Blacks organize to prevent environmental racism

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- David Baker remembers the upheaval in his hometown of Anniston in the 1990s when many residents realized their health and property had been contaminated by toxic PCBs from a nearby chemical plant.

The experience spurred Baker and others in predominantly poor, black west Anniston to form Community Against Pollution to fight for damages and clean up the contamination. Today, most of the group's members have been involved in lawsuits against the chemical company.

"It was just something you could not believe in these days and times to see the people who suffered behind this," Baker recalled.

Like Baker, citizens in many poor, black communities around Alabama and the South in recent years have fought companies who have located pollution-spewing industrial plants, hazardous landfills and waste incinerators near homes and schools.

Known as "environmental racism," the practice of locating such toxic operations near politically powerless blacks has been stymied by the emerging citizen groups.

"Companies now don't just bully in," said Robert Bullard, sociology professor at Clark Atlanta University. "When they do, they're in for a rude awakening. There is no path of least resistance any more."

Bullard, author of "Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality," said many members of watchdog groups are involved in lawsuits seeking massive damage judgments.

Over time, as low-income neighborhoods in Southern towns became more racially mixed, poor people, white and black, joined in the fight, Bullard said.

They often run up against business and civic leaders working to develop communities economically. To the developers, such projects often bring in badly needed jobs and revenues for areas that sometimes have little of either.

In the early 1990s an awareness of environmental racism arose among community activists and academics, said Bullard.

He said Louisiana in particular became a "hotbed" of environmental racism lawsuits, with many communities along the Mississippi River serving as sites for incinerators and petrochemical plants.

In the mid-1990s, the Japanese company, Shintech Inc., wanted to build a $700 million plastics plant in St. James Parish. But parish residents got help from student attorneys at Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.

Shintech eventually scaled down the plan to $250 million, and moved it to Plaquemine.

In rural Lowndes County, one of the poorest in the country, efforts to build a 230-acre solid waste landfill near the historic Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail are on hold because of community outrage.

County commissioners approved the project on land owned by Waste Management Inc.

But Lowndes County Citizens United for Action sued to halt construction, contending in part it was wrong to put a waste disposal site near the highways where marchers helped inspire the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The case is making its way through the courts.

The mainly black county residents had support from the mainly white residents of Lowndesboro.

"Twelve jobs -- come on," said Barbara Evans, who heads the community group. "Twelve jobs for a dump on the ... historic civil rights trial."

Evans said with roughly 250 types of landfills in the state, including 29 that take in more than 32,000 tons of waste daily, Alabama doesn't need new landfills to handle its trash.

"I think Alabama is being targeted and I think especially the communities of color and low-income neighborhoods are being targeted," she said.