April 2024 - Intersectional Environmentalism
Most Americans don’t appreciate how intertwined environmentalism is with the civil rights movement, explains Leah Thomas, author of The Intersectional Environmentalist. She points to Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech when he focused on the environmental hazards faced by Memphis sanitation workers. People of color often end up in dangerous work such as cleaning up sewage spills or harvesting lead, mercury, arsenic, and barium from discarded electronics. When Ben Jealous was president of the NAACP, he asked why Black people so often had “the most physically difficult, lowest paying jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins.” [For more on this, see blog “#19: Incarceration and Toxic Environments”]
Marginalized communities have often borne the brunt of bad air, contaminated water, toxic chemicals, and natural disasters. A 2018 American Journal of Public Health article indicated that people in predominantly Black neighborhoods had a 1.54 times higher burden of exposure to particulate matter than did the overall population.
Hazardous building materials that include lead and arsenic also disproportionately harm folks of color who often live closer to fracking sites where groundwater is contaminated. Though the water crisis in Flint, Michigan shocked many, similar situations fester around the country. And when climate disasters occur, such as hurricane Katrina, people of color tend to suffer the most. [Read more about this in two past blogs: “#17: Schools, Cities, and Environmental Racism” and “#18: Rising Tides of Racism”]
Given this context, why don’t we know more about Black environmental activists like Charles Young, Hattie Carthan, and Hazel Johnson? Johnson, nicknamed “the mother of environmental justice,” lost her husband to lung cancer in 1969. Her seven children suffered from skin and respiratory health challenges. Through research she confirmed that this was due to the air and water pollution in her southeast Chicago neighborhood.
Caught in the middle of what Johnson labeled a “toxic donut” of landfills, sewage-treatment plants, and factories, residents of Altgeld Gardens had the highest cancer rate in the city. To fight back, Johnson joined the Local Advisory Council and founded People for Community Recovery. Civil disobedience and lobbying forced municipal authorities to test the water. Its high cyanide levels led to new water and sewer lines. Johnson pressured the city to do asbestos abatement in aging housing developments. Her leadership earned her the 1992 President's Environment and Conservation Challenge Award.
Johnson may have been inspired by the work of Brooklyn’s Hattie Carthan. At age of sixty-five, Charthan founded the Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee. About five years later, her Neighborhood Tree Corps taught young people to plant and care for 1500 trees in over 100 block associations. Nicknamed “the tree lady,” she lives on through Hattie Carthan Garden and Market that promote social activism, community building, and food justice. [For more information on Black-owned community farms see April 2022 blog, “Farming While Black"]
Carthan may have been inspired by Charles Young, a defender of trees from a generation earlier. Born enslaved in Kentucky in 1864, Young rose to be the third black American to graduate from West Point. He served his country in the Spanish-American War and as an attaché in Haiti and Liberia. But he became an environmentalist as the first black National Parks Superintendent who protected California’s great Sequoias in the Sequoia National Park.
National parks offer Leah Thomas opportunities for healing, something she especially needed after being traumatized by the 2014 death of Michael Brown and the uprising in Ferguson near her childhood home. When interning with the National Park Service, Thomas felt guilty as she was able to escape to nature. But it helped her discern her life’s work: “intersectional environmentalism.” This type of ecological activism, she explains, “advocates for both the protection of people and the planet. It identifies the ways in which injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected.”
This is not always evident in predominantly white environmentalist spaces. Black environmentalists often feel their time and energy drained when having to both teach this lesson and confront systemic racism within white activism. Thomas points out how it hurts when the environmental injustice happening to Black people today has to take a back seat to endangered animals or environmental threats in the future. There’s truth in the words of Hazel Johnson decades ago: "It's all very well to embrace saving the rain forests and conserving endangered animal species, but such global initiatives don't even begin to impact communities inhabited by people of color."
FURTHER ACTION
1) Learn more about Black environmentalists, like Hazel Johnson who mentored Barack Obama when he was a community organizer in Chicago pushing for asbestos removal from Altgeld Gardens.
2) Learn more about the work of Black community farmers through my April 2022 blog, “Farming While Black." It focuses on Leah Penniman who explains the amazing racial disparity in agriculture today. While an astounding 85% of agricultural workers are people of color, only 1-3% of farms are owned or managed by them.
3) Encourage posthumous recognition of Black environmental activists, as when President Barack Obama used the Antiquities Act to designate Charles Young’s house as a national monument. Learn more about Young through this extensive National Park Service website.
4) Appreciate the ingenuity of Young who named many of the great Sequoias for heroes in American history. This personalization, if you will, protected many of the largest and oldest trees in the country. One example is the Redwood dedicated to the escaped slave and activist, Booker T Washington.
5) Support one or more of the following organizations that link racial and environmental justice: Justice Outside; Outdoor Afro; Hunters of Color; Soil Generation; Minorities in Shark Sciences; BlackAFinSTEM; and Black in Marine Science.
6) Facilitate inclusion of more people of color into stewardship of our lands and waters. After all, as Dudley Edmondson points out, by the year 2045 more than half of the population of the U. S. will be non-white. Edmondson recommends you do that by promoting his book, Black and White Faces in America’s Wild Places, as well as Carolyn Finney’s Black Faces, White Spaces and Dorcetta Taylor’s Toxic Communities.