-19 highlighted and exacerbated longstanding racial and ethnic inequalities in the UK across a range of social arenas, the ensuing crises in living standards and the criminalising of protests could further entrench these inequalities.
They added:
As the pandemic wanes, we are thrusted deeper into a confluence of crises: Governmental inertia in response to the cost of living crisis and climate change, and a coordinated attack on the civic right to protest by the state’s Policing, Crimes, Sentencing and Courts Bill. While Covid-19 threw existing inequalities into sharp relief, these crises continue to disproportionally impact the lives of society’s most vulnerable people.
Study says deployment of technology in public by Met and South Wales police failed to meet standards
Police should be banned from using live facial recognition technology in all public spaces because they are breaking ethical standards and human rights laws, a study has concluded.
LFR involves linking cameras to databases containing photos of people. Images from the cameras can then be checked against those photos to see if they match.
On Tuesday, November 1, 2022, from 5:30 – 7:30pm EST, join Fordham University School of Law’s Center on Race, Law, & Justice and Leitner Center for International Law and Justice for a discussion and reflection on the United Nations General…
On 4 August, Black Lives Matter campaigner and Bristol copwatcher Ahmed Fofanah died unexpectedly. Bristol Copwatch, a police monitoring group, has launched a crowdfunder to cover the costs of Ahmed’s funeral.
Years of police harassment and racism
Ahmed died suddenly – aged 42 – in August 2022, having faced years of police harassment. In a 2020 interview with Black Lives Matter Weston-super-Mare, Ahmed shared his experiences of targeted violence and racism by local police. Explaining how police made his life “hell”, Ahmed stated that police persistently racially profiled him, stopped and searched him, and even confronted him with guns.
spent years trying to clear his name of false accusations from Avon & Somerset Police
It added that:
Ahmed was able to clear his name but still never received an apology or compensation for years of police harrasment.
In his interview, Ahmed shared that his experiences of police harassment induced extreme “anxiety”. He added that due to being criminalised, he could no longer work in his security job. Reflecting the harmful impact of policing on families and communities, Ahmed said that his daughter started to self harm due to the distress caused by her father’s experiences. Meanwhile, Ahmed stopped driving, taking the bus or visiting the town centre for fear that armed police would shoot and kill him on sight.
Reflecting on Ahmed’s struggle for justice, Bristol Copwatch founding member John Pegram said:
Even at his lowest Ahmed had a strength that is rarely seen and a fierce determination to fight for his rights.
Ahmed was a key member of the Co-POWeR Community Engagement Panel.
Co-POWeR is an association which produces research and recommendations relating to the “wellbeing and resilience” of Black and racially minoritised families and communities. In its statement, the university added that Ahmed “will be sadly missed”.
We were deeply saddened to learn of his passing as he meant so much to all of us. His resilience and sheer bravery and determination in the face of adversity were truly beautiful things and seeing him rise time and again was an inspiration to us all.
It added:
All of us within the Bristol Copwatch core organising team are devastated by his death and will never forget his importance as someone we supported during his fight for justice and as a strong black man and loving father and husband.
Ahmed leaves behind a wife, five children, and three grandchildren. Bristol Copwatch is raising money to support his grieving family. The police monitoring group is asking for supporters to donate what they can to reach its £7,000 target.
INQUEST has published a report revealing new data and sharing the harrowing stories of 22 Black and racially minoritised people whose deaths in prison were “preventable and premature”. The report reflects the prevalence of institutionalised racism, systemic violence, and neglect in England and Wales’ prison system.
Deaths in prison
INQUEST is a charity which supports families bereaved by state neglect and violence. Freedom of Information (FoI) data gathered by the charity reveals that 2,220 people died in prison between January 2015 and December 2021.
371 people died in prison in 2021, the highest number of deaths ever recorded in English and Welsh prisons. Responding to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) statistics in January, INQUEST director Deborah Coles argued that:
the pandemic alone cannot explain away this record level of deaths.
Indeed, in July, User Voice (a charity led by formerly incarcerated people) published evidence that in some cases, prison conditions during lockdown amounted to the UN’s definition of torture. The systemic neglect and restrictive regimes implemented during the pandemic inevitably took their toll on imprisoned people’s physical and mental wellbeing.
Institutionalised racism
INQUEST’s new report, Deaths of racialised people in prison 2015 – 2022, analysed the deaths of Black, mixed-race, Asian, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, white Irish, white Gypsy and Irish Traveller people. Coles explained that the deaths of Black and racially minoritised people are “among some of the most contentious, violent and neglectful” deaths in prison.
The report analyses the “preventable and premature” deaths of 22 racially minoritised people in prison. These cases include:
the inappropriate use of segregation;
the racial stereotyping of Black imprisoned people as “aggressive”;
the neglect of imprisoned people’s physical and mental health;
prison staff failures to seek help, particularly for Black and mixed-race imprisoned people; and
cases of extreme and violent bullying.
According to INQUEST’s analysis, the highest number of prison deaths were among Black and mixed-race people. Black and mixed-race women accounted for almost half of the deaths of all racially minoritised women in prison. The researchers said that this is evidence of “the role of institutional racism in the prison estate”.
In a press release, executive director of INQUEST Deborah Coles said:
The failure of post-death investigations to examine the potential role of racism or discrimination in deaths renders racialised issues invisible. As a result, the opportunity to acknowledge and address racial injustices and inequalities is lost.
Harrowing case studies
The report details the death of 22-year-old Pakistani Mohammed Irfaan Afzal. Mohammed died from a chest infection on 4 August 2019 while being held on remand at HMP Leeds. According to INQUEST, he arrived in prison physically healthy. However, he lost almost a third of his body weight over the course of 48 days. This left him ‘vulnerable to infection’.
Prison staff described Mohammed as “bewildered” and “child-like” during his time behind bars. Inquiries into his premature death found multiple failures to identify and meet his physical and mental health needs.
My brother suffered for the last few months of his life scared, starving, sick, and alone. That will haunt me every day until I die. No one has been held accountable for his death, and there has been no justice.
The decision to imprison the people featured in this report ended up being a death sentence. Imprisonment is ineffective in reducing crime and instead perpetuates harm and violence, with racialised and marginalised groups worst affected.
INQUEST’s report comes at a time in which the government seeks to expand the prison system. In 2021, the Ministry of Justice announced plans to create 20,000 new prison places. These places will likely be filled by those criminalised by the government’s draconian new laws, as well as people pushed into destitution and mental health crises due to a cost-of-living crisis following years of austerity.
These and other factors disproportionately target Black and racially minoritised people, who are already overrepresented in England and Wales’ prison population. Indeed, although they make up just 13% of the general population, they account for 28% of people behind bars.
This disparity is even more pronounced in the youth carceral estate, with over half of children in custody being from Black and racially minoritised backgrounds.
As INQUEST has detailed, imprisonment can be a ‘death sentence’ for criminalised people. Prisons don’t create justice or accountability – they cause irreparable harm to individuals and communities.
The only way we will see an end to these preventable deaths is if the state ends its destructive prison expansion scheme. Instead of more prisons, we need community-based infrastructures of care which deal with the root causes of social harm through healthcare, housing and education.
The Biden administration announced a new environmental justice initiative over the weekend, with $3 billion in block grants to go to communities and neighborhoods hard hit by pollution.
Michael Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said the new Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights will have a prominent role in the agency and will be made up of more than 200 current EPA staff members to be located in 10 regions and will be led by an assistant administrator to be named by President Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Regan, the first Black man to hold the position, made the announcement in Warren County, North Carolina, near the site of a protest against a toxic waste dump 40 years ago that civil rights leaders laud as helping to spark the national environmental justice movement.
The EPA’s announcement comes in light of the recognition that low-income communities and communities of color are more likely to experience harm from climate disasters and pollution, and that it’s past time to provide solutions.
“This is a much-needed step to achieve environmental justice,” said Joan Casey, an environmental health researcher at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, in an email. “We must start with communities and progress is difficult without funding and federal support.”
A 2017 study by the Clean Air Task Force and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People found that Black Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than white Americans. They are also 75 percent more likely to live in communities that are adjacent to polluting industrial or service facilities and impacted by their noise, chemical emissions, odor, and traffic.
An April study, for which Casey was a co-researcher, found that historically redlined neighborhoods were more likely to host oil and gas wells, which contributed to higher rates of respiratory illnesses and other public health disparities among residents.
The creation of the office is part of the Biden administration’s wider climate and environmental policies. The Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate-change and environmental legislation to date for the administration, invests billions of dollars in climate and energy programs like electric charging infrastructure and the Justice40 Initiative.
“Today, I’m more inspired than ever by the deep, collaborative work that is happening to ensure environmental and ocean justice become a reality,” she said in an email.
Advocates for low-income communities and people of color have long argued that if electric cars are necessary for American roads and the health of the planet, then they should be accessible to all Americans, not just the ones with disposable income.
But for years, they have also worried that electric cars and trucks could be out of reach — too expensive and too hard to charge. If there are neighborhoods that are already food deserts, why expect them to have a charging station or three?
The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, also known as IRA, has several rules and benefits designed to bridge the electric vehicle gap, but some activists are still worried.
“Left unchecked, the electric vehicle boom could pass an entire generation of Black and Brown drivers by,” said Michael Brown, an advisor for Neighborhood Forward, a national racial justice advocacy organization.
For instance, one of the new IRA tax credits for charging stations installed after 2023 would cover up to 30 percent of their installation cost. The full benefits of this credit would only apply to charging stations located in a rural community or a low-income community — defined as a census tract with a poverty rate of at least 20 percent.
“The fact that there is now funding available across the country for deploying charging infrastructure, I think it’s a good sign,” said Alvaro Sanchez, the vice president of policy at the Greenlining Institute, an environmental justice nonprofit based in Oakland, California. (Sanchez was a 2019 Grist Fixer).
And for those interested in buying an electric car but discouraged by the cost, a $7,500 tax credit on new EVs will likely help. But the problem, both automakers and advocates say, is that the credit comes with strict rules about where new EVs must be built and where their batteries must be sourced. They argue that these rules would mean that too few EVs would qualify, continuing to make it hard for potential buyers to buy one.
Even a $4,000 tax credit on used EVs would force potential new buyers to wait, as the credit would only apply to used EVs put into service after Dec. 31 of 2023.
Overall vehicle ownership rates are far lower for households of color than for white households. And households of color tend to hold onto cars for a longer time. These inequities in car ownership are largely driven by the racial wealth gap and lack of intergenerational wealth, as well as discriminatory auto insurance and auto loan rate policies that make it harder for people of color to afford cars.
In low-income communities around the US, finding an electric vehicle charging station is often as difficult as finding a grocery store. Charging stations are more likely to be found in dense clusters in wealthier and generally whiter urban areas. Drive, or walk, through a low-income community of color or a rural area, and you would be hard-pressed to find a charging station. Advocates call these areas “charging deserts.” They also argue that this lack of access to charging stations has contributed to lower rates of EV ownership among racial minorities. Advocates argue that if there’s no access to charging stations, how will people be motivated to buy an EV?
“We can’t build equitable infrastructure anywhere if the money isn’t available, let alone in the communities that need it the most,” said Michael Brown.
Both Brown and Sanchez are nonetheless encouraged by the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, as well as provisions in last November’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The November bill allocated $7.5 billion to build out a national network of 500,000 charging stations and required states to submit mapping plans of their part of the charging infrastructure.
But the build-up of the national charging network would be prioritized on “Alternative Fuel Corridors” along the Interstate Highway System, benefiting electric vehicle owners who are commuting or making long-distance trips.
Earlier this year, Indiana’s Department of Transportation announced that it would follow the Act’s guidelines and use $100 million of its funding to expand the state’s portion of the national charging network along these corridors.
The state’s plan faces criticism from the Indiana Alliance for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for Electric Vehicle Infrastructure and Economic Opportunities, a coalition of Black-owned businesses, faith institutions, nonprofits and civil rights groups. The alliance argues that the charging infrastructure plan would bypass communities of color and not prioritize Black-owned businesses.
A sign along the Pacific Coast Highway in California announcing an electric vehicle fast charging station up ahead.
OnTheRunPhoto via Getty Images
“I think you’d be hard pressed to find a senator or congressman who knows the best location to place electric vehicle chargers to combat inequity,” said Brown. “There must be top-down pressure followed by an open conversation to ensure equity in the development stages.”
Activists and community members in neighborhoods of color have reflected on the missed opportunities of previous massive national infrastructure projects. The creation of the federal interstate highway system in the 1950s decimated historically Black neighborhoods and facilitated the transfer of wealth from urban financial centers to the country’s then segregated suburbs. The system also created more opportunities for car ownership among whites, while exacerbating the racial wealth gap and cementing the dependency of Black and other minority communities on poorly-funded public transit.
Lionel Rush, who is part of the Indiana Alliance and the president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance in Indianapolis, told Indiana Public Radio earlier this month that if the EV charging stations were not equitably placed and designed to serve communities of color, those communities would be permanently left behind in the electric vehicle revolution.
“If we don’t get in now, we’re going to be behind — and we’ll never catch up,” he said.
Sanchez of the Greenlining Institute believes that the biggest solution is making sure that EV infrastructure equity doesn’t just exist on paper. That means pressuring states and the federal government to track where implementation is going well and where it might be exacerbating or creating new gaps.
“We need to make sure that we are adjusting our approach so that we are not leaving too many communities behind,” he said.
This story is part of the Grist series Flood. Retreat. Repeat, an exploration of how communities are changing before, during, and after managed retreat.
Linda Worsley had been trying to get back to her hometown of Princeville, North Carolina, for almost six years. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew overwhelmed the banks of the Tar River and submerged the town under more than 10 feet of water, destroying Worsley’s house and nearly 500 others. Worsley fled with her family, but she returned without one: Her mother, father, and husband all passed away before they could move back. Many of her closest friends had also died or moved elsewhere during her period of exile.
Worsley and I sat on the porch of her parents’ house, less than half a mile from the banks of the Tar River, one hot afternoon in early June. I noticed the sounds of North Carolina’s swampy coastal plain region: huge wasps buzzing around us (Worsley doesn’t mind them), twittering birds darting around the porch, and a short freight train chugging past us, carrying scrap metal. Worsley, 72, mostly notices what’s gone silent. When she sits on the porch, the absence of passing cars and neighbors’ voices reminds her of how much she has lost; when she leaves the house and drives through the streets of Princeville, the rows of abandoned houses remind her of how much the small town of 2,000 has changed.
“The caring is gone,” Worsley said. “In a way I’m glad to be back here, and in a way I’m not.”
Linda Worsley stands on the porch of her parents’ home in Princeville, North Carolina. Grist / Gabrielle Joseph
The flood caused by Hurricane Matthew was at least the 10th major flood in Princeville’s 150-year history, and the second in as many decades. It devastated the town, displacing hundreds of people and wiping away entire blocks. Since then, longtime residents like Worsley have been struggling to return and rebuild, waiting on the aid money the federal government is supposed to provide in the aftermath of natural disasters. Meanwhile, the houses they left behind have begun to rot and sag, their white slats turning fuzzy and green with mold.
The cost of repairing their damaged houses made it impossible for many of Worsley’s neighbors to return until they received federal aid, but thanks to the government’s convoluted bureaucracy, much of that money is still in limbo. Some people sold their destroyed properties for pennies on the dollar. Many just walked away, renting in nearby cities like Tarboro, Rocky Mount, and Pinetops. The storm had exiled them from the town where their families had lived since the aftermath of the Civil War, when a group of emancipated Black people founded the town on abandoned land.
“It’s God’s will, it’s not my will, and we just have to accept that,” Worsley said. “I have been gone from here up until last Monday. No way I could have foreseen that I’ll be gone that long.”
While she waited for federal officials to process her aid application in the years after Hurricane Matthew, Worsley spent tens of thousands of dollars renting a series of apartments in and around Tarboro. This spring, five years after her application was submitted, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, agreed to buy her a new manufactured home and set it up on her family property. When I visited the Worsley family’s three-acre plot in June, the home hadn’t yet arrived. Instead, a storage unit containing all of Worsley’s belongings sat next to a clearing in the yard, full of knickknacks and family heirlooms. Worsley didn’t know when she’d unpack.
Dozens of other places around the country have suffered the same fate as Princeville, their communities emptied out and scattered by natural disasters fueled by climate change. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which monitors involuntary movements around the world, more than 200 flood events have displaced half a million Americans since 2008. In the aftermath of these disasters, residents in ruined towns and neighborhoods have confronted an agonizing choice: return to the place they know, or move somewhere safer?
In Princeville, what’s at stake is not just one town’s survival but a unique window into American history: Princeville is the oldest community in the United States chartered by Black people. In an effort to safeguard this history, several arms of the state and federal government have promised to invest millions of dollars to protect the town, which is still more than 90 percent Black, from floods. The wide variety of strategies deployed offer a preview of the ways the government plans on helping communities adapt to climate-fueled disasters in the future. The Army Corps of Engineers has promised to build a levee that would protect against floods brought on by storms like Hurricane Matthew, while FEMA has offered to buy out flood-prone homes and relocate residents. The state government has launched a third campaign to build a new version of Princeville on higher ground.
But even as the government moves to protect Princeville, the hundreds of people who have already died or moved away have left holes in the town’s social fabric. Princeville is caught between rebuilding and retreating, unable to bring all its residents back but also unable to convince them all to move somewhere safer and more stable. The town’s decline is a testament to just how much history is at risk in an era of accelerating climate change, as well as an object lesson in the contradictions of climate adaptation. Disasters like those brought by Hurricane Matthew don’t lead to complete rebuilds or complete retreats. Instead they condemn towns like Princeville to a kind of indefinite limbo, trapping them between the future and the past.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, millions of formerly enslaved Americans found themselves in a world that was profoundly changed. The Union’s 1865 victory and the passage of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment had brought an end to chattel slavery and thrown the South’s plantation economy into turmoil. But as efforts to redistribute Southern land to Black Americans soon stalled out, most stayed within a few miles of the estates where they had once been in bondage.
In the heart of North Carolina’s plantation country, a group of these freedmen congregated on the banks of the sluggish Tar River after the war, forming a settlement across the river from the town of Tarboro. At first the freedmen had no legal right to the Edgecombe County tract they were living on, but the land was too flood-prone to support cotton, so the white planters who owned it eventually sold it off to them at cut-rate prices. By 1880, the settlement boasted around 400 residents, many of whom worked as day laborers, laundresses, or in other occupations that kept them “only a step away from slavery,” in the words of North Carolina State University historian Joe Mobley. But there were also blacksmiths, farmers, teachers, and two local leaders who were among the state’s earliest Black legislators.
It was around that time that residents began campaigning to incorporate an independent town named after one of its founders, a carpenter named Turner Prince. When the state legislature formally recognized Princeville in 1885, it became the first municipality in the postbellum United States to be chartered by formerly enslaved people.
Princeville, North Carolina, is the oldest community in the United States chartered by Black people. Grist / Gabrielle Joseph
From the beginning, Princeville’s fortunes were intertwined with the caprices of the Tar River, which flooded the town every few years. Floodwaters would seep through pipes, contaminating drinking water, and the puddles that accreted by the banks of the river attracted hordes of mosquitoes. When the Tar crested its banks, residents would watch their homes and stores wash away. Not even those that were built on stilts were safe. A local legend holds that during the great flood of 1919, a less-than-honorable mayor was seen fleeing downriver on a rowboat, clutching a chest full of money purloined from the town treasury.
In 1958, 75 years after its founding, Princeville was still vulnerable to every flood event. After the town was submerged for the eighth time in its short history that year, local leaders began a concerted and ultimately successful campaign to lobby the federal Army Corps of Engineers to build a levee along the Tar River.
When the Corps completed the levee in 1967, it was as though the town had been reborn. The levee, a grassy rampart that stretched three miles along the river bank, rose a steep 37 feet at the water’s edge and sloped gently back down toward the town settlement. It was almost unthinkable that the water would ever rise high enough to flow over the rampart. An entire generation of residents grew up without fear of flooding, and dozens of businesses sprung up, many of them owned by locals. There were convenience stores, mills, a blacksmith, an auto shop, and a psychic by the name of Madam Rose.
A sign advertises Madam Rose’s psychic services in Princeville, North Carolina. Grist / Gabrielle Joseph
“We were a very small town, but it was quite serene,” recalled Delores Porter, who grew up just off Main Street, near the spot where Princeville was founded. “We didn’t have to worry about being worried. We could keep our doors unlocked at all times, and we just had fun, and you knew everybody. I always say that we were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor.”
The peace was not to last. Princeville’s decades-long reprieve from flooding came to an abrupt end in September 1999, when Hurricane Floyd made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 3 storm. Though the levee was built to withstand even strong hurricanes like Floyd, the timing could not have been worse. Ten days earlier, the smaller Hurricane Dennis had passed over North Carolina not once but twice, soaking the ground and raising the water level in rivers and lakes. The rainfall from Floyd swelled the Tar River to almost 42 feet above its normal flow, high enough to overtop the levee.
The residents of Princeville rushed to fortify the Army Corps levee with makeshift stacks of sandbags, to no avail: The floodwaters soon spilled over and inundated the town, pooling in the low-lying basin of land. When the flood reached its peak, only the treetops were visible above the water, along with a few church steeples. The water knocked down rows of brick houses along Main Street, destabilized the Reconstruction-era town hall, and squished dozens of mobile homes like soda cans. (Madame Rose’s house also flooded, casting doubt on her psychic powers.)
Within days, the town’s plight attracted national attention. Emergency response teams from the county, state, and federal government arrived, along with then-Congresswoman Eva Clayton, then-Governor Jim Hunt, and civil rights leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Prince and Queen Latifah sent donations. Even President Bill Clinton turned up in town, later signing an executive order to assist Princeville’s recovery.
Before the recovery could start, though, Princeville had to make a choice. FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers had approached the town’s mayor, Delia Perkins, with two contradictory offers. The Corps offered to fortify its levee, raising the height of its walls and fixing flaws in the old structure, such as a divot by the railroad tracks where water could rush through. At the same time, FEMA offered to buy out a large share of the homes in Princeville, giving residents the resources to move somewhere safer while simultaneously depopulating the town. Perkins and her colleagues on the town board could accept one offer or the other, but not both.
This was thanks to a Reagan-era regulation that required federal agencies like the Corps to conduct cost-benefit analysis for every project, forcing officials to prove that the financial upside of a project outweighed what it would cost. If FEMA bought out the town’s residents, there would be so few houses left that the Corps would not be able to justify building a levee. The federal government could only give so much money to an impoverished town like Princeville, where the median household income today is still around $33,000, less than half the national figure.
The four-member town board soon deadlocked on which offer to take, with two members arguing that residents deserved the chance to move somewhere safer and the other two arguing that it was wrong to give up on Princeville’s legacy. Mayor Perkins held the tie-breaking vote, and she had been opposed to buyouts from the beginning. Princeville would stay put.
“I did not think the buyout was a good idea,” Perkins told me. “Participating in the buyout would mean leaving all our history behind.”
So the displaced residents of Princeville moved back, reassured by the Army Corps’ promise to repair the levee. FEMA distributed aid and helped rebuild homes, but it didn’t buy anyone out. Some of those who were more concerned about flooding shuffled away from the historic center to the outskirts of town, where the housing stock was newer and less vulnerable, while others erected new brick houses and trailer homes on land that had just flooded. Slowly, life trickled back into Princeville. Some of the businesses that shuttered after the storm never reopened, but almost everyone returned. Most people weren’t concerned about the next flood: Experts had said that Hurricane Floyd was a hundred-year storm, the kind that hits just once a century, and the Army Corps had vowed to start work on the new levee within a few years.
Neither of those assumptions turned out to be true. As the years passed, the Corps made little progress on the levee project, and its communications to Princeville’s leaders became less frequent. Princeville went through several mayors and city managers over the same period, and some of the new leaders neglected to pursue the levee repairs. The result was that it took more than a decade for the Corps to identify a few viable options for repairing the levee, and even longer to actually begin conducting engineering studies for the structure. (In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for the Army Corps of Engineers attributed the delays to the difficulty of designing a project that met federal cost-benefit regulations.)
In the spring of 2016, more than 15 years after Hurricane Floyd, the Army Corps of Engineers returned to Princeville to present residents with its final levee study. The results were alarming: Not only was the previous levee weaker than the Corps had thought, but it also contained numerous structural defects that would render Princeville vulnerable even to smaller storms than Floyd. The town needed a brand-new levee. Without it, the report said, “each occurrence of flooding would bring another round of suffering and hardship to the community.”
That prophecy would be fulfilled far sooner than anyone thought.
Six months later, Linda Worsley was at home cooking a pot of pig’s feet. Hurricane Matthew had just passed over North Carolina, but it hadn’t caused any significant damage to Princeville, so Worsley was resting easy. Shortly after nightfall, though, she got a phone call from her mother, who sounded frantic. She told Worsley that the Tar River was going to crest its banks and breach the town levee again, just like it had during Hurricane Floyd 17 years earlier. Worsley looked outside. Sure enough, there was already water rising through a ditch in her yard. She showed her husband, who said it wasn’t worth worrying about: Floyd had been a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Worsley was still scarred from her experience escaping Princeville during the last flood and wasn’t going to take any chances. She left the house and drove across the river to Tarboro, where she booked a room at the Quality Inn just to be safe. Her husband stayed at home to finish cooking, and by the next morning the floodwaters had reached the Worsleys’ doorstep, making it impossible for him to drive out. He climbed up to the roof of the house and hollered until some neighbors who ran an auto body shop approached the area in a cherry-picker truck and scooped him off the roof.
Two plaques, one dedicated to those who rebuilt after Hurricane Matthew and the other to those who endured Hurricane Floyd, hang on the side of the Princeville Town Hall. Grist / Gabrielle Joseph
To many people in Princeville, it seemed like history was repeating itself. Meteorologists had called Hurricane Floyd a “100-year storm,” which made it sound like it would only happen once in a lifetime, but in fact the term only meant that the storm had about a 1 percent chance of happening each year. Matthew was another 100-year storm in less than 20 years. This time, instead of overtopping the levee, the floodwaters rushed in through a gap where the railroad tracks went through, sweeping away Worsley’s home and dozens of others. The houses that remained were so sodden and moldy they could barely stand up. In the weeks that followed, the town’s residents scattered in all directions, renting rooms in Tarboro or taking up residence in trailer parks around the county. Some moved in with relatives farther away in larger cities like Fayetteville and Raleigh.
“The first time, I could not believe it. It was like something out of a movie,” Worsley said of living through Hurricanes Floyd and Matthew. “The second time I said, ‘Well, what will be will be.’” People in Princeville had told themselves that another storm like Floyd was impossible, but in fact such monster hurricanes are becoming more common in an era of accelerating climate change. As the ocean warms, it provides more fuel for tropical cyclones as they barrel toward the mainland United States, helping storms like Matthew gather strength faster and maintain that strength longer after they make landfall. Warmer air can also retain more moisture, which makes rainstorms even wetter. Princeville had always struggled against the river, but these two climatic shifts had helped to make devastating floods much more likely.
A railroad bridge stands over the Tar River in Princeville, North Carolina. Grist / Gabrielle Joseph
After Matthew, Princeville’s people were again presented with a choice to stay put or leave, this time with the knowledge that storms like Floyd could come more than once in a lifetime. The Army Corps had just completed its plan for a new levee to protect Princeville from more rounds of suffering, and the only remaining barrier to building it was securing funding from Congress. No one knew how long that would take. At the same time, FEMA was offering millions of dollars in recovery money, and representatives from the federal and state governments were urging the town’s leaders to consider buyouts.
Bobbie Jones had been elected mayor two years before Matthew hit. A schoolteacher who had been born in Princeville but spent most of his adulthood elsewhere, Jones moved back after Floyd to help revitalize the town. He opposed buyouts, and in his early conversations with FEMA officials he insisted that his friends and neighbors wouldn’t take them. They would take money to rebuild destroyed homes, or to elevate homes off the ground, but not to leave.
“I’m totally anti-buyout because of the significance of the town of Princeville,” Jones told me, ”and because we’re already operating on a small budget of less than a million dollars. Every time you take away a home and you can’t replace it with a home, that tax base decreases.”
After Hurricane Matthew struck in 2016, though, the board overruled Jones, voting to allow residents to decide for themselves whether they’d take a buyout. The experience of a second flood had shown the board members that the risks facing Princeville were far greater than they had thought. They felt an obligation to let people leave if they wanted to. A few months later, the state government pitched the town on a second buyout program that would target a specific area around Princeville’s historic main center, the area that faced the greatest danger from floods. Most residents felt the same way as Jones and wanted to return to their homes if possible, but a few dozen residents enrolled in the state or FEMA buyouts. It seemed like Princeville’s social ties were finally starting to fray.
At the same time, the state government approached Princeville about yet another adaptation project, one that would allow the town to move to higher ground in a more concentrated way. The state would purchase a 53-acre tract of vacant land near housing on the outskirts of town. Essential town services like the fire station would be relocated to the new tract, and the state would also help build a few new affordable housing units. The idea was to relocate Princeville entirely out of harm’s way, but Jones managed to negotiate something different: The state would help build the new subdivision for Princeville, but the town’s longtime residents would all stay put, and the town hall would be rebuilt on the original historic land as well. A few years later, the state bought another 88-acre tract and sketched out a mixed-use housing development for that land, and Princeville received another million dollars from FEMA to help build it. Despite Jones’s insistence that Princeville is not moving, FEMA’s grant paperwork refers to the project as a “relocation.”
“The vision we have is for visitors to come in to see the historical area, but also be able to spend dollars and cents in the new commercial area,” Jones told me. “We just don’t want to recover. We want to flourish.”
Each one of these adaptation actions made sense on its own, but the big picture revealed contradictions. FEMA had doled out grant money to rebuild homes, but it was also funding buyouts to help people leave. The state of North Carolina was doing the same thing, even as money from another federal grant program was paying to help the town move to higher ground. Then, in 2020 Congress gave money to the Army Corps to build a new levee and protect the town’s core, even though other government agencies were working to depopulate that area. The federal officials who funded these various projects were all trying to respond to Princeville’s needs, but different residents had different visions for the future — some wanted to stay, some wanted to leave, some wanted to shift to higher ground, and still others were just trying to make ends meet.
Linda Worsley looks up at her new elevated house in Princeville, North Carolina. Grist / Gabrielle Joseph
The federal and state governments had the money and the will to save Princeville, but no one agreed on how to save it. Did saving the town mean fortifying the land that Turner Prince and his fellow freedmen had settled, or did it mean giving vulnerable residents a chance to move somewhere else? And who got to decide which path the town took?
“After Floyd, it was seen much more as ‘one or the other’ between the [levee] and the buyouts, but the situation is a little bit more complicated this time around,” said Amanda Martin, the chief resilience officer in the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, who has led the state’s recovery efforts in Princeville. According to Martin, the fragmented nature of the disaster recovery system has made it impossible to coordinate a unified response to Hurricane Matthew — even now, six years after the fact. The result is that Princeville has become the rope in a game of tug-of-war, with federal and state agencies pulling the town in different directions.
“These decisions are being made by so many different people, with so many different funding sources,” Martin said. ”We don’t have the tools or the framework to make them as interdependent kinds of decisions. No one’s able to make a decision that’s informed by anything other than what they have right in front of them.”
By the time the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Matthew comes around next month, Linda Worsley will be living in her own home in Princeville again, having finally reached the end of her road to recovery. Her new manufactured home sits nine feet off the ground on wooden pilings, a few feet higher than the floodwaters from Floyd and Matthew.
Princeville itself still has a long way to go. As another hurricane season reaches its peak, the town is more vulnerable than ever. The Army Corps of Engineers still has not begun construction on the new levee. Corps officials discovered last year that their proposed design would push water toward Tarboro in the event of a major flood. The agency went back to the drawing board and expects to present Princeville officials with a new plan next month.
The Corps declined to provide Grist with an updated timeline for the levee’s completion but noted that, “due to a variety of factors like inflation and cost,” it is “unlikely” that the money appropriated by Congress would be sufficient to finish the project. “If there was a simple solution to this problem, it would have been identified by now,” said a Corps spokesperson. “We understand the frustrations.”
In June, as I drove through the streets of the town’s historic center, I found myself surrounded by an eerie silence. There were four or five houses on each block, but only one or two of them showed signs of life. The others had facades stained green with mold, or gaping holes where their doors should have been. Some homes looked like they were in good condition until I got up to the doorstep and saw sagging columns on the porch or shattered glass in the windows. On other blocks, the lots were vacant and overgrown, untouched since Hurricane Floyd more than 20 years earlier.
A sign at the entrance to Princeville’s town hall features a picture of Jones, who was reelected mayor earlier this year, along with a caption that reads, “I could never be completely satisfied until all our citizens are back home.” The residents who own empty homes and abandoned lots, meanwhile, are still out there; indeed, many of them live just a few miles away, but the myriad delays in the recovery process have made it impossible for them to return. FEMA’s grant money first has to be disbursed to state governments, which then have to work out recovery plans with county governments, which then have to take applications from residents, which then have to go back up the paper chain so FEMA can approve them. The result is that many Princeville residents, both those who wanted to rebuild and those who wanted to take buyouts, are still waiting for their money to arrive.
Delores Porter is one such resident in exile. She spent most of her life living right off Main Street in Princeville, and she rebuilt within a year after Hurricane Floyd. But since Matthew hit, Porter has been living across the river in Tarboro, working at a Christian printing shop and driving over to check on her old property whenever she can. Porter applied for recovery funding from FEMA to rebuild her home in 2016. Because her house was in a flood zone, she could not rebuild it as it had been. Like Worsley, she would have to elevate it many feet in the air — a tough decision, given that her husband uses a wheelchair. Almost six years have passed since she first applied, but she still hasn’t received any money from FEMA. She isn’t sure she ever will and has all but given up on trying to pursue her application.
Delores Porter stands in front of the Christian printing shop where she works in Tarboro, North Carolina. Grist / Gabrielle Joseph
“Why should I rush to get something done and rebuild, and then there’s a flood and I lose everything?” she said. “I’m holding out as long as I can, and my land is still my land, and maybe one day I’ll make it back.” Porter is happy that Worsley returned to Princeville after so many years, but she doesn’t know if she’ll be joining her friend any time soon.
Joann Bellamy moved further away to Fayetteville, where her son lives. She applied for a buyout from a state program after Matthew, only to be told that her flooded home wasn’t in the subsection of town the state had identified for buyouts. She’s still hoping to secure one from FEMA, but she isn’t optimistic.
“They are not doing enough for the people, rebuilding folks’ houses and helping them out,” Bellamy said. “I signed up for the buyout, we did all the paperwork, they kept telling us we needed this, and we needed that, and we couldn’t get no help — we were in the flood zone, but we weren’t in the district.”
In response to questions from Grist, a FEMA spokesperson said that the agency has received around a hundred applications for buyouts and home elevations in Princeville since Hurricane Matthew. Eight buyouts have been completed, plus Worsley’s elevation. The rest of the repair projects are still pending.
Stories like Porter’s and Bellamy’s paint a grim picture of Princeville’s future, at least in its historic center. Some, like Bellamy, will continue to move away out of frustration with the bureaucratic delays. The most dedicated — and the luckiest — may follow in Worsley’s footsteps and return to their original homes or build new houses that are elevated off the ground. But in the absence of a new levee, the returning residents will be just as vulnerable as they were before Matthew.
To the extent that Princeville has a future, that future may be in the new elevated acreage that the federal and state governments are working to develop. In one sense, the history of the town has already seen a slow migration away from the Tar River, with new development shifting back from the levee and toward the high ground that Princeville is now building on. Worsley and Mayor Jones see this shift as a means to an end, a way of generating tax revenue to protect the old Princeville, but in another generation this new Princeville might be all that remains.
Not everyone sees this as a bad thing. The day after I visited Worsley, I took a drive around town with Calvin Adkins, a lifelong Princeville resident. Adkins has served in what seems like every aspect of local civic life: He’s been a newspaper reporter, a town clerk, a liaison for FEMA’s recovery efforts, and several other things besides. As we circled around the historic center of town, he seemed to remember who lived on every lot, whether occupied or vacant, recalling a childhood memory from just about every intersection.
Calvin Adkins poses near an old train car, now part of the Princeville historical museum. Grist / Gabrielle Joseph
Adkins grew up in the historic center of Princeville, but he moved to one of the newer subdivisions on the outskirts after Hurricane Floyd. Even there, he said, he saw some flooding during Hurricane Matthew. The flooding led him to conclude that nowhere in Princeville was safe, which is why he’s trying to get FEMA to offer him a buyout on his new house. He wants to move somewhere else in the county, leaving his hometown behind.
“I don’t want to go through another flood. The anticipation of knowing or not knowing if it’s going to flood, it’s devastating” Adkins said. “That doesn’t take away from my love for Princeville. I love Princeville, but I gotta love me better.”
Adkins isn’t holding out hope that the long-promised levee can save Princeville. He understands why people like Worsley and Jones want to stay, but he doesn’t think it’ll ever be safe. The past might have limited Princeville’s founders to dangerous, low-lying land that white planters did not want, but, as Adkins sees it, the future is on higher ground.
“What do you think Turner Prince would do?” he asked. “Do you think Turner Prince would allow his people to stay in a flooded area, given the chance to move? My answer would be no. He’d say, ‘As sacred as those grounds are, we can’t stay here.’”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Higher Ground on Sep 20, 2022.
A years-long battle to stop the chemical company Formosa from building a massive petrochemical complex along the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana swung in favor of residents on Wednesday when a state district judge withdrew the air permits that the company needs to operate.
The Taiwan-based chemical giant first announced its plans to build the $9.4 billion petrochemical complex on a sprawling 2,400-acre site in St. James Parish in April 2018. If approved, the so-called “Sunshine Project” would have been one of the largest and most expensive industrial projects in the state’s history. Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, celebrated it as a boon for economic development that would bring 1,200 new jobs to the region.
But the project encountered swift opposition from the local community.
St. James is perched on a bend of the lower Mississippi River in a region known as “Cancer Alley” for its concentration of plants that spew cancer-causing chemicals. Numerous large industrial facilities already operate in the parish. A ProPublica investigation in 2019 found that the air around Formosa’s proposed site already contained more cancer-causing pollution than 99.6 percent of industrialized areas of the country. If the complex was to be built, the analysis estimated, the level of cancer-causing industrial pollution in some parts of the parish could more than triple.
“Formosa was wrong to even want to come in here and poison us because we’re already being poisoned,” Sharon Lavigne, a lifelong parish resident, told Grist. After Formosa selected her hometown for its new chemical complex, Lavigne founded Rise St. James, a faith-based grassroots organization with the explicit goal of stopping Formosa’s plans.
That’s when the company’s legal struggles began. In 2019, on behalf of Rise St. James, the environmental watchdog Earthjustice sued the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality for its decision to grant Formosa its permits to emit air pollution. Around the same time, another environmental group, the Center for Biological Diversity, filed suit against the Army Corps of Engineers for issuing the company its Clean Water Act permits. The federal agency voluntarily suspended the water permits last year and required its staff to develop a full environmental impact statement, citing environmental justice concerns. That review has yet to be released.
In her ruling, Judge Trudy White called the state agency’s environmental justice analysis “arbitrary and capricious” and said that it “does not comply with the agency’s public trustee duties.”
Despite the judge’s ruling, Formosa reportedly said on Thursday that it still intends to build its complex in St. James.
But without air or water permits, the company will have to “go back to the drawing board” and rework its permits from scratch, said Corinne Van Dalen, a senior attorney at Earthjustice.
The district court’s ruling comes on the heels of another major victory for the residents of St. James. Last week, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality announced that it was withdrawing the permit application for South Louisiana Methanol’s proposed chemical complex. The project site was located between two historic Black neighborhoods, including Freetown, a community founded by formerly enslaved people.
“These developments mark a new day for the residents of St. James,” Van Dalen told Grist. “This predominantly Black area was once seen as ground zero for new petrochemical developments. And the residents galvanized this enormous campaign and they fought and they fought and they’re winning. Goliath is wobbling. And now they get to have a new St. James.”
A decision by the city of Chicago to relocate a scrapyard from an affluent white neighborhood to a majority-Black and Latino area has sparked years of public outcry, a hunger strike, national media attention, and multiple federal investigations. Now, one of those investigations has found that the city’s approval violated residents’ civil rights, representing a pattern of discrimination against a community already burdened with pollution and health issues, federal housing authorities said last week.
The finding stems from a nearly two-year probe by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, into Chicago’s 2019 agreement to allow the General Iron metal recycling plant to operate in the city’s Southeast Side, an environmental justice community that contains dozens of other polluting facilities and where adult asthma rates are double the city average.
HUD threatened to withhold federal funding if local leaders continue violating the Fair Housing Act, which protects homeowners, renters, or people living in federally funded housing from discrimination on the basis of race or color, according to a letter to the city obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
“It feels good to know that what frontline communities have been experiencing in Chicago is now really well known,” Olga Bautista, executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, one of the groups that filed a complaint with HUD, told Grist. “That gives us an opportunity to fix it, and to get the support that we need to make sure that we have policies in the city of Chicago that’s going to prevent something like [this] from ever happening again.”
City officials did not respond to a request for comment from Grist. But Cesar Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the office of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, denied accusations of discrimination, according to Block Club Chicago, a local news site.
“Any allegations that we have done something to compromise the health and safety of our Black and Brown communities are absolutely absurd,” Rodriguez told the publication.
For decades the General Iron metal shredder operated in the majority white Lincoln Park neighborhood, where residents complained about the smell and noise from tearing apart cars, appliances, and other types of scrap metal to be recycled. Under former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, according to the Sun-Times, the city pressured the company to relocate to make room for a multibillion-dollar private real estate development, the Lincoln Yards. The administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot continued to support the relocation, signing an agreement in 2019 with a company that agreed to buy General Iron and move the scrapyard to the Southeast Side.
General Iron constructed its new shredder in Southeast Chicago before receiving a final permit to operate from the city.
Jamie Kelter Davis/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
In response, the Southeast Environmental Task Force and two other community groups filed a complaint with HUD, alleging that the General Iron decision was just the latest flashpoint following decades of discriminatory policies that allowed polluting facilities to set up shop in Southeast Chicago. HUD opened an investigation into the General Iron deal in the fall of 2020; the following February, more than 100 residents participated in a hunger strike to pressure the city to reconsider its decision.
A year later, the city blocked the final permit the company, by then renamed Southside Recycling, needed to begin operating. Officials cited the “potential adverse changes in air quality and quality of life that would be caused by operations,” and argued the facility presented an “unacceptable risk” to surrounding communities. The company, though, is appealing the decision, and other projects are still moving forward that community members say pose a risk to their health — including a massive underground warehouse and industrial complex.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a separate investigation into the state of Illinois’ decision to approve General Iron’s venture on the Southeast Side. The probe, which began in January of last year, focuses on allegations that the state EPA issued permits for the new scrapyard without sufficient input from the public, in an area where residential property is already contaminated by pollutants like oil byproducts, lead, and arsenic.
HUD’s letter to the city urged officials to change their planning and zoning policies to avoid racial discrimination. Lightfoot’s administration has previously promised to work with elected leaders to pass local laws that protect frontline communities from pollution and to institute stricter environmental reviews around industrial operations.
But residents say passing such legislation — known as a cumulative impact ordinance, because it would require agencies to consider the total burden of all existing facilities on a neighborhood before issuing permits for new sites — is taking too long. The Coalition to End Sacrifice Zones, an alliance of environmental, health, and social justice groups that includes the Southeast Environmental Task Force, announced in May that it will work on a draft ordinance incorporating these principles, and Bautista said she hopes the HUD decision will provide some impetus for action on the city’s part.
“We are very ready and geared up to really take this into our own hands,” Bautista said. “Because we don’t expect the city to be able to fix a problem that they created.”
HELP
We just supported this case! 
31st Oct – 3rd Nov, 5pm – 6.30pm each day
Online
Free
Sign up here: 
