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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

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

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2. 1960-2008 Imprisonment Rate vs Crime Rate from 1960-2008 Graphic showing U.S. imprisonment rate versus crime rate from 1960-2008 Critics also pointed to data showing that people of color were targeted and arrested on suspicion of drug use at higher rates than whites. Overall, the policies led to a rapid rise in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997. In 2014, nearly half of the 186,000 people serving time in federal prisons in the United States had been incarcerated on drug-related charges, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
3. 1980 cuts in Title XX (the 1980 Omnibus Reconciliation Bill) “There are over 100,000 persons in California who depend on IHSS funded services to live on their own or in board and care facilities. One-third of these people are severely disabled, all of them are poor. Recent federal cutbacks in Title XX will mean a reduction of services to 99% of these people and many will lose up to 50% of benefits. The 1980 cuts in Title XX (the 1980 Omnibus Reconciliation Bill) are only now filtering down to the people who depend on it for services. In mid-year the California Legislature passed S.633 which determined how the $28 M. cut would be implemented. This act was held up by the courts until recipients had adequate notice and opportunity to appeal. In January 1982, the recipients will actually begin to lose benefits.” From: Testimony on the Impact of Federal Human Services Cutbacks on the Disabled for the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee Hearing January 18, 1982, Sacramento, California by EDWARD V. ROBERTS, DIRECTOR of the DEPARTMENT OF REHABILITATION
4. 1980 Why Jimmy Carter Ordered the U.S. to Boycott the 1980 Olympics
8. 1980s Restructuring and organized labor changes “Restructuring hit factories in southern Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley especially hard; plant closures eliminated many unionized jobs. In south Los Angeles, eight major plants closed from 1975 to 1986, leaving 12,000 people out of work. More closures came as defense contracts ended in the 1990s – especially in aircraft and shipbuilding – with the end of the Cold War. In addition to these broad changes, the economic crisis of the mid-1970s and a rightward shift in politics further eroded the power of organized labor. Business went on an anti-labor offensive in the 1970s and 1980s, seeking to weaken the union movement. They were bolstered by anti-unionism at the federal level, led by President Ronald Reagan who set the tone. In 1981, he fired striking air traffic controllers and replaced them with non-union workers, and championed business deregulation. In emerging high- tech industries, like electronics assembly plants, as well, owners were anti-union and often fostered sweatshop-like conditions in their plants.” Excerpt from SurveyLA Citywide Historic Context Statement
9. 1980s UFW
10. 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.
11. 1983 In Today’s Headlines, Echoes of Central America’s Proxy Wars of the 1980s deadly conflicts in crowded Central American cities and dusty hamlets during the 1980s. Their effects are still felt today. Over the decades, several million Central America migrants have sought opportunity, refuge, and stability in the United States, driven by a mix of factors including battered economies, violence, corrupt governments, and the desire to reunite with relatives who emigrated earlier or to find a family-sustaining job. While media attention in recent years has focused on the arrival of unaccompanied minors and families, primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the lion’s share of the 3.8 million Central American immigrants in the United States as of 2019 have been in the country for at least a decade. Displacement and economic instability caused by regional civil wars, in which the U.S. government had involvement, led many Central Americans to migrate in the 1980s. The wars ended, but economic instability remained—as did migration. The Central American immigrant population in the United States more than tripled between 1980 and 1990. Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and two earthquakes in 2001 were among the factors further driving migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Similar factors have remained at work in recent years. In November 2020, Hurricanes Eta and Iota devasted the region, affecting as many as 11 million people throughout Central America. Drought also has plagued parts of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in what is known as the “Dry Corridor.” Further, government corruption, gang activity, and high homicide rates continue to affect parts of the region, driving emigration. The total Central American-born population in the United States has grown more than tenfold since 1980, and by 24 percent since 2010. The 3.8 million Central American immigrants present in 2019 accounted for 8 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population of 44.9 million.
12. 1986-87 Anti- Nuclear Protests Die-in at student union, UMass Amherst, sometime in the late 1980s. During the academic year 1986-1987, the campus at UMass Amherst was a hotbed of political protest, fueled in part by the US intervention in Central America. The arrival on campus of a CIA recruiting officer in November set off a string of demonstrations that attracted the support of activists Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter, daughter of former president Jimmy Carter. The occupation of the Whitmore Administration Building was followed by a larger occupation of adjacent Munson Hall, resulting in a number of arrests. Hoffman, Carter, and eleven co-defendants were tried and acquitted on charges of disorderly conduct were tried in April 1987
13. 1987 Just Say No On September 23, 1987, first lady Nancy Reagan accepts on behalf of the “Just Say No Club” a check from the Procter & Gamble company for $150,000, in Washington, D.C. "Just Say No" was an advertising campaign prevalent during the 1980s and early 1990s as a part of the U.S.-led war on drugs, aiming to discourage children from engaging in illegal recreational drug use by offering various ways of saying no. The slogan was created and championed by Nancy Reagan during her husband's presidency
14. 1987 LA River Encampment “By the 1980s, the homelessness situation was a crisis. Skid Row was full, and [those experiencing homelessness] were living throughout the city, with people and families living under freeways, by the beach, and along the Los Angeles River’s 51 miles. Due to the surge in the population, LA County and City took desperate measures, opening City Hall as a temporary housing site, and signing an emergency agreement for a temporary “urban campground” for hundreds in need. This campground was on 12 acres of land lining the LA River and approximately 2,600 people looked to this camp for housing solutions. Unfortunately, this riverside camp was deemed unsuccessful and closed months later.”
15. 1989 - A diverse group of AIDS activists march in front of Oakland City Hall. April 1. This photograph, taken on April Fool's Day in 1989, shows minority AIDS activists marching to Oakland's City Hall to demand programs and funding for AIDS prevention and education in their communities. The disease first emerged between 1980 and 1981 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Doctors there reported to the Federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) they had seen a handful of people suffering from Kaposi's sarcoma, an extremely rare form of cancer, or pneumocistis carinii, a rare form of pneumonia, and swollen lymph nodes. The first wave of sufferers who sought medical attention was overwhelmingly white gay men. As a result, the few politicians, journalists, and members of the public who were paying attention responded as if AIDS was a gay disease affecting the white community.
16. 1989 UNITE HERE Local 11 “UNITE HERE Local 11, currently representing over 32,000 hospitality workers in southern California and Arizona, has a long history in Los Angeles. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 11 brought together previously separate locals for waiters, waitresses, bartenders, cooks, and other hotel workers. In the 1970s and 1980s, the predominantly Spanish-speaking membership of Local 11 fought for fuller participation in their union against a largely Anglo leadership. In 1989, María Elena Durazo became the first Latina to lead a major Los Angeles union. She began reorienting the local towards greater membership participation and a more assertive stance with employers. Since then, Local 11 merged with locals in Santa Monica, Long Beach, and Orange County, and in 2016, with Local 631 in Arizona.”
17. Harvard - Student Anti- Apartheid Protests A speaker addresses the crowd of students gathered to protest Harvard's investment in South African holdings during the late 1980s. A sign reads: "Put Apartheid Out of Business." Harvard University, April 25, 1985. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, these students made headlines by urging University administrators to pull Harvard’s investments from firms that did business with the apartheid government in South Africa, though Harvard never fully divested, despite continued protests.
18. Housing Overview smael Cazarez wearing serape and playing flute leading protest of housing demolition in Pico-Union neighborhood in Los Angeles, Calif., 1980 Hodge, Bill, December 15, 1980, Los Angeles Times - “In the decade following 1973, 4.5 million units were removed from the nation's housing stock, half of which was occupied by low-income households. In roughly the same period, over 1 million SRO units were lost, and the nation's public housing program was all but abandoned. It was replaced by the 'Section 8' rent-subsidy program that increased the residential location choice of recipients but only modestly increased the stock of affordable housing. Federal authorizations for housing subsidies amounted to 7 percent of the total budget in 1978; but by the late 1980s this proportion had shrunk to 0.7 percent. At the same time, the rise in single-person households dramatically increased the demand for housing across the nation. In Los Angeles and Southern California the consequence of these wider trends was a housing affordability crisis of unprecedented proportions. The proportion of households able to afford a median-priced home fell, and between 1974 and 1985, the number of housing units in L.A. County renting for $300 per month or less fell by 42 percent in real terms. In addition, the share of the total housing stock that was affordable fell from 35 percent in 1974 to 16 percent over the following decade. The number of poor renter households grew by 43,000 but the number of units they could technically afford fell by 60,000. Virtually no new public housing units were constructed during the 1980s, and between 1970 and 1989 market-rate housing unit growth in L.A. lagged at half the national rate.11”
19. 1980 - Ken Horne - CDC identifies first American Patient of the Aids Empidemic
20. Notable 1980s Labor History Events “1981 First Comparable Worth strike in United States, conducted by AFSCME Local 101 in San Jose; women achieve pay equity in city government jobs; 1981 President Ronald Reagan warns the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) that he would fired every member if they struck. They did and he did, resulting in the termination of all 10,000 federal air traffic controllers. 1983 The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) establishes local partnership from private and public employers who receive federal funds for job training and employment. Replaced the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA).”
21. UFW in the 1980s
22. Unemployment and Benefit Reductions “In Los Angeles, high unemployment in the late 1970s and early 1980s increased the welfare rolls, and drastic measures to curtail them were introduced. As a result of State actions, 38,000 recipients were dropped entirely, another 48,000 suffered benefit reductions, almost 8,000 lost food stamps, and about 12,000 AFDC families lost Medi-Cal coverage. Health and mental health funding was cut, along with funding for substance abuse treatment. Lawsuits forced the county to raise its General Assistance monthly payments (locally known as General Relief, or GR) from $228 in 1986 to $341 in 1991. However, this benefit payment was later slashed to $293 and has continued to decrease since then.”
23. USC Student Anti-Apartheid Protests A statue of USC’s mascot with a Anti-apartheid sign on his shield at rally on the campus of USC 1986. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa.” It was an indirect strategy, but an effective one; because foreign companies played an important role in South Africa’s economy, their withdrawal undermined the country’s government. In conjunction with the massive resistance by South Africans, divestment forced companies to leave and not return until apartheid ended
26. 1981 Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open Eric Mann describes organizing with Ed Asner (Actor): “...we initiated the Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open in 1981 even before GM threatened to close our plant. We spent 2 years building a powerful coalition, we met with GM President F. James McDonald in 1984 as which time, shaken up by our real threat of a boycott of GM cars in the largest new car market in the U.S., he made a 3-year commitment to keep the plant open. Thanks to our work we won one of the great UAW labor/Black/Latin@/women’s victories of the entire period as GM kept the plant open until 1992—the exact ten years we had demanded to “keep GM Van Nuys Open.” More than 4,000 workers, 50% Latin@, 15 Black, 15% women, kept their jobs for a full decade.” Source “Speaking to a crowd of about 750 GM employees and their supporters, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson praised the auto workers as “freedom fighters,” and a Chamber of Commerce official said the possible plant closing could have a devastating economic impact on the entire San Fernando Valley.”
27. 1981 First Major News Article about HIV/ AIDS Article: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html Entitled “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” the article was penned by Lawrence K. Altman and appeared in the New York Times. At the time, gay men were dying of an unusual disease. They presented with purple spots on the skin, and their lymph nodes eventually became swollen before they died. It seemed to be cancer—but the symptoms matched a type usually only seen in very old people. The people who were dying at the time, however, were young and otherwise healthy. Doctors did not understand what was happening or whether the cancer was contagious.
30. 1982 Koreatown sin unveiled The 1965 Immigration Act ended various exclusionary immigration policies. It also set up a system of preference that favored skilled workers and the families of American citizens. This landmark piece of legislation facilitated massive new waves of Asian migration. New communities arose, such as Los Angeles’ Koreatown, and the Sikh community in Yuba City, whose temple is pictured here. As Asian migrants with more capital arrived, “suburban Chinatowns” such as Monterey Park grew.
31. 1982 A Salvadoran army unit advances on guerrilla positions in the capital's poor neighbourhood of Cuscatancingo, March 1982. photographs taken by Mike Goldwater during the Salvadoran Civil War, a 12-years long conflict resulted in the death of more than 75 thousand people and the displacement of over one million. The war was fought between military-led government forces and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, an umbrella organisation of five left-wing guerrilla groups, and ended with the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992. At the height of this conflict, Goldwater travelled to the small Central American nation in order to extensively document the role of the rural poor in the revolution, as well as the unrest in urban areas such as San Salvador, the capital.
32. 1982 Anti- nuclear Protests Upwards of one million people demonstrated in New York City's Central Park June 12, 1982 against nuclear weapons and for an end to the cold war arms race. It was the largest anti-nuclear protest in American history. On the morning of June 12, 1982, as the sun shined down on the green grass in Central Park, people began to gather carrying signs for nuclear disarmament. Throughout the morning, buses arrived from around the country. By the afternoon, nearly every blade of grass was covered. Citizens filled second, third, fifth, sixth, seventh, and Madison avenues. By mid-afternoon, the police estimated that over 750,000 people were in Central Park demanding an end to nuclear weapons. By the end of the day, that number had swelled to 1 million
33. 1982 Anti-nuclear protests
34. 1982 Plyler v. Doe This Supreme Court case ruled that public school districts cannot constitutionally refuse admission to unauthorized immigrant children because the harmful effects to the public outweighed the cost savings. Every child deserves a fair chance to learn and thrive. That might seem an obvious statement today, but it took years of legal battles fought by MALDEF to ensure that “every” child did not exclude any child – particularly, immigrant children. After nearly five years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that all children, regardless of immigration status, have a constitutional right to a free public education from kindergarten to 12th grade. The landmark case, Plyler v. Doe, grew out of a 1977 attempt by the Tyler Independent School District in Texas to oust the children of undocumented workers – farmhands, for the most part – from the school system by imposing tuition of as much as $1,000 per student to attend what were for everyone else free public schools.
35. 1982 Warren County Warren County, North Carolina, was selected in 1982 by the state government as a landfill site for “6,000 truckloads of soil laced with toxic PCBs”. The residents of Warren County are majority Black and low-income (90% low income, and 66% African American according to Lehmann, 2011), and the carcinogen, PCB, poses a major threat to the health of the community. “But many frustrated residents and their allies, furious that state officials had dismissed concerns over PCBs leaching into drinking water supplies, met the trucks. And they stopped them, lying down on roads leading into the landfill. Six weeks of marches and nonviolent street protests followed, and more than 500 people were arrested—the first arrests in U.S. history over the siting of a landfill.”
36. 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.
37. 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
38. The Environmental Justice Movement: 1982 Warren County “The people of Warren County ultimately lost the battle; the toxic waste was eventually deposited in that landfill. But their story… drew national media attention and fired the imagination of people across the country who had lived through similar injustice. The street protests and legal challenges mounted by the people of Warren County to fight the landfill are considered by many to be the first major milestone in the national movement for environmental justice.”
39. In 1983, Jackie was elected to the LAUSD Board of Education, where she served for two terms From her time as student leader in the Free Speech Movement to her work as a classroom teacher in Compton, and through her leadership on the LAUSD School Board, the Los Angeles City Council, and in the California State Assembly, Jackie Goldberg has been a dedicated champion of quality public education and working families for her entire adult life. A Los Angeles native, Jackie was raised in Inglewood and educated in public schools. She graduated from Morningside High School before going on to the University of California at Berkeley and then pursuing a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from the University of Chicago. While at UC Berkeley, Jackie became a leader in the Free Speech Movement in 1964, sparking a lifelong passion for political activism and community organizing.
41. 1983 Carecen The Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), then called the Central American Refugee Center, was founded by Salvadoran refugees who were fleeing persecution by the military during the civil war. CARECEN was founded to secure political asylum for the refugees fleeing persecution, to defend their human rights and to offer immigration and basic social services needed by the refugees who were arriving in large numbers to Los Angeles. CARECEN received its 501 (c) (3) non-profit status.
42. 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.
43. 1983 US Invasion of Grenada The United States invasion of Grenada began at dawn on 25 October 1983. The United States and a coalition of six Caribbean nations invaded the island nation of Grenada, 100 miles (160 km) north of Venezuela. Codenamed Operation Urgent Fury by the U.S. military, it resulted in military occupation within a few days. It was triggered by the strife within the People's Revolutionary Government which resulted in the house arrest and execution of the previous leader and second Prime Minister of Grenada Maurice Bishop, and the establishment of the Revolutionary Military Council with Hudson Austin as Chairman. The invasion resulted in the appointment of an interim government, followed by elections in 1984. The Reagan administration in the U.S. launched a military intervention following receipt of a formal appeal for help from the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States. In addition, the Governor-General of Grenada Paul Scoon secretly signaled he would also support outside intervention, but he put off signing a letter of invitation until 26 October. Reagan also acted due to "concerns over the 600 U.S. medical students on the island" and fears of a repeat of the Iran hostage crisis
45. Carecen: Migration of the Golden People by Judy Baca
46. Organizing Methods of the Justice for Janitors Movement ...The workers hold mops, brooms and signs and are rallying in an effort to gain union contract with building janitorial contractors. Photograph dated May 2, 1989.” Excerpt from Santa Offers Presents to Aid Cause of Janitors : Labor: His visits to L.A. office complexes turn out to be a campaign to pressure cleaning firms into recognizing union. “Office complex managers contend that disputes over treatment of janitors are out of their hands and instead are the responsibility of the cleaning companies. In response, the Justice for Janitors campaign has staged numerous demonstrations at major Los Angeles office complexes, contending that the complexes have a social responsibility to pressure their cleaning companies to recognize the union. As the result of a steady shift by office complexes to non-union cleaning companies, a typical janitor’s hourly wage in Los Angeles dropped from $7.07 in 1983 to $4.50 last year, according to a study done for the union by a UCLA graduate student in economics. This has allowed downtown office complexes to cut in half the percentage of rental income that goes to janitors wages, the study said. Local 399 has been able to win representation for about half of the 1,500 janitors who work for cleaning companies that contract with major downtown office towers, usually obtaining $1-an-hour raises to $5 or $5.50 an hour, as well as overtime and health benefits. In Century City, however, the union has yet to unionize any janitors. Which is why Santa Claus came to the pricey environs of Century Park East on Wednesday. Shaffer, followed by a half a dozen janitors and an equal number of their children, marched gleefully into several Century City buildings to present packages of gloves and issue a plea to surprised receptionists or building managers “that you treat your janitors with respect.””
47. 1984 - 15 Day Hunger Strike at La Placita Olvera Church
48. 1984 Joan Benoit Samuelson’s Olympic Marathon Win The moment when Joan Benoit Samuelson emerged into the sunlight of the Los Angeles Olympic stadium was the perfect symbol for how far women’s running had come. Even more than a symbol, the message Samuelson gave as she moved from obscurity to acclaim triggered a transformation that 35 years later is still gaining momentum. That was the moment when women's running worldwide moved from the margins to the mainstream.
50. 1984: Tent City highlights growing problem “In December 1984, advocates for the homeless opened a temporary shelter downtown at 1st and Spring streets, in the shadow of Los Angeles City Hall. Nicknamed “Tent City, ” it looks like a battlefield hospital. Cots are lined up, one next to the other, and sleeping bodies squirm under thin blankets. When it rains, drops fall from unseen leaks and deep puddles and mud cover the plastic spread over the grass for flooring.”
51. 1985 ABC Settlement
52. 1985 "Be Skeptical of the Spectacle" and "Respect your Perspective
53. 1985 Heal the Bay founded Heal the Bay was founded in 1985 by Dorothy Green and a group of Los Angeles residents who were fed up with pollution in the Santa Monica Bay. Together they successfully brought an end to Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant's dumping of semi-treated wastewater into the Bay, and their grassroots legacy lives on in our work. it was clear that the public was not being informed on poor water quality at all. The county and the city had beach-monitoring programs, but when the bacteria counts are really high, or even when there was a sewage spill, the public wasn’t always informed. So people go to the beach and swim in raw sewage contaminated water, so it’s just ridiculous. So I decided to create something called the Beach Report Card, and at first it was annual. Now it’s weekly in the whole West Coast. At first it was the annual in just Santa Monica Bay, and it started bringing attention to the beach issue. - Mark Gold
54. 1985 John Outterbridge with a group of students at the Watts Towers Artist John Outterbridge (right), director of Watts Towers Art Center, seen with a group of students, from the El Segundo Center St. Elementary School, who are touring the Watts Towers. Photograph dated March 22, 1985. Outterbridge began teaching at the Watts Towers Arts Center in the mid-1960s. He became director of the arts center in 1975. Beginning in the 1960s, Outterbridge and other artists sought a new visual language to express the African American experience, one that did not depend solely on representation. Assemblage, coupled with the move toward abstraction, allowed such artists to work through themes and ideas that concerned them without having to fall back on visual types. For Outterbridge, the exploration through art of his heritage, his struggles, and his past intersected with his interest in community activism. (https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/artists/john-outterbridge)
55. 1985 The Minority Aids Project Love is for Everyone, 1991 By Mary Linn-Hughes and Reginald Zachary Minority AIDS Project Building5149 West Jefferson Boulevard (on Sycamore) ARTIST:Based in Huntington Beach, Linn-Hughes has spearheaded various art therapy projects. Among them, running a self-portrait photography workshop for people with AIDS and being the artist in residence at Orangewood Children's Home. SUBJECT:Text on the mural: I am your co-worker, I am the married couple who live down the street, I am your high school teacher, the woman you sit next to on the bus, the plumber who fixes your sink, the athlete you watch of television, the field worker who harvests your food, I am your brother, your sister, I am a person living with AIDS. The same text repeats in Spanish.
56. 1990 Mandela in Oakland during his “eight city tour” across America Mandela in Oakland during his “eight city tour” across America. The Regents convened a public forum in May 1985 to discuss divestment. The steps they took were only incremental, so protests continued for another year. American cities and schools were beginning to divest. Finally, in July of 1986, the UC Regents voted to divest $3.1 billion from companies doing business with the apartheid government. It was the largest university divestment in the country. In 1990, Mandela was released, and he stopped over in Oakland to thank the students and faculty of Berkeley — his "blood brothers and sisters." The students had changed not just the national but the international conversation on apartheid
57. Maria Elena Durazo “María Elena was born the seventh child in a family of eleven children to migrant worker parents. Growing up, María Elena traveled with her family, following the crops throughout California and Oregon, and experiencing the exploitative conditions and hardships that migrant laborers suffer. In spite of these obstacles, María Elena attended St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and graduated in 1975. In college she became involved in the Chicano Movement at the urging of her older brother. Then she entered the labor movement as an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (later called UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees). While working as a union organizer, she pursued an education in law at the People’s College of Law and earned her degree in 1985. By 1987, María Elena was ready to lead a drive by the rank and file of HERE Local 11 to make the union more responsive to its majority-Latino membership. The organizing drive successfully instituted a shop steward system that educated the rank and file on their rights, workers were now able to participate in negotiating their union contracts and all meetings and publications were from then on bilingual.”
58. 1985 WeHo Policy Changes Mayor Valerie Terrigno removing "Fagots Stay Out" sign from Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood, California, 1985. The ordinances adopted by the West Hollywood City Council within the first year of Cityhood included landmark legislation such as the City’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance (which, upon its adoption was one of the strictest rent control laws in the country); Ordinance prohibiting discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS; Domestic Partnership Ordinance; and Ordinance prohibiting discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation. Today, many of the City’s landmark ordinances have been duplicated and have become mainstream policies nationally and globally.
59. 1966 Organizational efforts to unionize farm workers in Central Washington Thirty-five years ago in April, Yakima Valley farmworkers took to the streets to address low wages and other concerns. The workers, who marched from Granger to Yakima over the course of two days, were led by Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union. One organizer of the march said its legacy was instilling confidence in area farmworkers and giving them a voice that has been heard in Olympia. “They became emboldened,” recalled Ricardo Garcia, one of the organizers of the 1986 march and one of the founders of Radio KDNA, a Granger-based Spanish-language radio station. The farmworkers movement traces its roots to the Mexican Farm Worker Program — also known as the Bracero program — that brought Mexican nationals to the United States to keep farms working as the military and war industries created a labor shortage. While the program required that farmworkers be treated fairly, they were subjected to brutal working conditions — workers were required to use short-handled hoes — and cheated out of a portion of their wages by the Mexican government, which was supposed to hold a tenth of their paychecks in trust for them. The National Farm Workers Union was organized to combat the abuses that farmworkers faced. Chavez emerged as a leader in the farm labor movement, founding the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 in California with Dolores Huerta, forging alliances with other unions, churches and community groups to push for the end of the Bracero program in 1964. While the program ended, wages remained low. Chavez’s NFWA merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form United Farm Workers. Tomas Villanueva and Guadalupe Gamboa, sons of Yakima Valley farmworkers, met with Chavez in 1966, and came back to formed the United Farm Workers Cooperative in Toppenish, pushing for better wages, sick pay and help applying for food stamps and other assistance. In the 1980s, following Chavez’s calls for boycotting California grapes until workers receive better wages, labor organizers in Yakima sought Chavez’s help securing better wages in the Valley and promoting organized labor. “We invited him to inspire, motivate people for the farmworker movement,” Garcia said.
60. 1986 Americans for Border Control
62. 1986 Chernobyl The meltdown and explosions ruptured the reactor core and destroyed the reactor building. This was immediately followed by an open-air reactor core fire which lasted until 4 May 1986, during which airborne radioactive contaminants were released and deposited onto other parts of the USSR and Europe. Approximately 70% landed in Belarus, 10 miles away. The fire released about the same amount of radioactive material as the initial explosion. In response to the initial accident, a 10-kilometre radius exclusion zone was created 36 hours after the accident, from which approximately 49,000 people were evacuated, primarily from Pripyat. The exclusion zone was later increased to a radius of 30 kilometres, from which an additional ~68,000 people were evacuated.
65. PROP 64 Group photograph of the BAYMEC group fighting against Prop 64 and Lyndon LaRouche, 1986. One of those dark moments happened in California in 1986 when paranoid perennial Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche at the height of the hysterical anti-gay backlash that had sprung up against the growing AIDS epidemic, founded his Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee (PANIC), which gathered enough signatures to place Proposition 64 onto the ballot. Prop 64, also known as the LaRouche Initiative, would have effectively forced anyone who was HIV-positive out of their jobs and schools and into a quarantine.
67. 1987 Black Monday View of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on October 19, 1987. The Dow plunged over 22% that day, which has since been dubbed Black Monday. The degree to which the stock market crashes spread to the wider economy (or "real economy") was directly related to the monetary policy each nation pursued in response. The central banks of the United States, West Germany and Japan provided market liquidity to prevent debt defaults among financial institutions, and the impact on the real economy was relatively limited and short-lived.
68. 1987 Black Monday Paper flies through the air as trading closes at the Toronto Stock Exchange on Black Monday. During Black Monday, the DJIA fell 508 points (22.6%), accompanied by crashes in the futures exchanges and options markets. This was the largest one-day percentage drop in the history of the DJIA. Significant selling created steep price declines throughout the day, particularly during the last 90 minutes of trading. Deluged with sell orders, many stocks on the NYSE faced trading halts and delays. Of the 2,257 NYSE-listed stocks, there were 195 trading delays and halts during the day. Total trading volume was so large that the computer and communications systems in place at the time were overwhelmed, leaving orders unfilled for an hour or more. Large funds transfers were delayed for hours and the Fedwire and NYSE SuperDot systems shut down for extended periods
69. 1987 New minimum wage rally
70. 1987 "LA's Big Freeze" Unhoused folks sleeping on floor of Council Chambers at City Hall, Los Angeles, 1987 Gladstone, Penni January 22, 1987 Los Angeles Times “Cold temperatures gripped Southern California for the third straight night Saturday, the continuation of an unusual chill that has apparently caused two hypothermia deaths among Los Angeles’ homeless while threatening farmers’ crops and sending city dwellers scurrying for hand warmers and furs. The deaths were reported one day after the City Council declined to act on a proposal to open city buildings to the homeless and Mayor Tom Bradley appealed to the public to donate blankets to help keep them warm. The deaths prompted bitter accusations Saturday that the city isn’t doing enough to feed and shelter homeless people during the cold spell, which began Thursday and is expected to continue for several days.” BY CAROL MCGRAW AND JILL STEWART JAN. 18, 1987 12 AM PT Spurred by the deaths of four [people experiencing homelessness] from exposure to near-freezing temperatures, the Los Angeles City Council opened City Hall to serve as temporary housing. Authorities had come under harsh criticism for failing to provide shelter for homeless residents during the cold spell, which … reached its low point when the temperature at the Civic Center dipped to 36 degrees.”
71. 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.
72. 1987 Whittier Narrows Earthquake Whittier Narrows Earthquake aftermath, 1987. Whittier Narrows Earthquake, October 1, 1987. MAGNITUDE: 5.9, DEPTH: 9.5 km This earthquake occurred on a previously unknown, concealed thrust fault approximately 20 km east of downtown Los Angeles, California. It resulted in eight fatalities and $358 million in property damage. Severe damage was confined mainly to communities east of Los Angeles and near the epicenter. No severe structural damage to high-rise structures in downtown Los Angeles was reported.
73. 1987 Whittier Narrows Earthquake Earthquake damage to a building on Philadelphia Street in Whittier, 1987. The most severe damage occurred in the "Uptown" district of Whittier, the old downtown section of Alhambra, and in the "Old Town" section of Pasadena. These areas had high concentrations of unreinforced masonry buildings. Residences that sustained damage usually were constructed of masonry, were not fully anchored to foundations, or were houses built over garages with large door openings. Many chimneys collapsed and in some cases, fell through roofs. Wood frame residences sustained relatively little damage
74. 1988 New minimum wage Photograph shows Margarita Vargas speaking at a rally to inform workers in the garment district not to work for less than $4.25 an hour, which is the new minimum wage. Photograph dated July 1, 1988 “Although the increase to $4.25 fell short of the $5.01 “moral minimum wage” sought by organized labor and community groups who had lobbied hard for an increase, leaders in the movement declared themselves pleased with Friday’s vote. “This is a major victory for minimum-wage workers throughout the state,” said the Rev. John Seymour, pastor of Ascension Church in South-Central Los Angeles and a leader of a grass-roots lobbying effort by three Los Angeles community organizations for the increased wage.”” BY HENRY WEINSTEIN DEC. 19, 1987
75. 1989 Black Monday A stock broker smokes a cigarette in exhaustion at the New York Stock Exchange after the events of Black Monday, October 19, 1987. Black Monday is the name commonly given to the global, sudden, severe, and largely unexpected stock market crash on Monday, October 19, 1987. All of the twenty-three major world markets experienced a sharp decline in October 1987. Out of twenty-three major industrial countries, nineteen had a decline greater than 20%. Worldwide losses were estimated at US$1.71 trillion. The severity of the crash sparked fears of extended economic instability or even a reprise of the Great Depression.
76. 1987 Black Monday A stock broker with his face in his palms at the New York Stock Exchange after the events of Black Monday, October 19, 1987. Before the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opened on Black Monday, October 19, 1987, there was pent-up pressure to sell stocks. When the market opened, a large imbalance immediately arose between the volume of sell orders and buy orders, placing considerable downward pressure on stock prices. Regulations at the time permitted designated market makers (also known as "specialists") to delay or suspend trading in a stock if the order imbalance exceeded that specialist's ability to fulfill orders in an orderly manner. The order imbalance on October 19 was so large that 95 stocks on the S&P 500 Index (S&P) opened late, as also did 11 of the 30 DJIA stocks. Importantly, however, the futures market opened on time across the board, with heavy selling.
77. Discrimination against LGBTQ immigrants has a long history in U.S. immigration policy The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, while it reversed the national origin quota system, became the first policy to explicitly prevent “sexual deviates” from entering the country under the guise of a medical exclusion. The Act also requirePost-war America saw the rise not only of the Red Scare, but also a lesser known “lavender scare” in which the federal government launched a “Pervert Elimination Campaign.” This discriminatory policy resulted in the arrests, firings, and general social persecution of LGBTQ Americans working for the federal government. This anti-LGBTQ sentiment spilled over into the broader culture as well, causing concern among LGBTQ individuals working in different industries across the country. The government’s anti-LGBTQ attitudes were insidious, and found their way into immigration policy as well. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act upheld the controversial national origins quota system that had been established in 1924, despite President Harry Truman’s opinion that the law was racist and discriminatory. In addition to reinforcing the national origins quota, the 1952 INA also instituted new, anti-Communist and anti-LGBTQ laws preventing people from entering the country or obtaining green cards or citizenship. The INA referred to LGBTQ people as “aliens afflicted with a psychopathic personality, epilepsy or mental defect.” The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, while it reversed the national origin quota system, became the first policy to explicitly prevent “sexual deviates” from entering the country under the guise of a medical exclusion. The Act also required the legacy Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, now subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security) to deport LGBTQ people. This policy was not reformed until the Immigration Act of 1990, when sexual orientation was finally removed as a grounds of exclusion from the U.S. However, the ban on HIV/AIDS-positive individuals from entering the U.S., which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, remained in effect until 2010. HIV/AIDS disproportionately affected the LGBTQ community in the 1980s, making the bans particularly harmful to LGBTQ migrants even after the ban on entry due to sexual orientation was lifted.
78. University of Missouri Anti- Apartheid Student Protests A student reads the newspaper in her shanty on MU's Francis Quadrangle. Originally ran Feb. 22, 1987. When the first shanties were torn down, Weitzel said more would be rebuilt. Police said if the shanties were rebuilt, the protesters would be arrested. On Feb. 6, 1987, Weitzel kept her promise, and the police kept theirs. At a rally of about 200 people, 41 protesters were arrested for occupying the shanties. Duane Stucky, MU’s interim chancellor at the time, said he would press for state prosecution, and some students could face student-conduct regulations.
79. Free Huey Huey P. Newton, in full Huey Percy Newton, (born February 17, 1942, Monroe, Louisiana, U.S.—died August 22, 1989, Oakland, California), American political activist, cofounder (with Bobby Seale) of the Black Panther Party (originally called Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). An illiterate high-school graduate, Newton taught himself how to read before attending Merritt College in Oakland and the San Francisco School of Law. While at Merritt he met Seale. In Oakland in 1966 they formed the Black Panther group in response to incidents of alleged police brutality and racism and as an illustration of the need for Black self-reliance. At the height of its popularity during the late 1960s, the party had 2,000 members in chapters in several cities. In 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of a police officer. His imprisonment sparked protests—and the popular rallying cry “Free Huey.” His conviction was overturned in 1970, and he was released from prison. In 1971 he announced that the party would adopt a nonviolent manifesto and dedicate itself to providing social services to the Black community, which included free meals for children and health clinics. In 1974 Newton was accused of another murder and fled to Cuba for three years before returning to face charges; two trials resulted in hung juries.
82. 1989 East and West German people celebrate the end of cold war East and West German people celebrate the end of cold war on top of the Berlin Wall, November 10, 1989. Two million East Germans invaded West Berlin, making history with a good day out. The cork-popping on the Berlin Wall at the end of last week had been portrayed to the world as the symbolic theatre of reunification. All over the city, seven-hour queues crammed the pavement, waiting for each visitor’s DM 100 gift from the government. In the banks, they collected a white slip of paper, walked over to the Kasse and exchanged it for either a blue note or two brown ones.
83. 1989 Contribution of Minorities to the Progress of California By Orlando Castillo Beverly at Harvard Hollywood. ARTIST: Born in the Philippines, Castillo studied art at the University of San Tomas. From a young age he wanted to be an artist but his traditional parents felt it was their duty to choose a career path for their four children. However, the young artist was determined to waylay their plans of making him into an architect. To support his studies in fine art, Castillo undertook commercial art, even doing fashion designs at the age of 15. Always very political, Castillo views himself as a social realism artist-which has gotten him in trouble at times. He was imprisoned during the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship for distributing political prints, posters, and flyers to field and factory workers. “Artists don’t belong to any country. The artist’s work must reflect the community he lives in” –Orlando Castillo SUBJECT: This mural shows the U.S., represented as a woman with a torch, welcoming immigrants to help build California. Coming to America, or finding one's place in america, is one of the many themes muralists concentrate on in L.A. The struggle for survival as migrant workers, their perseverance in preserving their cultural knowledge, and their aspirations and dreams in this country are some prominent themes shown. The mural depicts the ways in which immigrants from his country and from other places in Asia have contributed to the economy and culture of California.
84. 1989 “Failure to Disperse: The L.A. Police Riot” “DOES THE AVENUE of the Stars now lead to Tiananmen Square? For two bloody hours last Friday June 15), the LAPD sealed off Century City so that they could beat and arrest scores of striking janitors and their supporters. While horrified office workers and residents looked on (including, perhaps, Ronald Reagan in his Fox Plaza suite), the police repeatedly flailed the front lines of the justice for Janitors march with riot batons, before launching a flanking attack that swept an en tire section of the crowd into an underground parking structure. Those trapped inside were mercilessly pummeled; trying to flee, they were arrested for “failure to disperse.” From Mike Davis, “Failure to Disperse: The L.A. Police Riot”
85. 1989 Striking in Century City “During each strike, the campaign organized public dramas intended to increase awareness of the movement, publicly embarrass select individuals in the industry, and build public support. They began by demonstrating along Santa Monica and Olympic Boulevards with signs reading “Century City: Luxury by Day, Sweatshop by Night,” and “ISS + JMB Equals Poverty for Janitors.” In one particularly creative action, the union marched through the city and encouraged supporters to bring their garbage and dump it at Century City; later, in a nationwide campaign, supporters mailed it directly them to the owners of the buildings. As the strikers grew in number and their supporters became more vocal, police presence at the public events increased. The Los Angeles Police Department eventually set up a command post in Century City, one of the safest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. In response, Local 399 conducted frequent civil disobedience training to ensure that the strikers were educated about their right to peaceful assembly and the legalities associated with protesting. This training prepared the demonstrators to submit to arrest and respond non-violently to provocation by the police, in anticipation of resistance from law enforcement. On June 15th, 1990, the Justice for Janitors movement marched from Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills to a planned rally in Century City. The peaceful protesters, clad in red Justice for Janitors t-shirts, were met by over one hundred members of the LAPD in full riot gear as they attempted to cross into the Century City office park. Though the marchers were in a public space, the police aggressively ordered them disperse. A bullhorn rang out, claiming the march was an illegal assembly. In an act of planned and non-violent civil disobedience, the protesters moved into the street and sat down, preparing to be arrested. Among them was Ana Veliz, an ISS janitor from El Salvador who made $4.25 an hour and worked two jobs to send money back to her mother and six children outside the United States. Veliz became pregnant in March of 1990 and fought with Justice for Janitors for the fair wages and health insurance she would need to safely deliver and raise her child.”
86. 1989 Wits University Student at Wits University flee as police fire tear gas at them during an anti-apartheid protest rally in 1989. The education system was part of this apartheid-capitalist system that dehumanised people in ghettos of poverty. Despite, and because of, strong state repression, an era of youth politics ignited on June 16 1976. The political tide turned and made liberation from a colonised mind-set and socioeconomic suppression thinkable
87. 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act

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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. 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.
3. 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
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. 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
8. 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.
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. 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.
11. 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.
12. 1990 Congressional Black Caucus Meets with EPA Officials
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 1971 Marin County, Bolinas California OIL SPILL
20. 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.
21. 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.