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First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit

1 On October 24, 1991, nearly 300 Black, Native, Latino, Pacific Islander, Asian American, and other minority activists gathered in Washington, D.C. to discuss, for the first time in history, the environmental injustices their communities were experiencing. During the four-day event, delegates told stories of Black communities forced to relocate due to dangerously high pollution levels, farmworkers forced to live in homes built on abandoned chemical dump sites, Indigenous groups fighting against mining and nuclear testing on their reservations, and Asian immigrants developing respiratory problems after working for years in factories. There was excitement, remembers sociologist Robert Bullard, an environmental justice advocate who served on the summit’s planning committee, but also anxiety. Conversations got heated. “We had to unpack, and throw off that baggage of mistrust that’s kept African Americans from knowing that much about Latinos, Latinos from Asian and Pacific Islanders and Indigenous people,” said Bullard. “Those first few days were very intense.” “That was the moment that we came together — not knowing much about each other — but we learned during those first few days,” he added. Thirty years later, the 17 principles of environmental justice laid out during the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit are as relevant as ever. The intersection between race and environmental injustices has been recognized by the federal and state governments, and a growing number of people understand certain groups are more vulnerable to the devastating effects of environmental degradation and climate change due to historical injustices. On the 30th anniversary of the summit, we talked to four of its key figures to understand the legacies of the watershed moment, and what challenges still lie ahead for environmental justice.

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1. 1979 Whispering Pines - Bean v Southwestern Waste Management Corp. and the Formation of NECAG. In Houston, Texas, a group of African American homeowners began a bitter fight to keep the Whispering Pines Sanitary Landfill from being placed within 1500 feet of a local public school (and within two miles of 6 schools). Residents formed the Northeast Community Action Group (NECAG). NECAG and their attorney Linda McKeever Bullard filed a class action lawsuit to block the landfill from being built. Their lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., was the first of its kind in the United States that charged environmental discrimination in waste facility siting under civil rights laws. While the lawsuit ultimately failed to prevent the construction of the landfill, it sent a clear message for environmental justice cases across the country. Robert Bullard is the father of environmental justice. A distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, Bullard first began exploring the relationship between the environment, place, and race back in the ’70s. At that time, the term “environmental justice” didn’t yet exist. Racist practices by people in power, however, did. Through a civil rights lens, Bullard began studying a landfill proposal near a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood in Houston. Today, this field of research Bullard founded continues to show that low-income communities and people of color live closest to hazardous waste sites and polluters. Before climate disaster even strikes, these vulnerable communities face a disproportionate burden from industry—often from the one most at fault for this crisis in the first place: fossil fuels. More than 70 percent of the world’s emissions can be attributed to 100 companies, according to a 2017 report from CDP, which measures companies’ climate risks. The fossil fuel sector is responsible for this mess. It’s also responsible for the air pollution and health disparities that communities in the Gulf Coast or California’s Central Valley face daily. Climate change devastates vulnerable communities from beginning to end. Welcome to The Frontline, where we get real about the climate crisis—and whom it affects most. I’m Yessenia Funes, the climate editor at Atmos. Today, I’m here to break down the history of environmental justice and how it relates to the heating of our planet. The environmental justice movement is a direct result of the civil rights movement. It didn’t come from nature or conservation groups. Nope, civil rights leaders made it happen. That’s how Bullard got his start on this research. “The environmental justice movement and environmental justice were framed out of a civil rights equity movement,” Bullard tells me over the phone. “Environmental justice, for me, embraces the principle that all communities and all people are entitled to equal protection of environmental laws and regulation, housing laws, education, land use, employment, and health.” All communities should be entitled to this, but we know that’s not the reality. In 1978, the Houston neighborhood of Northwood Manor was confronted with a proposal for a toxic landfill. Bullard and his students relied on archival records and reports to map where landfills in the city sat. They were trying to uncover whether the locations of these city-owned landfills were, in fact, discriminatory toward Black residents. Surprise, surprise: They were. Every single landfill and 75 percent of the incinerators were in Black neighborhoods. This was despite the fact that Houston was only about 27 percent Black.
2. 1982 Sit-in Against Warren County, NC PCB Landfill September 1982: The second time African Americans mobilized a national, broad-based group was a nonviolent sit-in protest against a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill in Warren County, North Carolina. Over 500 environmentalists and civil rights activists were arrested and the protest was unsuccessful in halting construction. This event is widely understood to be the catalyst for the Environmental Justice Movement. North Carolina State Troopers pick up protestors on the road to the Warren County Landfill on September 17, 1982. The protestors, who sat on the road with their arms locked, were upset over the dumping of PCB-laden dirt in the landfill.AP Photo/Steve Helber
3. 1983 Publication of Solid Waste Sites and the Houston Black Community Dr. Robert Bullard (husband to Linda McKeever Bullard, the attorney for the plaintiffs in Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc.), conducted a first-of-its-kind study documenting the location of municipal waste disposal facilities in Houston. Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community was the first comprehensive account of environmental racism in the United States. Bullard and his researchers found that African American neighborhoods in Houston were often chosen for toxic waste sites. All five city-owned garbage dumps, 80 percent of city-owned garbage incinerators, and 75 percent of privately owned landfills were sited in black neighborhoods, although African Americans made up only 25 percent of the city's population. (Original Caption) 10/21/1982-Afton, NC- Resembling civil rights demonstrators of the 1960's, blacks and whites march together in protest against a dump for toxic wastes. Many in this rural community contend Warren County was chosen as the site because most of its citizens are black and poor. Officials deny the question of race played any part in the selection. Front center is Reverend Joseph Lowery of Atlanta, who heads the Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Environmental advocates lost that battle—North Carolina ultimately buried the PCBs in Warren County—but the controversy crystallized the idea that the nation's environmental problems disproportionately burden its low-income people of color. Other communities of color had organized to oppose environmental threats before Warren County. In the early 1960s, Latino farm workers led by Cesar Chavez fought for workplace rights, including protection from harmful pesticides in the farm fields of California's San Joaquin Valley. In 1967, African-American students took to the streets of Houston to oppose a city garbage dump in their community that had claimed the life of a child. In 1968, residents of West Harlem, in New York City, fought unsuccessfully against a sewage treatment plant in their community. But the Warren County protests marked the first instance of an environmental protest by people of color garnering widespread national attention. The environmental justice movement's power only multiplied when the data began to roll in. At the behest of Congressman Walter Fauntroy, the Washington, D.C., delegate arrested during the North Carolina protests, the General Accounting Office in 1983 confirmed that hazardous waste sites in three southeastern states were disproportionately located near black communities. Four years later, the United Church of Christ produced a landmark report showing that three out of five Latino and black Americans lived near a toxic waste site.
4. 2017 Why communities fighting for fair policing also demand environmental justice
5. 1987 Toxic Waste in the United States The United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice (UCC) released Toxic Waste in the United States (PDF). In this document, the UCC examined the statistical relationship between the location of a hazardous waste site and the racial/socioeconomic composition of host communities nationwide. The study found that over 15 million African Americans, 8 million Hispanics, and half of all Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans resided in communities with at least one abandoned or uncontrolled toxic waste site. The UCC study was the first of its kind to address the issues of race, class, and the environment on a national level. The study noted that although the socioeconomic status of residents appeared to play an important role in the location of hazardous waste sites, the residents' race was the most significant factor among the variables analyzed.
6. 1990 Dumping in Dixie: Race Class and Environmental Quality, the nation's first environmental justice book
7. 1992 Deep South Center for Environmental Justice founded at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation's first EJ center Dr. Beverly Wright founds the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in collaboration with community environmental groups and universities across the southern region. The center was the first EJ center affiliated with an HBCU (the center has recently been restructured to be a fully independent, nonprofit entity). Since its founding, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice has become an influential resource for environmental justice research, education, and job training.
8. 1983 General Accounting Office Conducts Study (Environmental Justice) Prompted by the 1982 Warren County sit-in, the United States General Accounting Office (GAO) conducted the study: Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities (PDF). This study is said to have "galvanized the environmental justice movement and provided empirical support for the claims for environmental racism." GAO found that three out of four hazardous waste landfills examined were located in communities where African Americans made up at least twenty-six percent of the population, and whose family incomes were below the poverty level. This study used 1980 Census data.
9. 1992 University of Michigan's Environmental Justice Program n 2020 SEAS hosted the Michigan Environmental Justice Summit, celebrating 30 years of Environmental justice. Panelsist included moderator & SEAS Alumna Michelle Martinez (MS '08), Coordinator, Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, Detroit-based EJ activist, speaker, writer and mother; Dr. Robert Bullard,  known as the “Father of Environmental Justice,” named one of 13 Environmental Leaders of the Century (Newsweek, 2008); Charles Lee, Senior Policy Advisor, EPA, EJ pioneer and principal author of the landmark report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States; Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Policy Director, New Consensus, an architect of the Green New Deal; Regina Strong, Environmental Justice Public Advocate, Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy; and Dr. Beverly Wright, Founder and Executive Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
10. 1994 Executive Order 12898 President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations., This action was made to focus federal attention on the environmental and human health conditions of minority and low-income populations with the goal of achieving environmental protection for all communities. The Order established an Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice Additionally, it directed federal agencies to develop strategies on how to identify and address the disproportionately adverse human health and environmental effects of programs, policies, and activities on minority and low-income populations.
11. 1983 A Movement Is Born: Environmental Justice and the UCC The Rev. Ben Chavis during a 1983 protest against the dumping of toxic waste. Photo by Ricky Stilley Through the leadership of Dollie Burwell, the Rev. Leon White, the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, Jr., and the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice, the United Church of Christ served as the leading organizational force in the birth of the environmental justice movement. The story of how this movement arose begins in the late 1970s when a group of residents formed the Warren County Citizens Concerned (WCCC) and began to protest the state of North Carolina’s designation of a landfill in their county for the disposal of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a toxic chemical substance whose production was banned by congress in 1979. With a population that was roughly 62% black, no other county in the state had a higher percentage of black residents, and only a few of the state’s one hundred counties could claim higher poverty rates. The placement of the landfill became to be regarded as an instance “environmental racism,” a phrase coined by Chavis. Photo Ricky Stilley While Chavis would ultimately take the helm of the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice, it was White who served as the commission’s Executive Director when the WCCC first involved the group in its efforts. Both White and Chavis ultimately played leading roles in what became the watershed event in the launching of the movement. In September of 1982, the first trucks carrying PCB contaminated soil drove into Warren County but were met by hundreds of protestors who laid down on the highway to prevent their arrival. On the first day of action, 55 protestors were arrested. The protests lasted six weeks and were covered by the national media. By the end, 523 arrests were made. The attention garnered by the demonstrations in Warren County laid the foundation for more activism and consciousness-raising. In an article that appeared in the New Yorker, Chavis later recalled, “Warren County made headlines. And because it made headlines in the media, we began to get calls from other communities. But you know that in the eighties you couldn’t just say there was discrimination. You had to prove it.” Under the leadership of Chavis, the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice issued its landmark 1987 report Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The study found that race rose to the top among variables associated with the location of a toxic waste facility. Three out of five Black and Hispanic Americans lived in a community that housed what the EPA called an “uncontrolled toxic waste site,” a closed or abandoned site that posed a threat to human health and the environment.
12. 1988 West Harlem Environmental Action West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT) was founded. WE ACT was created to address ongoing West Harlem community struggles around the poor management of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant, the construction of the sixth bus depot across from an intermediate school, and a large housing development - a densely populated and heavily trafficked area. WE ACT evolved into an environmental justice organization committed to empowering the community to become a vocal, informed, and proactive force that determines and implements its vision of what its environment can and should be. WE ACT was New York's first environmental justice organization created to improve environmental and health quality in communities of color. WE ACT co-Founders Peggy Shepard and the late Chuck Sutton raising awareness about poor air quality in Northern Manhattan
13. 1990 Indigenous Environmental Network Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) was formed by grassroots indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues by building economically sustainable communities. IEN's activities include building the capacity of indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect their sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, and health of both their people and all living things. Established in 1990 within the United States, IEN was formed by grassroots Indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues (EJ). IEN’s activities include building the capacity of Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities. IEN accomplishes this by maintaining an informational clearinghouse, organizing campaigns, direct actions and public awareness, building the capacity of community and tribes to address EJ issues, development of initiatives to impact policy, and building alliances among Indigenous communities, tribes, inter-tribal and Indigenous organizations, people-of-color/ethnic organizations, faith-based and women groups, youth, labor, environmental organizations and others. IEN convenes local, regional and national meetings on environmental and economic justice issues, and provides support, resources and referral to Indigenous communities and youth throughout primarily North America – and in recent years – globally.
14. 1978 LOVE Canal - President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency Aborted canal project branching off of the Niagara River - Dr. Jordan Kleiman Love Canal is an aborted canal project branching off of the Niagara River about four miles south of Niagara Falls. It is also the name of a fifteen-acre, working-class neighborhood of around 800 single-family homes built directly adjacent to the canal. From 1942 to 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company, with government sanction, began using the partially dug canal as a chemical waste dump. At the end of this period, the contents of the canal consisted of around 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals, including at least twelve that are known carcinogens (halogenated organics, chlorobenzenes, and dioxin among them). Hooker capped the 16-acre hazardous waste landfill in clay and sold the land to the Niagara Falls School Board, attempting to absolve itself of any future liability by including a warning in the property deed. Public awareness of the disaster unfolded in the late 1970s when investigative newspaper coverage and grassroots door-to-door health surveys began to reveal a series of inexplicable illnesses—epilepsy, asthma, migraines, and nephrosis—and abnormally high rates of birth defects and miscarriages in the Love Canal neighborhood. As it turns out, consecutive wet winters in the late 1970s raised the water table and caused the chemicals to leach (via underground swales and a sewer system that drained into nearby creeks) into the basements and yards of neighborhood residents, as well as into the playground of the elementary school built directly over the canal. After a series of frustrating encounters with apathetic NYS officials, who were slow to act but quick to dismiss the activists (most of whom were working-class women who lived in the neighborhood) as a collection of hysterical housewives, President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency in 1978 and had the federal government relocate 239 families. This left 700 families who federal officials viewed as being at insufficient risk to warrant relocation, even though tests conducted by the NYS Department of Health revealed that toxic substances were leaching into their homes. After another hard battle, activists forced Carter to declare a second state of emergency in 1981, during which the remaining families were relocated. The total cost for relocation of all the families was $17 million. Love Canal quickly came to symbolize the looming environmental disaster represented by untold numbers of toxic waste disposal sites scattered throughout America. Legislators and activists alike have tapped the momentum generated by Love Canal activism in their efforts to deal with this dangerous and costly problem. On the level of public policy, lawmakers used the national publicity generated by the Love Canal disaster to push for new legislation to hold polluters financially responsible for cleaning up their toxic waste sites. The result was the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act—better known as Superfund. A less well-known but equally important outcome of Love Canal was the emergence of a militant, grassroots “environmental justice” movement. This movement, which was fueled by mounting frustration with mainstream environmentalism’s failure to address the disproportionate impact of toxic pollution on working-class and minority communities, launched anti-toxics campaigns in hundreds of cities across the nation.
15. 1990 University of Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards Dr. Bunyan Bryant and Dr. Paul Mohai organized the Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards at the University of Michigan. This conference further propelled environmental justice as a legitimate academic field of study and resulted in Bryant and Mohai leading a team of academics and activists to advise the U.S. EPA on environmental justice policy. The EPA dubbed this group the "Michigan Coalition," which met with the EPA throughout the early 1990s.
16. 1971 Bolinas Oil Spill - one of the worst environmental disasters to occur in San Francisco Bay Volunteers clean oil from a beach in Bolinas, Calif., on Jan. 23, 1971, following the collision of two Standard Oil tankers. (Ilka Hartmann/Associated Press) In the early morning of Jan. 18, 1971, two Standard Oil tankers collided in dense fog several hundred yards outside the Golden Gate and spilled more than 800,000 gallons of thick bunker fuel oil. Hours later, oil began to wash up on San Francisco and Marin County beaches and smothered more than 7,000 birds in the toxic fuel. All but a few hundred birds died despite extensive efforts to save them over the next several weeks. Tens of thousands of volunteers — from local residents to farmers to hippies and doctors — flocked to beaches to attempt to protect cherished habitats such as Bolinas Lagoon and to save as much of the wildlife as possible.
17. April 1990 Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ) was formed in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the People of Color Regional Activist Dialogue on Environmental Justice. SNEEJ is a regional organization composed of African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian/Pacific Islanders. SNEEJ exists to strengthen the work of local organizations and empower communities and workers to impact local, state, regional, national, and international policy on environmental and economic justice issues.
18. 1971 Marin County, Bolinas California OIL SPILL
19. 1990 Congressional Black Caucus Meets with EPA Officials
20. 1979 Whispering Pines Robert Bullard is the father of environmental justice. A distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, Bullard first began exploring the relationship between the environment, place, and race back in the ’70s. At that time, the term “environmental justice” didn’t yet exist. Racist practices by people in power, however, did. Through a civil rights lens, Bullard began studying a landfill proposal near a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood in Houston. Today, this field of research Bullard founded continues to show that low-income communities and people of color live closest to hazardous waste sites and polluters. Before climate disaster even strikes, these vulnerable communities face a disproportionate burden from industry—often from the one most at fault for this crisis in the first place: fossil fuels. More than 70 percent of the world’s emissions can be attributed to 100 companies, according to a 2017 report from CDP, which measures companies’ climate risks. The fossil fuel sector is responsible for this mess. It’s also responsible for the air pollution and health disparities that communities in the Gulf Coast or California’s Central Valley face daily. Climate change devastates vulnerable communities from beginning to end. Welcome to The Frontline, where we get real about the climate crisis—and whom it affects most. I’m Yessenia Funes, the climate editor at Atmos. Today, I’m here to break down the history of environmental justice and how it relates to the heating of our planet. The environmental justice movement is a direct result of the civil rights movement. It didn’t come from nature or conservation groups. Nope, civil rights leaders made it happen. That’s how Bullard got his start on this research. “The environmental justice movement and environmental justice were framed out of a civil rights equity movement,” Bullard tells me over the phone. “Environmental justice, for me, embraces the principle that all communities and all people are entitled to equal protection of environmental laws and regulation, housing laws, education, land use, employment, and health.” All communities should be entitled to this, but we know that’s not the reality. In 1978, the Houston neighborhood of Northwood Manor was confronted with a proposal for a toxic landfill. Bullard and his students relied on archival records and reports to map where landfills in the city sat. They were trying to uncover whether the locations of these city-owned landfills were, in fact, discriminatory toward Black residents. Surprise, surprise: They were. Every single landfill and 75 percent of the incinerators were in Black neighborhoods. This was despite the fact that Houston was only about 27 percent Black.
21. First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit On October 24, 1991, nearly 300 Black, Native, Latino, Pacific Islander, Asian American, and other minority activists gathered in Washington, D.C. to discuss, for the first time in history, the environmental injustices their communities were experiencing. During the four-day event, delegates told stories of Black communities forced to relocate due to dangerously high pollution levels, farmworkers forced to live in homes built on abandoned chemical dump sites, Indigenous groups fighting against mining and nuclear testing on their reservations, and Asian immigrants developing respiratory problems after working for years in factories. There was excitement, remembers sociologist Robert Bullard, an environmental justice advocate who served on the summit’s planning committee, but also anxiety. Conversations got heated. “We had to unpack, and throw off that baggage of mistrust that’s kept African Americans from knowing that much about Latinos, Latinos from Asian and Pacific Islanders and Indigenous people,” said Bullard. “Those first few days were very intense.” “That was the moment that we came together — not knowing much about each other — but we learned during those first few days,” he added. Thirty years later, the 17 principles of environmental justice laid out during the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit are as relevant as ever. The intersection between race and environmental injustices has been recognized by the federal and state governments, and a growing number of people understand certain groups are more vulnerable to the devastating effects of environmental degradation and climate change due to historical injustices. On the 30th anniversary of the summit, we talked to four of its key figures to understand the legacies of the watershed moment, and what challenges still lie ahead for environmental justice.