As we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and consider the effects Dr. King's work have had on the United States, I want to highlight an often overlooked aspect of that work, how Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle have influenced American notions of environmental health and justice.
One of the many corrosive effects of racial segregation in the United States is the unequal exposure to wastes and hazardous substances faced by people of color in both urban and rual areas across the nation. Consciousness of environmental racism grew in the 1980s, after a variety of incidents (including the siting of hazardous waste sites in Houston and the 1982 protests of a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) dump in Warren County, North Carolina that marked the first time Americans had been arrested for protesting a landfill) became public. Parents worried about children getting sick. Cancer rates in affected areas skyrocketed. In the years after the federal government evacuated the neighborhoods surrounding the Love Canal chemical dump site in upstate New York, worries grew that more communities were affected. These worries were acute in African-American communities, where similar health complaints were not unusual.
The series of events led the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice to conduct a study of hazardous waste siting in the United States. The report, issued in 1987 as Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites, concluded that:
-- Race proved to be the most significant among variables tested in
association with the location of commercial hazardous waste
facilities. This represented a consistent national pattern.
-- Communities with the greatest number of commercial hazardous waste
facilities had the highest composition of racial and ethnic residents.
In communities with two or more facilities or one of the nation's
five largest landfills, the average minority percentage of the
population was more than three times that of communities without
facilities (38 percent vs. 12 percent).
-- In communities with one commercial hazardous waste facility, the
average minority percentage of the population was twice the average
minority percentage of the population in communities without such
facilities (24 percent vs. 12 percent).
-- Although socio-economic status appeared to play an important role
in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities, race still
proved to be more significant. This remained true after the study
controlled for urbanization and regional differences. Incomes and
home values were substantially lower when communities with commercial
facilities were compared to communities in the surrounding counties
without facilities.
Commission for Racial Justice, United Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York, NY, 1987), p. xiii.
In the twenty years since the report, debate and study of environmental racism has proliferated in academic and policy circles, as have organization and protests to remediate environmental inequities. The organized response to environmental racism has grown in the last quarter of a century, fighting a battle that is far from over, yet doing so in ways that will not be easily dismissed, ignored, or dissolved.
All of this happened many years after Martin Luther King died in Memphis almost 40 years ago. Yet Dr. King's work shaped today's struggle for environmental justice; indeed, the last work he ever did was in order to improve the lives of African-Americans in Memphis affected by waste -- the city's sanitation workers.
I will write more about the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike of 1968 next month (February 12 marks the 40th anniversary of its start) as it is an important milestone in American racial, labor, and environmental progress. (Anyone curious about why I say this is strongly encouraged to read Michael Honey's magnificent history of the strike Going Down Jericho Road, as Honey brings the strike into the context of Memphis's long and complicated history of racial segregation and public works. It is an inspiring and poignant read, and the single best work of American history I have read in the past two years.) I bring it up here, though, to show how Dr. King viewed the strike. In early 1968, Dr. King's campaigns had expanded beyond breaking the color line in the South to attempt desegregation in the urban north (including a contentious effort in Chicago in 1966) and to oppose unjust wars (speaking out against the American presence in Vietnam). His vision of equality increasingly incorporated economic issues and the rights of poor people. The criticism Dr. King received for these stances was fierce, and media coverage even among the outlets that had given sympathetic perspectives on the Civil Rights marches in the South began to echo the J. Edgar Hoover accusations that Dr. King was a Communist and subversive. Frustrated with a lack of progress on racial equality (despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act, violence in several cities between 1965 and 1967 underlined the continued racial and economic inequalities that plagued the United States), Dr. King proposed a Poor Peoples' Campaign that would ideally produce "distributive justice" in the form of government programs to abolish poverty by providing poor people enough money to pay for their own housing, education, and necessities. Far from the image of "welfare queens" that Ronald Reagan infamously demonized, these programs would allow participants to get the training required to get and keep a good job and work one's way out of poverty without being beaten down by perpetual debt while reducing the problems of crime, violence, and substance abuse that accompanied poverty. Dr. King's proposals were not unique at the time as many politicians and academics proposed similar antidotes for the ills of poverty. Yet the scorn he received for advocating these ideas helped make a sustained campaign difficult. In the winter of 1968, Dr. King made several speeches to build the campaign, yet with few organizational achievements. He was frustrated.
When Dr. King heard that Memphis's sanitation workers were walking off their jobs to protest the poor working conditions and benefits that this exclusively African-American workforce put up with while removing the wastes of the city of Memphis, he recognized a perfect setting for the Poor People's Campaign.
Memphis was the central city of a vast rural hinterland where impoverished African-Americans lived and worked. Many of the sanitation workers had worked fields in Mississippi in abject poverty with few rights and had come to the city for better wages. Collecting garbage and yard waste was in many ways a step up, but especially after Henry Loeb became mayor, work conditions were brutal as workers carried heavy wastes in excruciating heat with no shade or water, and used dangerous machinery that regularly maimed operators, leaving them unfit to work and destined for poverty with little aid. The strike was triggered by two workers getting killed when they were pulled into their garbage truck and compacted to death.
Only African-Americans worked in sanitation in the city; the exposure to injury and disease associated with the work fell exclusively on the African-American community despite the entire metropolitan area contributing to the wastes that had to be managed. The strike quickly moved beyond a simple demand for better working conditions as it neatly defined the frustration of the city's African-American community living with the existing forms of segregation. Passion for the strike built in the churches and the sanitation workers' cause was seen in town as a Civil Rights cause. As news of the strike spread, Dr. King realized that African-American workers demanding better conditions in Memphis made the strike a focal point for the Poor People's Campaign. He famously said "the movement lives or dies in Memphis."
On March 18, 1968, Dr. King came to Memphis. Speaking at the Mason Temple in front of 25,000 people (the largest indoor mass meeting of the civil rights movement) he declared:
We are tired of being at the bottom. We are tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression...We are tired of having to live in dilapidated, substandard housing conditions where we don't have wall-to-wall carpets but so often we end up with wall-to-wall rats and roaches...We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate to get the basic necessities of life. We are tired of our men being emasculated so that our wives and daughters have to go out and work in the white lady's kitchen leaving us unable to be with our children and give them the time and attention that they need. We are tired.
The crowd, fully into Dr. King's speech, enthusiastically agreed when he extended the strikers' plight to that of all African-American Memphians and asked them all to -- if the city did not come to terms with the strikers -- have a general work stoppage. From there, action (and tensions) in Memphis snowballed. Dr. King led a march in Memphis on March 28, 1968 that was chaotic and marred with violence. Days later, he regrouped and gave his final speech, the "I Have Been to the Mountaintop" speech in support of the strike. Dr. King broadened the focus of the strike to extend to economic equity for all Memphians as he called on the people of Memphis to boycott businesses that didn't support the strikers.
We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.
He died at the Lorraine Motel the next evening. Much pain and suffered followed, in Memphis and throughout the United States. Yet even in the narrow confines of the sanitation workers' strike, his death was not in vain. The city quickly forged an agreement with the strikers that gave sanitation workers in Memphis new powers to organize and new protections on the job. A terrible price had been exacted, but Dr. King's final campaign produced progress in Memphis.
The Memphis strike also provided a roadmap for the advocacy of environmental justice. Though existing organizations such as the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund did not concentrate on the effects of wastes in communities of color, the churches that spawned the Civil Rights movement did. It is no coincidence that the landmark report on toxic wastes and race came from the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. (Its executive director was Dr. Benjamin Chavis, who would go on to head the NAACP.) The nonviolent resistance that was a staple of Dr. King's campaigns in the South was adopted in Warren County, where residents laid down in front of bulldozers en route to digging the dump. The focus on specific, localized environmental factors predated an expanded concern for environmental remediation that would see accomplishments like the asbestos remediation at Chicago's Altgeld Gardens. Much work is left to do to relieve the unequal environmental burdens on communities of color, but the attention on these problems will not soon go away.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died more than a decade before the environmental justice movement came into being, but his work and his example were direct influences on people like the protesting residents of Warren County, on Benjamin Chavis, on environmental justice pioneer Professor Robert Bullard (read an interview with Dr. Bullard for more on his work), and on the communities across the nation and the world who recognize that racial and economic forces shaped environmental inequalities today and fight and hope to overcome these inequalities. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may never have heard the term "environmental justice" but today as we celebrate his birthday, those of us involved in the struggle for environmental justice give thanks for his example, for his contributions, and for his hope.
