Finalist: Staff of The Washington Post

In the Virgin Islands, a refinery tests Biden’s environmental justice commitment

By Juliet Eilperin, Darryl Fears and Salwan Georges

ST. CROIX, U.S. Virgin Islands — Two hours after midnight in this island paradise, a cloudy vapor rose from a massive oil refinery and floated over nearby homes as quietly as a ghost.

The fine mist of oil and water from Limetree Bay Refining rained down on the community of Clifton Hill, showering the slick mix onto cars, gardens, rooftops and cisterns filled with rainwater that residents use for daily tasks.

The vapor, caused by a pressure release valve triggered by an accident on Feb. 4, came just three days after the Limetree Bay refinery reopened for the first time in nearly a decade, prompting the Biden administration to investigate. The Trump administration had approved the reopening of the plant, which had shut down after facing a deluge of lawsuits alleging serious environmental violations.

Three miles from the refinery, Armando Muñoz still sees signs of oil everywhere.

“When it rains it doesn’t wash out,” said Muñoz, 59, who lives with his wife and 78-year-old mother-in-law. “It’s in all the plants we have, avocado trees, and breadfruit trees, and fruit trees and regular household plants.”

The refinery presents one of the earliest tests of President Biden’s vow to clean up pollution in America’s disadvantaged communities. Ushered back into existence in the waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency, Limetree Bay refinery embodies the difficult trade-offs Biden faces as he tries to deliver on promises to provide both a clean, safe environment and plenty of good-paying jobs.

On Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan withdrew a key permit for the refinery. The move will not close the plant but could lead to tighter pollution controls, marking the administration’s most significant step yet in a campaign to ensure environmental justice.

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the administration would revoke the plantwide permit, which was granted seven weeks before Trump left office.

“Withdrawing this permit will allow EPA to reassess what measures are required at the Limetree facility to safeguard the health of local communities in the Virgin Islands, while providing regulatory certainty to the company,” said Walter Mugdan, acting administrator for EPA Region 2, which oversees the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Many officials in the Virgin Islands support the plant, so any federal action poses significant implications. The pandemic has battered the local tourism industry, leaving the refinery and its adjoining logistics hub as a significant source of revenue worth at least $25 million a year to the U.S. Virgin Islands government. The two facilities also employ more than 400 full-time workers, virtually all of them territory residents, and 300 contractors.

“I’m going to be honest with you, the economy in the Virgin Islands, we were dead,” said Herminio Torres, a community organizer in Clifton Hill. Retooling the plant brought contractors to the island at a crucial time. “Those workers buy our local food, our local products. The economy has moved forward.”

Company officials said that they are addressing the contamination and that the plant is safe. According to a company report, when water gushed into a drum holding hot coke — an oil byproduct — the reaction triggered a safety valve that relieved the pressure. Refinery flares usually release a mix of water vapor and carbon dioxide: In this case tiny oil droplets entered the air, drifting as far as three miles away.

“Limetree has worked closely with our community and our regulators, investing hundreds of millions of dollars to safely reopen a modernized refinery and create hundreds of high-skilled, well-paying jobs for St. Croix residents,” said company spokeswoman Erica Parsons.

Parsons said the company was “disappointed” with the EPA’s decision but noted it only affects a permit that “would have streamlined the permitting process for potential future investment in the refinery.”

On the island’s southern shore between the refinery and Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge, dozens of oily clumps are once again washing up on the beach, reeking of gasoline.

Their source could not be immediately determined. Olasee Davis, an ecologist and historian at the University of the Virgin Islands, attributed the clumps to tanker traffic.

“You can see the impact for miles,” Davis said. “When it comes to the refinery, the refinery always gets its way. The politicians here, they don’t have the political will. People cannot do without it.”

St. Croix ― where Biden celebrated New Year’s 2019 with his family, and former vice president Mike Pence sought respite days after leaving office ― has idyllic stretches of beaches that offer habitat for leatherback sea turtles, roseate terns and other vulnerable wildlife. But it has also been a quasi-petro state for more than half a century.

The territory’s governor in the early 1960s, a White businessman named Ralph Paiewonsky, struck a deal with Hess Oil Virgin Islands Corp. to construct a refinery on 1,500 acres of the south shore. On the eve of the deal in 1965, Lady Bird Johnson — America’s environmentally minded first lady — dismissed concerns raised by a citizen that the trade winds would carry the plant’s fumes and waste to the south shore’s “magnificent beaches.”

“As America grows,” Johnson replied, “private industry will work with local officials and interested citizens to assure the preservation of choice spots of natural beauty and avert some of the unfortunate forms of destruction you describe.”

Named for a partnership between Amerada Hess Corp. and Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the Hovensa refinery — along with a neighboring aluminum plant and rum distillery — transformed its part of the island into an industrial landscape. The refinery ran a mix of oil and water through pipelines that were buried in the sand and became corroded. By 1982, the company identified underground contamination that ultimately released at least 300,000 barrels of petrochemicals and polluted the island’s one aquifer; In 1994 EPA determined all the pipes needed to be replaced.

Lawsuits from local residents, the U.S. Virgin Islands government and the EPA helped speed its demise. Hovensa’s 2011 settlement with the EPA required it to pay a $5.3 million fine and spend $700 million to install modern pollution controls and offset its impact on local residents, including paying more than $300,000 to start a cancer registry. The EPA later determined that at the time of the agreement the plant posed the ninth-highest cancer risk among all U.S. refineries, but the total number of cases is hard to track because the island’s health system is so threadbare that many people seek treatment in Florida or Puerto Rico instead.

After suffering $1.3 billion in losses over the course of three years, the company halted operations in 2012 and declared bankruptcy three years later. The move meant it didn’t pay for a full cleanup, and paid more modest amounts to settle four class-action suits: $4.7 million. Overnight the territory lost its largest private employer, which accounted for at least 13 percent of its GDP.

“There was no question that when Hovensa closed the operations in St. Croix, there were close to 4,000 folks that pretty much lost their jobs,” said Kenneth Mapp, an independent who served as the U.S. Virgin Islands governor from 2015 to 2019.

In 2015, a subsidiary of the Boston-based equity firm ArcLight Capital bought the refinery. Its push to reopen enjoyed support among Trump administration officials, looking to expand U.S. oil production, and local politicians who were eager to find a new source of revenue. The devastation wrought by Hurricanes Maria and Irma added urgency to the territory’s campaign for fast-track approval.

Mapp personally appealed to Trump to expedite the reopening “for the benefit of the Nation’s energy independence and the economic resurgence of the Virgin Islands of the United States.”

In August 2018, EPA head Andrew Wheeler directed EPA appointees to help Limetree Bay “resume operations,” according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials from ArcLight — founded by GOP donor Daniel Revers — and its subsidiary worked with the Justice Department and the EPA to renegotiate the 2011 consent decree to restart the refinery. At one point, according to a document released under FOIA, Limetree Bay and its lawyers expressed “appreciation for [the EPA’s] attention, coordination and responsiveness.”

For Trump appointees at the EPA, the application provided a test case for reinterpreting the Clean Air Act, which the Trump administration sought to weaken. Bill Wehrum, who headed the EPA’s air office from November 2017 until June 2019, wanted to make it easier for industrial operations to expand without being forced to install stricter pollution controls.

In Limetree Bay’s case, that meant the refinery would be treated as if it had never stopped operating, and would not require a new permit.

In meetings with White House officials, Wehrum cited Limetree as a model for how the Trump administration could greenlight plants across the nation more quickly, said two former federal officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Relying on a determination that Wehrum provided in an April 5, 2018 letter, Limetree Bay got a permit to operate from the U.S. Virgin Islands government on Dec. 30, 2019.

Limetree Bay also applied to the EPA for a new, plant-wide permit to process more oil. Trump officials set air emission limits based on the refinery’s production a decade ago, when it processed more than 500,000 barrels a day — even though it planned to produce 200,000 barrels of low-sulfur marine fuel for its main customer, BP.

“We were literally in the dark for months, and not necessarily able to process or understand what was happening with the reopening of the refinery,” said Jennifer Valiulis, who directs the St. Croix Environmental Association.

Parsons said the company spent $100 million on environmental improvements on the plant, and has permanently shut down part of it. “Because Limetree upgraded the facility and reduced its capacity, the Limetree refinery emissions will be much lower than its predecessor.”

Even as the Trump administration helped usher through the company’s applications, it documented how the refinery would affect nearby disadvantaged communities. The EPA found the adjoining neighborhoods — where nearly 27 percent of residents live below the poverty line and 75 percent are people of color — had “high risk vulnerability” to pollution. An earlier 2014 study, by the University of the Virgin Islands Eastern Caribbean Center, found that White residents constituted just 2 percent of area residents.

“There is in fact a disproportionate burden in South-Central St. Croix,” the EPA concluded in 2019, adding at one point, “it is difficult to conclude” the refinery “will not contribute to a disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effect” on nearby residents.

Shortly afterward, three air policy experts published a blistering Harvard Law School paper attacking how the Trump administration had interpreted these provisions of the law, singling out Limetree Bay as an example. The paper’s authors included Joseph Goffman, EPA’s acting assistant administrator for air, who is now with the Biden administration and has been reviewing Limetree’s permit.

The University of the Virgin Islands 2014 study found that nearly twice as many residents “experienced asthmatic conditions during the past five years” compared with those living outside it, and more than twice as many had chronic bronchitis.

On Dec. 2, 2020 — less than two months before Trump left office — Wheeler took the unusual step of signing the permit allowing Limetree Bay refinery to expand or alter its operations, rather than leaving that to the regional office overseeing the island.

The refinery began producing fuel two months later.

The day it restarted, a coalition of groups — including the St. Croix Environmental Association, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club — challenged one of Limetree’s key air permits with the EPA.

Several of these groups are also challenging the plantwide permit with the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board. That appeal, along with one Limetree filed with the board, allowed the EPA to withdraw the permit Thursday.

John Walke, NRDC’s clean air director, said the Trump administration’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act violated the law.

Valiulis said that residents remain in the dark and that some have moved out of the area because their health was compromised.

“A lot of people live with cistern water, rainfall off the roof. Whatever goes in there you drink,” she said. “We’re certainly outraged about the process, the lack of information. We don’t know what the monitoring levels are, what they’re allowed to do and if anybody is monitoring.”

Neither the governor’s office nor the territory’s department of planning and natural resources responded to repeated requests for comment.

Mapp, for his part, said Limetree Bay has provided an economic lifeline for the territory during the pandemic. “Absent of that plant, the government of the Virgin Islands would have been in significant financial problems once its tourism industry was closed.”

Several residents credited the company for being more responsive than its predecessor. According to the company, by March 3 it had contacted or inspected 213 homes; washed 208 cars; cleaned 134 roofs and sampled 135 cisterns. It has been delivering bottled water to many Clinton Hill residents, and has hired a local claims adjuster to negotiate how to pay for damages.

But residents in the contaminated neighborhood cannot bathe or easily wash dishes with bottled water. Limetree’s contractors confirmed Muñoz’s cistern is contaminated.

“We are very uncomfortable to hear oil is in the water,” said Muñoz, but he wasn’t surprised. “It had a little odor now and then, sometimes a little taste.”

Sonya Rivera, whose husband, Errol, only ate from their organic garden, said 90 percent of it was lost because of the accident. “They destroyed all our foods,” she said. “Everything was dead.”

It’s a concern, Rivera said, that Limetree should have addressed more rapidly and never allowed to happen again. “I’m infuriated,” said Rivera, 53. “I know things happen. That plant just opened and things happen. But just take a little more consideration on this community. You know you caused this problem, just rectify it.”

Another resident, Steve, who asked to be identified only by his first name because he is afraid of speaking out against the company, said he heard sirens blare from the refinery on the morning of Feb. 4. But Steve and his family did not understand what the siren meant and didn’t find out about the accident until many days later.

“We didn’t pay it no attention,” he said. “At that time, we were eating and drinking whatever’s there in the water.”

Design and development by Leo Dominguez, Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Maps by Hannah Dormido. Copy editing by Annabeth Carlson. Design editing by Matt Callahan.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said President Lyndon B. Johnson dismissed a resident’s concerns about trade winds carrying fumes from the plant. It was Lady Bird Johnson, the first lady at the time, who responded.

How a protest in a North Carolina farming town sparked a national movement

By Darryl Fears and Brady Dennis

WARREN COUNTY, N.C. — Ben Chavis was driving on a lonely road through rolling tobacco fields when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the state trooper.

Chavis knew he was a marked man. Protests had erupted over North Carolina’s decision to dump 40,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals in a poor Black farming community in Warren County, and Chavis was a leader of the revolt. The trooper pulled him over.

“What did I do, officer?” Chavis asked that day in 1982. The answer shocked him.

“He told me that I was driving too slow.”

Chavis was arrested and thrown in jail. When the cell door slammed shut, he gripped the metal bars and declared: “This is racism. This is environmental racism.”

The term stuck, and now — nearly 40 years after Chavis spoke the words that have come to define decisions by governments and corporations to place toxic pollution in communities of color — the issue has risen from the fringes of the American conservation movement to the heart of President Biden’s environmental agenda.

One week after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order vowing to steer clean energy investments to minority communities battling pollution, placing environmental justice at the core of his plan to fight climate change. He named a Native American and African Americans to powerful environmental posts.

And last week, he tapped more than two dozen advocates from around the country to counsel his administration — “for the first time ever, bringing the voices, perspectives, and expertise of environmental justice communities into a formal advisory role at the White House,” said Cecilia Martinez, a Biden appointee on the issue.

Systemic racism has long influenced where major sources of pollution are located within communities. Beginning in the early 20th century, White government planners in many municipalities drew redlining maps that identified Black and Latino neighborhoods as undesirable and unworthy of housing loans. Heavy industry was permitted to cluster in those places, adding a toxic dimension that persists today.

Given little support by White philanthropists, environmental justice groups run by Black, Latino, Native American and Alaskan Native advocates historically have been as impoverished as the communities they represent. While White environmental groups tended to focus on wilderness and wildlife, activists fighting everything from toxic dumps in Alabama to massive oil and gas refineries in California have largely worked in the shadows.

Today, Black people are nearly four times as likely to die from exposure to pollution than White people. According to “Fumes Across the Fence-Line,” a recent study by the Clean Air Task Force, African Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than White Americans, and they are 75 percent more likely to live in communities that border a plant or factory.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the consequences have proved particularly deadly. More than half of all in-hospital deaths from the start of the U.S. outbreak through July 2020 were of Black and Latino patients, according to researchers at Stanford and Duke universities. Black patients were far more likely to require ventilation.

“If your Zip code is buried with garbage, chemical plants, pollution … you’ll find there are more people that are sick, more diabetes and heart disease,” said Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University and the author of “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality.” “Covid is like a heat-seeking missile zeroing in on the most vulnerable communities.”

Though the cry “I can’t breathe” has come to define today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Chavis, now 73, said it echoes generations of environmental activists of color, including those who fought the toxic waste dump in North Carolina in 1982.

“There were public outcries of ‘We can’t breathe’ and ‘I can’t breathe,’” Chavis said, “by African American environmental justice protesters in Warren County.”

‘The injustice in it all’

Even before the protests, the federal government had recognized the danger PCBs posed to human life.

Short for polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs were widely used in paints, plastics and adhesives, and as industrial coolants. Then scientists discovered that, if inhaled or absorbed through the skin, the chemicals can cause birth defects, cancer and other disorders in multiple human organs.

In 1977, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to ban their domestic production.

Enter Robert Burns, the owner of a New York trucking company, who hatched a plan to become America’s “PCB king” by amassing discarded PCBs and selling them to companies that still needed the chemical, court records show. Burns approached a friend, Robert Ward Jr., owner of the Ward Transformer Co., which had stored thousands of gallons of PCB-laden oil in a warehouse near Raleigh.

The plan, however, was a disaster. The high cost of driving hundreds of 55-gallon drums of toxic liquid to a storage facility in Pennsylvania made the operation financially untenable. So Burns “devised a scheme, for which he sought Ward’s approval,” court records said. He would dump the chemicals instead.

The first location was a range at Fort Bragg, but the soil there failed to absorb the liquid. So Burns told Ward that his sons, Randall and Timothy, would spray the oil along rural North Carolina roads.

For more than three months, driving under cover of darkness, they poisoned an area spanning 14 counties with 30,000 gallons of PCBs, government records show.

It didn’t take long for state officials to notice the 211-mile stain. The men, all White, were convicted of committing an environmental crime. Burns pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges and was sentenced to a year in prison. Ward was acquitted of state charges but convicted in federal court, where he was sentenced to two years in prison.

North Carolina was left to clean up the mess.

Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. (D) first proposed to treat the PCB-contaminated soil where it lay, but the EPA nixed that plan. So Hunt pursued another option: dumping 10,000 truckloads of contaminated dirt in a soybean field in rural Warren County, a largely poor area that was nearly 60 percent Black.

There, in a modest ranch house off Tower Road, lived a young Black mother of two named Dollie Burwell. Barely 30, she was already a fierce civil rights activist, raised by sharecroppers who had instilled in her an unwavering sense of right and wrong.

Her parents had hammered home a Bible verse that Burwell still quotes by heart: “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Burwell said her mother “always made us believe we were the hands, the eyes, the feet of God on Earth.” It wasn’t enough to believe in justice; the scripture said to fight for it.

So Burwell assembled a small group of Black women to fight against the dump. They feared it would contaminate groundwater, and make their community a magnet for future toxic waste disposal.

During a recent interview not far from the protest site, Burwell said her community was an easy target: “We were poor, we were Black and we were politically impotent.”

But they were not silent.

The women organized gatherings at Coley Springs Baptist Church, a large brick and stained-glass building near the township of Afton. They “did the cooking and feeding the protesters and doing the fliers and passing out fliers and calling people to make sure we had people to participate,” Burwell recalled.

As a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Burwell “had the ability to call on people to come and march and go to jail with us.” Civil rights titans came: the Rev. Joseph Lowery of the SCLC in Atlanta, and his wife, Evelyn; Walter Fauntroy, the delegate representing Washington, D.C., in Congress; and the Rev. Leon White, a field director for the United Church of Christ racial justice commission.

White also called Chavis, a member of the Wilmington 10 — nine Black men and a White woman wrongly convicted of a 1971 firebombing at a grocery store in Wilmington, N.C. After they spent years behind bars, their sentences were commuted in 1978. Years later, Gov. Bev Perdue (D) would pardon the group, saying the trial was infected by “naked racism.” Investigators uncovered notes by the prosecutor showing he preferred jurors who were Ku Klux Klan members and that he described a Black juror as an “Uncle Tom type.”

Just three years out of prison, Chavis believed he was still being closely watched by the state. He worried about being locked away again.

But the women of Warren County had his back.

Over the six-week protest, women lay in the path of massive dump trucks beside men. Children often protested with their parents. More than 500 people were arrested, including Burwell, who was hauled away five times.

“A couple of times, I didn’t even intend to get arrested,” she said. “But you just saw the injustice in it all, and the next thing you know, you were blocking the trucks.”

The struggle took a toll not only on Burwell, but also her 8-year-old daughter, who attended some of the protests. One day, “just as I was being put in the paddy wagon, I saw all the reporters around her,” Burwell recalled. Bound in handcuffs, she saw her daughter in tears. “It just tore me up.”

The protests failed to stop the landfill. On Sept. 15, 1982, the state began piling contaminated dirt into a 22-acre dump carved out of farmland.

Hunt vowed to oppose future landfills in the county and to detoxify the site as soon as technology to eliminate PCBs became available. But that would take decades.

In Warren County, a battle had been lost. But across America, the larger fight was just beginning.

‘Toxic Wastes and Race’

National television networks and major newspapers had covered the Warren County demonstration, a first for a Black environmental protest. Activists as far away as Alaska were paying attention.

In poor, racially segregated communities across the country, people had been quietly fighting pollution from rail yards, coal-fired power plants, sewage treatment facilities, oil and gas refineries, and concrete batch mills. They saw their own stories playing out in Warren County.

Charles Lee, a Chinese American researcher, traveled there from New Jersey. Later, he read a 1983 federal report commissioned by Fauntroy that showed that 3 out of 4 major landfills in the South were surrounded by Black communities. Lee suspected that environmental racism was more widespread.

“I said, ‘We need to replicate this on a national scale,’” Lee recalled. With the backing of the United Church of Christ, he began to assemble the first major study of the environmental justice era, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States.”

Published in 1987, the study found that “communities with greater minority percentages of the population are more likely to be the sites of commercial hazardous waste facilities.” But the report does not use the term “environmental racism.”

“The conversation we started having was about ‘environmental racism,’” recalled Vernice Miller-Travis, who worked with Lee. “Because everybody was uncomfortable with racism, we called it ‘environmental justice.’ It’s not accidental. It’s all intentional.”

For the report, Lee networked with hundreds of local activists. One was Richard Moore, a Latino in New Mexico. Moore was frustrated that mainstream, mostly White environmental groups were not fighting environmental racism, focusing instead on land use, climate change, general air quality and wildlife protections.

Several green groups were established by white supremacists. Sierra Club founder John Muir once described African Americans as lazy “Sambos” and Native Americans as “dirty.” Madison Grant, a prominent early conservationist, argued for white supremacy in his book “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History” — a tome Adolf Hitler called “my bible.”

In March 1990, Moore and 90 activists fired off a letter to the National Wildlife Federation calling for more diversity.

“Although environmental organizations calling themselves the ‘Group of Ten’ often claim to represent our interests, in observing your activities it has become clear to us that your organizations play an equal role in the disruption of our communities,” Moore wrote.

Once again, Lee saw an opportunity.

“Let’s do something that really kind of makes a statement about the leadership that already exists in people across color communities on these environmental issues … and use it as a way to coalesce a movement,” he recalled thinking.

Lee pitched the idea for the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. If 300 people showed up, organizers thought, it would be a success.

When the summit began on Oct. 24, 1991, at the Washington Court Hotel on Capitol Hill, about 1,000 people flooded into Washington.

“We sold out the hotel,” Lee said.

‘Taking charge of their destiny’

They came from Prince William Sound, Alaska, where the Exxon Valdez oil spill had ruined Native American fisheries; from Albuquerque, where open uranium mines were emitting high levels of radiation; from Chicago, where power plant pollution had dirtied neighborhoods. They came from Houston, where garbage dumps were located next to Black communities.

Some of their homes had terrible names, such as the strand of tiny towns between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as Cancer Alley.

On opening day, only organizations with people of color in executive positions were allowed to participate. Over the four-day summit, activists prayed into microphones in English and Sioux, Korean and Spanish, long prayers seeking deliverance from suffering.

“The summit was about people of color taking charge of their destiny,” said Bullard, who had published “Dumping in Dixie,” his groundbreaking book about the siting of toxic facilities in the South, a year earlier.

Among the attendees was civil rights legend Jesse Jackson, a gifted orator who had made remarkable bids to become the first Black presidential nominee for a major party in 1984 and 1988. Jackson had not been deeply involved with the environmental justice movement, but after sitting quietly and listening for portions of the summit, he finally spoke.

“Your challenge to the anemic character and the exclusivity and the elite policies of the essentially White environmental movement is right on time,” Jackson said. “There can be no elite environmental movement. There must be a universal movement.”

The roar that followed sounded like a battle cry.

At his home near Logan Circle, Lee keeps a 234-page synopsis of the conference proceedings, including 17 principles of environmental justice, which instructed participants “to carry back home and institute in all of our communities.” The principles demand “respect and justice without discrimination,” an end to the placement of polluting industries and toxic waste sites in communities of color, and accountability for polluters.

After the summit, activists saw some progress in Washington. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush established the first EPA Office of Environmental Justice. Two years later, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order creating an environmental justice working group.

But there was no action from Congress. Later, President George W. Bush weakened the office, proclaiming that it should advocate for all Americans rather than concentrating on racial minorities disproportionately affected by pollution.

In 2004, the EPA inspector general took issue with Bush’s stance, and also found that the EPA had failed to incorporate environmental justice into its day-to-day decision-making. “It has not developed a clear vision or a comprehensive strategic plan,” the inspector general said.

In 2009, President Barack Obama revived the office’s original mission and put renewed focus on affected communities, though some activists argued the administration should have been more aggressive. President Donald Trump later tried to zero out the office’s budget.

And then, in 2020, came a racial reckoning.

A Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as onlookers recorded his last moments.

A global pandemic preyed on Black, Latino and Indigenous people in polluted communities.

And a presidential candidate who spoke passionately about environmental injustice started to rise in the polls.

A daunting problem

It happened a lifetime ago, but Joe Biden still talks about it.

When he was 10 years old, Biden’s family lived in the shadow of an oil refinery in Claymont, Del. On the ride to school, his mother, Catherine, sometimes switched on the windshield wipers “and there would be a slick in the window.”

“That’s why so many people in my state were dying and getting cancer,” Biden recalled while campaigning last year. “The fact is, those front-line communities, it doesn’t matter what you’re paying them. It matters how you keep them safe.”

As president, Biden has vowed to funnel 40 percent of relevant climate investments to disadvantaged communities. He has promised to weave environmental justice considerations into virtually every federal agency, and to issue a yearly scorecard that measures progress.

What will success look like? So far, the administration has not set clear goals.

In a recent interview, White House domestic climate czar Gina McCarthy promised to make environmental justice activists “part of the decision-making.” And EPA Administrator Michael Regan, a former North Carolina official who established the state’s first environmental justice and inequity advisory board, has called the issue “near and dear to my heart.”

“We have a lot of ground to make up, and I’m sure that I will be back before this committee asking for additional resources in this area to be sure that all Americans have access to clean air and clean water,” Regan said during his confirmation hearing.

Activists are withholding judgment until they see results.

“You’ve got to make a commitment that you are going to clean up X number of landfills, and you are going to reduce pollution in X number of communities,” said Peggy Shepard, co-founder and executive director of We Act for Environmental Justice in New York. “I’m impressed that these first steps have been out of the ordinary. But there are high hopes and high expectations.”

Christy Goldfuss, a senior vice president for energy and environmental policy at the Center for American Progress, said Biden should emulate states such as California, where officials have targeted communities most in need of funding. “When you look at the fossil fuel infrastructure across the country,” she said, “it becomes more obvious which communities bear the brunt of this industry.”

Certain places stand out. The 85-mile chemical corridor along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — home to 14 major manufacturing companies, including DuPont and Shell Chemical — is one example. The town of St. Gabriel alone is surrounded by 30 petrochemical plants, according to one analysis.

Another study, conducted the year of the Warren County protest, found that people who lived within a mile of factories in the corridor were more than four times as likely as the average American to develop lung cancer.

Miller-Travis hopes Biden can secure additional federal funding for environmental justice issues, so activists today won’t have to endure the intimidation she felt as a Black woman asking White philanthropists for help in the late 1980s. She likened the experience to “taking an elevator to heaven to talk to God.”

Some advocates worry that federal dollars could be diverted by less-committed officials at the state and local level. Mustafa Ali, who directed the environmental justice office in Obama’s EPA, said, “It’s going to take folks in the press watching and trying to hold people accountable.”

Back in Warren County, a historical marker commemorating the protest that “sparked [the] environmental justice movement” now stands along the lonely stretch of road where Chavis was arrested.

On a recent afternoon, Burwell stood near the aging toxic waste site. “It was the first time that environmental issues had been looked at through the lens of civil rights,” she said.

The marker doesn’t tell the whole story. Warren County residents never stopped fighting the landfill. State and federal officials eventually spent more than $17 million on detoxification.

In 2004, more than 20 years after the protests started, Warren County finally was declared clean.

CORRECTION

A previous version of this article incorrectly said Jesse Jackson was the first Black presidential nominee in 1984 and 1988. Jackson did not win the Democratic nomination in either primary. An earlier version of this article also misstated when President Barack Obama revived the original mission of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice. It was in 2009, after Obama took office, not 2008. This version of the article has been corrected.

The birding community faces a difficult debate about the names of species connected to enslavers, supremacists and grave robbers

By Darryl Fears

Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies.

When she joined Georgia Audubon last year, the group’s executive director called her hiring a first step to “begin working to break down barriers” so that people from all communities can fully enjoy birding and the outdoors.

But overcoming those barriers will be daunting. As with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in ornithology’s DNA, indelibly linked to its origin story. The challenge of how to move forward is roiling White ornithologists as they debate whether to change as many as 150 eponyms, names of birds that honor people with connections to slavery and supremacy.

The Bachman’s sparrow, Wallace’s fruit dove and other winged creatures bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people. Some of these men stoked violence and participated in it without consequence.

Even John James Audubon’s name is fraught in a nation embroiled in a racial reckoning. Long the most recognized figure in North American birding for his detailed drawings of the continent’s species, he was also an enslaver who mocked abolitionists working to free Black people. Some of his behavior is so shameful that the 116-year-old National Audubon Society — the country’s premier bird conservation group, with 500 local chapters — hasn’t ruled out changing its name. An oriole, warbler and shearwater all share it.

“I am deeply troubled by the racist actions of John James Audubon and recognize how painful that legacy is for Black, Indigenous and people of color who are part of our staff, volunteers, donors and members,” interim chief executive Elizabeth Gray said in a statement in May. “Although we have begun to address this part of our history, we have a lot more to unpack.”

For Newsome, community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, the pain is real. When she first wore her organization’s work shirt, “I felt like I was wearing the name of an oppressor,” she said, “the name of someone who enslaved my ancestors.”

She and other ornithologists of color deal with added layers of discomfort while doing research. Alex Troutman, a Black graduate student at Georgia Southern University, says he goes out of his way to smile and wave at every White passerby when he’s in a marsh or field “to appear as least threatening as possible” and ease suspicions that he shouldn’t be there.

Offensive eponyms compound that sense of not belonging. Despite professional and amateur birding groups’ declared commitment to diversity, only two names have been discarded.

The Townsend’s warbler and the Townsend’s solitaire still invoke John Kirk Townsend, whose journals detail his exploits in traditional Native Americans burial grounds in the West. Townsend, a Philadelphia-born ornithologist in the early 1800s, dug up and collected skulls for studies that sought to prove the inferiority of Indigenous people.

The Wallace’s owlet and five other birds honor Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist, explorer and anthropologist credited, along with Charles Darwin, for conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace’s writings frequently used the n-word, including in reference to the “little brown hairy baby” he boasted about caring for after fatally shooting her mother during an 1855 trip to the Malay Archipelago. Some historians believe they were orangutans.

Three birds, including the crimson Jameson’s firefinch, are named after another British naturalist involved in a heinous act committed against a young girl he purchased as “a joke” in 1888 during an expedition in Africa. James Sligo Jameson wrote in his journal that the girl was then given to a group of natives described to him as cannibals. He drew sketches of the child being stabbed and dismembered.

“Conservation has been driven by white patriarchy,” said J. Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, “this whole idea of calling something a wilderness after you move people off it or exterminate them and that you get to take ownership.”

Lanham views the issues as part of a much larger historic pattern, one connected to the White enslavers who renamed Africans kidnapped from that continent’s West Coast. “They renamed an entire people” — cancel culture on a global scale, he noted.

In Honolulu, ornithologist Olivia Wang is equally harsh. She regards the honorifics that birds carry with disdain.

“They are a reminder that this field that I work in was primarily developed and shaped by people not like me, who probably would have viewed me as lesser,” said Wang, an Asian American graduate student at the University of Hawaii. “They are also a reminder of how Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering and exploiting and claiming ownership of things rather than learning from the humans who were already part of the ecosystem and had been living alongside these birds for lifetimes.”

Indeed, White explorers, conservationists and scientists who crossed the world conveniently ignored the fact that birds had been discovered, named and observed by native people for centuries before their arrival.

To the Cherokee, eagles are the awâ'hili and crows are kâgû. The English common name for the chickadee is a butchered translation of the Cherokee name, tsïkïlïlï. Similar-sounding names for other birds that English speakers renamed or mispronounced are scattered throughout East Coast tribes.

Europeans named birds as though they were human possessions, but American Indians regard them differently. The red-tail hawk in some languages is uwes’ la’ oski, a word that translates to “lovesick,” because one of its calls sounded like a person who lost a partner.

“A whole lot of Native people, in thinking about birds, don’t open a book of science. Their book of science is in the knowledge possessed by people in generations before them, the elders,” said Shepard Krech III, a professor emeritus at Brown University and author of “Spirits of the Air.”

Bird lovers have agitated to change eponyms linked to racists for several years but have encountered resistance.

It would cause confusion in the profession and among casual birders, opponents said. Books and ledgers would have to be revised, and people would have to learn new names. Only twice have such objections been overcome and the American Ornithological Society approved a switch. The first was for the oldsquaw, a species of waterfowl now known as the long-tailed duck. And last summer, the McCown’s longspur became the thick-billed longspur — the first time a name with a Confederate past was dropped.

By then, a confrontation in New York City had linked race and birding in an ugly way. In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black birder in Central Park, was falsely accused of threatening behavior by a White woman who called police on him after he asked her to leash her dog.

For the leaders of Audubon, the American Ornithological Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, among other groups, systemic racism had hit home.

At the same time, activists in the ranks were growing more aggressive in opposing the eponyms. One of the loudest voices was that of Jordan Rutter, a White co-founder of Bird Names for Birds. She wanted to upend the society committee that names a species and reconsiders historic names.

“White people are credited for discovering [the birds]. White people were the ones to name the birds after other White people. And White people are still the folks that are perpetuating these names,” Rutter said in a recent interview.

A decade ago, that same committee unanimously refused to rename the Maui parrotbill, criticizing the proposed kiwikiu as “contrived,” ridiculous and hard to pronounce. As part of last year’s awakening, activists sought an actual transcript of the debate but were denied. “I called out the AOS and NACC for censoring some racist and offensive comments the [committee] made when discussing the … proposal,” Wang said, referring to the American Ornithological Society and its North American Classification Committee.

The society has since publicly apologized for those and other insensitive comments.

It is clear that leaders in the profession are listening more closely to the protests — and preparing to act. Audubon and the American Bird Conservancy, where Rutter works, have looked inward at their near-total lack of diversity and vowed to change. The American Ornithological Society pledged to “redoubl[e] our efforts toward making ornithology, birding, and access to the natural world equitable and inclusive.”

This spring, society president Mike Webster announced that the internal group responsible for bird names will now be guided by an advisory committee composed of people of different backgrounds — although 13 of the 17 advisers are White and the ethnicities of the four others have not been identified.

The new panel is “not just because we want to feel good about ourselves,” said Webster, who is White. “We see it [as] critically important to understanding and conserving birds. It’s critically important that we have a diversity of people out there doing it.”

A virtual panel discussion took place in April. Every major birding organization was represented, and 535 people joined from around the country as a majority of the panelists — nearly all of them White — agreed that it was time to move beyond racist eponyms.

Jeff Gordon, president of the American Birding Association, stressed that North America lost 3 billion birds over the past 50 years and that saving what’s left will need people of every ethnicity and background to be involved. “The biggest threat birds face … [is] being ignored to death,” he said. “Not enough people know and not enough people care.”

There is no timeline for decisions about the worst eponyms, but the discussion seems unlikely to wane, given participants such as Rutter and Newsome. Within days of the incident in Central Park last year, Newsome helped organize a very public declaration dubbed Black Birders Week — an event that quickly became a viral movement. By happenstance, it took place amid nationwide demonstrations and calls for racial justice following George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

The 28-year-old again took part in this year’s Black Birders Week, which began last weekend. She is encouraged by ornithology’s increasing focus on diversity and racism. She hopes it will soon extend to what the National Audubon Society and its chapters call themselves. “I believe they should both absolutely change the name. It feels wrong to enter African American communities … celebrating [Audubon’s] name,” she said. “It’s a reality I am wrestling with constantly.”

Yet far more progress is needed. Heads still turn when Newsome is in the field, observing birds. “I’m always questioned, in a seemingly friendly way, ‘Oh, what are you doing out here?’ ”

On urban and rural trails, she quickly lifts her binoculars when she sees White people do a double-take. In a scorching Georgia marsh where she slogs through muck to study a seaside sparrow, she shifts heavy equipment to the side of her body that faces the roadway so suspicious White motorists “won’t think I’m doing something illegal and make trouble for me.”

Across the muddy water is the Brunswick neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, was chased down and fatally shot in February 2020. Three White men have been indicted in the case. Newsome remembers driving past the neighborhood after the killing as she again headed toward the marsh.

“I felt like my soul couldn’t take being there anymore,” she said. “Like a Black person can’t even be what they’re called to be without encountering such violence.”

CORRECTION

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of an 1855 expedition by Alfred Russel Wallace as Africa; it was the Malay Archipelago. In addition, some historians believe that the mother and baby Wallace wrote about in demeaning human terms during his trip were orangutans. The story has been corrected.

About this story

Story editing by Susan Levine. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Copy editing by Carrie Camillo. Design and development by Leo Dominguez.

Bird photos by iStockphoto/Getty Images.

In a planned highway widening project, 94 percent of displaced residents
live in communities mostly consisting of Black and Brown people

By Darryl Fears and John Muyskens

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Weary-eyed and feeling all of her 85 years, Hattie Anderson doesn’t want to fight anymore.

For most of her life, she held on to the large plot of land that she and her late husband Samuel pinched pennies to buy — even after the state ran a freeway through their mostly Black community, after the city used eminent domain to take nearly nine acres for a sewage drain, and after the state added a beltway. But now, as state officials plan another major road expansion, Anderson is offering to sell them her land and leave.

“If they don’t take my house,” she said, “I’m going to be just in a little corner, in a little hole by myself. Where I am, it’s like a dead end.”

The dismantling of Black communities for state and federal highways is not just a thing of the past. It’s happening now a few miles north of Charleston with the proposed West I-526 Lowcountry Corridor, at a time when President Biden and his transportation secretary have vowed to stop it.

South Carolina is proposing to sweep aside dozens of homes, and potentially hundreds of people, to widen a freeway interchange choked with traffic in this booming coastal region. The $3 billion project is expected to begin about two years after the plan becomes final.

If Charleston County has its way, the roadbuilding and housing destruction would not stop in North Charleston. In late August, officials unveiled a separate, $720 million plan for an expressway to begin near the expanded beltway and extend south to rural Johns Island and suburban James Island. Both places contain historic African American enclaves, where formerly enslaved people spread out from a nearby plantation in the 1870s.

Under the state’s preferred proposal for the interchange upgrade, 94 percent of people and structures that would be displaced live in environmental justice communities mostly composed of Black and Brown residents.

They are the kinds of places that Biden vowed to protect as he campaigned for office. After his victory, he placed environmental justice advocates in key posts at the White House.

The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill awaiting a House vote includes a provision that seeks to mend communities of color that were broken apart by American freeways built over the last four decades. Democrats called for $20 billion to retrofit and possibly remove highways that became barriers in underprivileged communities, while adding parks and walkway bridges to beautify these areas and make them safer for pedestrians and cyclists to navigate.

But as Biden tries to right past wrongs, Black residents in North Charleston dread a plan that threatens them now. They live in the apartments, trailers, starter homes and houses that South Carolina transportation officials framed in red for demolition.

Anderson is haunted by the memory of what happened to her robust community when the highway was first built and expanded when she was a young woman in her 30s.

“It kind of split Liberty Park and Highland Terrace up,” she said.

Black communities: ‘The point of least resistance’

Interstate 26 crawled up to Anderson’s doorstep from Charleston, where it originated in South Carolina.

The project launched immediately after Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, paving the way for major roads that scarred and wiped out communities of color from Atlanta to Oakland, “often under the guise of urban renewal,” Deborah Archer wrote in an article, “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes: Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction.”

“Black communities were impacted because they were Black communities,” said Archer, a clinical law professor at New York University, during a phone interview. “They were impacted to remove Black people. They were impacted because people wanted to lock in segregation.”

Kevin Kruse, a Princeton University history professor, recalled that Atlanta’s mayor openly said Interstate 20 was designed to divide White and Black communities. And it wasn’t just in the South. Interstate 579 cut off Pittsburgh’s Hill District of Black businesses and residents from the city’s downtown, while expressways also eviscerated Black communities in St. Paul and Detroit.

The practice of locating freeways, oil and gas refineries, transportation hubs, landfills, power plants, concrete batch operations and freeways in non-White areas is so common that they have a name: sacrifice communities.

Robert D. Bullard, a distinguished professor at Texas Southern University and the author of the 2004 book, “Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity,” said residents living near freeways pay a heavy price. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 20,000 Americans die prematurely each year from motor vehicle pollution.

Anderson began noticing strange things when I-26 arrived in 1969, and again when I-526 joined it two decades later.

“Animals came from out of nowhere,” she said. “I saw foxes. Raccoons would lift bricks off the top of trash cans.”

To this day, she said, “I put lime around here for the snakes.” Over time, noise from thousands of cars and trucks intruded too. “You can hear them.”

Anderson is not surprised that Liberty Park will be hard hit again. Black residents are “the point of least resistance,” she said.

‘A history of negative impacts’

Ruthmae Whitney opened her front door one August day and the sound of heavy traffic poured into her house.

Truck engines growled. Hot rods shrieked as they raced past the speed limit. Even when the door is closed, the muffled drone of more than 100,000 vehicles per day is a never-ending whoosh.

At rush hour, it often becomes a horn-honking grind. “I can sit on my porch and see how congested it is on the highway,” Whitney said.

She has lived in Highland Terrace — about a mile from Hattie Anderson — for about 52 years, around the time I-26 arrived. It forced Whitney, now 86, and her mother to evacuate their first house on Jury Lane.

“Here you just got settled, and here comes the highway taking your place,” she said.

The addition of the beltway two decades later brought the road within a few feet of her current home on Good Street. The proposed expansion spared that house but, she said, it would eliminate the house next door, take a chunk of her property and “put me very close to that highway.

“I’ll be hearing all that traffic noise even more,” Whitney said.

On the telephone at her office in Columbia, the state capital, Joy Riley was apologetic. Riley, the project manager for the expansion, acknowledged that Black residents were wronged when the interstates were originally built.

“We had a history there going in of negatively impacting these communities,” Riley said, “and so the challenging part was trying to go in and figure out how can we address the traffic issues but also look at what’s been done in the past and try to do something different now.”

Riley was adamant that the project has to be done. The interchange that joins I-26 and I-526 is undersized in a county where the population has doubled since 1960 to more than 411,000. “The interchange just can’t handle the number of vehicles that come through there daily. You’re just stuck. You can’t get out.”

The department’s preferred alternative would acquire 33 single family homes, four apartment buildings with at least 35 units, 11 mobile homes and eight duplexes. Two community centers and at least one church will be leveled. The plan doesn’t say how many people would be forced out of those buildings.

From the moment the county and state proposed two freeway projects in 2010 and 2019, environmental groups such as the Low Country Alliance for Model Communities and the Coastal Conservation League have fought them.

First, Charleston County sought to build an expressway with bridges between Charleston International Airport and Johns Island and James Island, where many emancipated slaves resettled in the 1800s. Later, the state said it would have to infringe on Black communities again to widen the interstate.

The activists argue that South Carolina is approaching 21st Century traffic congestion in North Charleston with a mid-20th Century solution.

“While other cities are taking down expressways, Charleston’s still trying to build more expressways while also fixing the mistakes they made in the past by widening the current one,” said Jason Crowley, senior program director for communities and transportation for the conservation league. “It doesn’t make sense.”

As they battled the state project in North Charleston, advocates called on officials to include measures to help residents, which planners ultimately accepted.

The state is now planning to build affordable housing, mostly apartments and a few single family homes — about 100 units. It will offer financial counseling for first time home buyers and anyone seeking a home away from the affected area.

In addition, the state is promising to enhance the area with parks and better lighting, improve access to public transportation and construct a walkway bridge to help pedestrians navigate streets amputated by the freeway.

Together the improvements cost about $100 million, Riley said.

Despite the cosmetic makeover, the plan’s fine print reveals that people who choose to stay will face potential harm: “The residents of the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the I-526 and I-26 interchange are likely to experience greater impacts to the quality of the air they breathe than residents living in areas further removed from high traffic interchanges.”

It was the clean open space that attracted Whitney to Highland Terrace. She moved there from Charleston in 1957 because houses had big yards and her mother loved to garden.

They were near Liberty Hill, another community established by formerly enslaved people. Many Black residents were Gullah, who speak an English Creole directly linked to West Africa.

“These people were basically among the least assimilated Black people in the United States because of their isolation on the Sea Islands,” said Damon Fordham, an adjunct history professor at The Citadel military college in Charleston. They were brought over to grow rice and “they retained the African-ness of their speech.”

As White residents left the area, Black people created a tightknit community. They established Club Zanzibar and Club Jamaica, highbrow gathering halls that Fordham wasn’t even aware of when he was a Black kid growing up in nearby Mount Pleasant.

Some women were called “Chilly Bear Ladies” because they filled Dixie cups with crushed ice and flavored it with fruit juices or Kool-Aid. They sold the low budget Popsicles to children for dimes.

The freeways tore through near the end of the civil rights movement, dividing neighborhoods, crushing homes and forcing out occupants like Whitney. “It was bad, sad,” she said. “Nobody wants to lose friends that they’ve been around for some time.”

Convinced the state will keep coming back until nothing is left of Highland Terrace, Liberty Park, Ferndale and Russelldale, Whitney wants to leave.

“What I think is because they know that Blacks can’t really afford lawyers to fight, they have to go with moving us,” she said. With housing prices rising sharply in White neighborhoods around her, Whitney is at the mercy of appraisers who often undervalue African American homes.

A 2018 study by the Brookings Institution said homes in largely Black neighborhoods were appraised for 23 percent less than those in mostly White neighborhoods — even when they were of similar quality. It found that homes in Black communities are undervalued by $48,000 on average, a $156 billion cumulative loss nationwide.

Houses in Whitney’s area received the lowest appraisals of all on the transportation department’s maps, valued as low as $31,000.

“What I’m hoping, since they say they’re going through with this highway, is that they would give us a fair price and consider the fact that we didn’t ask to move and we cannot buy a house and build a house for the price of what we built this for,” she said.

DeAndre Gadsden, who lives across the street from Whitney, said the house he purchased four years ago for $100,000 is now worth twice that. But the state, which has yet to offer an appraisal, will have the final say.

However, state officials did offer an appraisal of Hattie Anderson’s five-acre property in Liberty Park — and she didn’t like what she saw.

‘A textbook case of highway robbery’

Samuel Anderson was a believer in owning land and building wealth.

He bought a plot in Liberty Park in 1944. When Hattie married him years later, she supported him by saving. “At first I started with pennies and then I graduated to dimes. When I got to quarters I was big time.”

In time, they owned nearly 13 acres.

But the state and the city of North Charleston immediately started to chip away at their property and its worth. The interstate uprooted their neighbors and the city forced them to accept $43,000 for more than eight acres of land for the sewer project.

With a big chunk of land gone, the Andersons were hemmed in by roads and a creek widened for sewage. The family stopped using the front of their home because a small bridge that led to their driveway could no longer straddle the creek.

Thirty years later, they still use a dirt path in the backyard to come and go.

“What you have described is a textbook case of highway robbery,” said Bullard, the author and Texas Southern University professor.

After Samuel Anderson died in 2006, Hattie Anderson clung to what was left of the land. But when she realized the government was going to keep building roads around her, she relaxed her grip.

The state needs a plot like hers to replace a community center the road expansion would tear down. They said her 5.7 acres with a 2,000 square foot house are worth $712,000.

“It is ridiculously low for the almost six acres she has,” said Anderson’s daughter, Cynthia. “She’s very upset. We have to calm her down because she’s says that’s not right, they’re taking my land and I’ve been here all this time.”

Riley said the state is planning a second appraisal of Anderson’s property because “we’re kind of in a weird market right now,” given that housing cost have skyrocketed in the last year-and-a-half.

The offer reminded Hattie Anderson of her husband’s 1980 legal fight against the city’s bid to take the family’s property through eminent domain for what she called “a ditch.”

At a court hearing, she recalled, a judge said, “We’re not going to make you any richer or any poorer” when he ruled in the city’s favor.

“We were upset,” Anderson said. “But we got to a place where we accepted the things we couldn’t change.”

About this story

The 1957 aerial photograph of North Charleston is courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.

People of color include all those identifying as a race and ethnicity other than White alone and non-Hispanic.

Chris Dixon contributed to this report from Charleston. Additional data work by Ted Mellnik.

The facility relocated from Chicago’s affluent North Side to its working-class Southeast Side, igniting a controversy marked by race, class and politics.

By Darryl Fears and Robin Amer 

Photos by Jamie Kelter Davis

CHICAGO — Twenty days into her hunger strike, Yesenia Chavez took a long look in the mirror.

Her skin was pale. Her brown eyes seemed blank. Her weight had dropped by 17 pounds and she thought she could see her bones. “I looked pretty sick,” she said.

Chavez and other activists were trying to stop a large metal scrapyard with a poor environmental record from starting up in their Mexican American community on Chicago’s Southeast Side. They feared noxious gases and toxic fiberglass fluff from the car-crushing facility would increase Hegewisch’s already significant air pollution.

What made the situation especially audacious, in their view, was that the business had relocated from a wealthy White community on the North Side, where residents pushed for years to get rid of it. The scrapyard’s departure from Lincoln Park is paving the way for a $6 billion development of new shops, restaurants, office buildings, luxury condominiums, playgrounds and scenic views of the Chicago River.

“It’s about the fact that you can take something from a community where it’s not wanted, for all the reasons it’s not wanted there, and build [it] here,” said Peggy Salazar, who has lived in Hegewisch for nearly four decades. “We don’t have a voice about that, but they do. That’s why it’s insulting … and that’s why we’re opposed to it.”

Black, Latino and American Indian communities across the country continue to feel targeted and expected to carry a heavier burden no matter the consequences. In North Charleston, S.C., hundreds of people in a mostly Black community could lose their homes if a freeway interchange is expanded. In Dallas, a mountain of toxic waste rose illegally on the edge of a Black neighborhood and took extraordinary pressure to get removed.

Then there’s Chicago, which has one of the biggest disparities in neighborhood life expectancy in the United States.

“The city of Chicago has long used the Southeast Side and other lower-income communities of color … as dumping grounds for heavy and dirty industries,” said Nancy Loeb, director of Northwestern University’s Environmental Advocacy Center. Locals even have a label for their situation: “Receiving zones for industries no longer welcome in wealthier, whiter areas.”

But the fight in Hegewisch has played out differently than most previous battles. Though Reserve Management Group is ready to switch on its new $80 million Southside Recycling facility — built within close proximity to high school, elementary school and sprawling playground — residents’ opposition has helped to delay its final permits.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D), who must decide whether to approve or refuse those permits, is caught in a maelstrom of politics, lawsuits and federal investigations. The Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a civil rights probe last fall into the city’s preliminary approval of construction permits for the scrapyard, and this spring the Environmental Protection Agency asked local officials to do a comprehensive study of its “aggregate potential health effects.” Both are still pending.

For many in the community, the relocated operation became their figurative line in the sand. It brought together older activists like Salazar and younger ones like Chavez, who were willing to risk their health for the cause. Their hungry strike drew global media attention and a visit from EPA Administrator Michael Regan.

Chavez joined the strike in part for personal reasons. She thought of her maternal grandfather, who encountered pollution on the Southeast Side when he immigrated from Mexico, and her mother, who was raised around it.

As a girl, she marveled at how the North Side, with its running trails along the Chicago River and views of the city skyline from Lake Michigan’s shoreline, contrasted with Southeast’s polluted Calumet River. An area known as the Calumet Industrial Corridor includes at least 80 heavy manufacturing sites — chemical factories, plastics manufacturers, paint companies, landfills, recycling and waste management plants, railways.

Protesters engaged with passion and zeal. Even when a medical team advised hunger strikers to quit as their action entered a fifth week, Chavez voted to press on.

“I was at peace,” the 27-year-old pre-med student said, “with potentially dying for this.”

‘Fugitive dust’ in homes

There’s a place on the Southeast Side’s shore where Olga Bautista can almost forget about the factories.

She hopped in her SUV on a warm day and drove east on South Avenue O to Calumet Park, an expansive recreation area along Lake Michigan. The wind played in her hair as she stood near the water’s edge. But even this oasis is no longer untouched. A grainy black substance darkened the waves licking the shore. It left thin rows of residue on the wet sand.

Bautista studied the substance, then looked toward the mills, warehouses and smokestacks in the distance. A worried look flashed across her face. Her young daughter was in the water taking a swimming lesson.

For more than a century, this section of the city was home to the powerful but dirty steel mills that helped build America. As U.S. Steel and other industry titans faded away in the early 1990s, residents hoped the pollution they had endured would also fade. Yet officials simply allowed in more industry, even as scientific evidence of the negative health effects became clear.

Two years ago, a New York University study showed the long-term repercussions. The analysis examined air quality, exposure to toxic pollution and access to healthy food by census tracts, as well as race, income and unemployment. Researchers found a 30-year gap in life expectancy between two neighborhoods on Chicago’s North and South sides — the largest disparity of the country’s 500 biggest cities.

When Salazar moved to Southeast in 1983, into a little house with a manicured yard, she knew bulk open-air storage facilities were only a few blocks away. “I didn’t think they would impact me.”

She was wrong.

Over time, she realized the wind was lifting hazardous material off giant piles at warehouses and sprinkling it on her neighborhood like powdered sugar on a cake. One day, a neighbor marveled at the dark, rich dirt that clung to a rag whenever she dusted.

“It’s not dirt,” Salazar said. “It’s fugitive dust that’s getting into your house.”

As her concerns about pollution grew, Salazar joined what became the Southeast Environmental Task Force and entered its war against city planning and zoning officials. She fought a proposed coal gasification plant, landfills expansions and more petroleum coke facilities.

“I had hoped to bring about some transitioning into a greener kind of community, but it’s a big lift,” Salazar, 68, said recently. After serving as the task force’s executive director for about a decade, she stepped down in July. “I thought once the steel mills closed we could make it cleaner, and it didn’t happen. All they did was bring us dirty industry to replace that one.”

Bautista, 42, will lead the charge moving forward.

She dreams of bringing green manufacturers into Hegewisch, as happened seven miles away in the Pullman community, where the Method soap company is going strong with wind turbines, solar panels and a 75,000-foot green roof with pesticide-free vegetable garden. The city, she believes, must finally honor its past promises to clean up Southeast.

“My fight is not with General Iron,” said Bautista, who worked with other activists and lawyers at the Greater Chicago Legal Clinic to file the complaint that triggered HUD’s investigation. “My fight is with the city of Chicago. They’ve said a lot of wonderful, beautiful things about what they prioritize, and I want to see that.”

$80 million sitting idle

How did a scrapyard with a problematic environmental record — constant noise violations, multiple fires, even explosions — get the permits allowing it to shift to another part of Chicago?

General Iron Industries operated nearly a century in Lincoln Park, taking the rebar, typewriters, washing machines, cars, scooters and other scrap metal that junkmen had collected from alleys or demolition companies. It transformed that into raw, usable steel.

But the more affluent its surroundings became, the more the scrapyard stood out. By 2017, its owners were under siege.

Steve Joseph watched its last days. Joseph, chief executive of Reserve Management Group, aspired to expand his company’s recycling compound near Hegewisch and coveted General Iron.

Given its troubles, Joseph said in an interview, he figured the owners might sell at a lower price. As RMG bartered for the scrapyard, it also negotiated with then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel to close the Lincoln Park operation and build a new one to the south.

“They didn’t tell us to put it here,” Joseph said, “but we asked them, ‘If we put it here, will you work with us?’ and the answer was yes.”

The two companies publicly unveiled their new partnership in July 2018 and simultaneously announced that the “recycling center” would be relocated. The new facility, they noted, would “revitalize the Calumet Region with jobs and business opportunities while improving the environmental health and safety of the region and showcasing sustainable development.”

Hegewisch erupted. People demanded that their representative on the city council, Alderwoman Susan Garza (D), stop the move.

Even Lincoln Park residents who pushed for General Iron’s exit were flabbergasted.

“Our motto was comply or goodbye,” said Lara Compton, one of the leaders of the North Side environmental group Clean the North Branch. “We felt strongly … that if General Iron couldn’t comply on the North Side, then it wouldn’t be able to comply anywhere in the city.”

For more than two years, the RMG/General Iron venture seemed on track, despite Emanuel’s announcement in September 2018 that he would not seek reelection. The permit process continued amid protests, and in early 2019, the new venture won local approval to use equipment for a new shredder on the South Side.

Lightfoot became Chicago’s first female African American mayor that spring. Several months after she took office — after campaigning as an environment-friendly candidate — the city entered into an agreement with RMG that cleared the way for the shredder’s relocation.

As of last fall, her administration was still supporting RMG. A city lawyer even chided protesters as needlessly reactionary, saying their concerns were unwarranted because the new facility was technologically advanced and safer than the old one.

Yet the circumstances under which the city granted the permits under both Emanuel and Lightfoot were so questionable that HUD launched a probe focused on possible violations of the federal Fair Housing Act. This January, the federal EPA began an investigation of the state environmental agency’s separate approval of a construction permit.

The $80 million structure continues to sit idle. Lightfoot declined to be interviewed for this article but said in a statement that her administration is committed to spurring both economic growth and improving air quality.

After the EPA administrator’s visit in May — when Regan asked Lightfoot to delay her final review, citing the “environmental justice implications” — RMG filed two lawsuits in federal and state courts for $100 million in damages.

A federal judge threw out the case. A state judge allowed the company to continue seeking monetary damages with its claim that the city’s action posed “an existential threat to RMG’s existence, and its employees,” not just in Chicago but nationwide.

“We never would have closed this purchase and never done this deal and never spent a dime on it if we didn’t have that agreement with the city that took sometime over a year to negotiate,” Joseph said. He believes the EPA also hurt his business when it requested the environmental analysis.

“It’s a wish of the Biden administration to change environmental policy, and I’m all for that,” he said. “But he can’t change the rules of the game after the game has been played.”

‘We thought we would die’

For the hunger strikers, it was no game.

Óscar Sanchez, who directs youth and restorative justice programs for a local nonprofit, was livid over the scrap shredder’s arrival in his community. Biology teacher Chuck Stark was angry because it sat across the street from his students at George Washington High School.

Both Sanchez, 24, and Stark, 37, were among the first volunteers when discussions about a hunger strike began. Sanchez stepped forward in memory of his grandfather, who suffered from a respiratory illness that contributed to his death from covid last year, and for a brother who has asthma.

His agony started within days, he recalled. He had migraines and lagging energy. He was so hungry that at times “it felt like my stomach was trying to eat itself.”

After about two weeks, he wasn’t just losing weight. He was losing short-term memory. When a wheel on his car went bad, he asked his father to help repair it. The next day, he asked again. “My dad’s like, ‘We fixed the car yesterday,’ ” Sanchez said. “That’s when I started crying.”

Chavez became part of the strike a week after it began. By her third week, she was drained and depressed and periodically felt faint. Still, she vowed not to quit.

“Should I have to face the same pollution that my mom and my grandfather had to deal with in the ’70s?” Chavez asked. “Will my kids have to face that same pollution?”

The group put out a call to all of the Southeast to join the fast. Democratic Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 38, who represents a district on the South Side, signed on. He later explained that he had wanted to bring attention to the lasting effects on health “when industry gets dumped in our communities.” He described the 10 days he went without food as “difficult and excruciating.”

The effort lasted about a month, finally ending in March when that medical team convinced participants that they were putting themselves in danger. They fell short of their prime objective: a meeting with Lightfoot. “We literally thought we would die before the mayor would do anything,” Chavez said.

They now must wait for the completion of the city’s environmental study and then Lightfoot’s decision. Sanchez is sure other companies in Chicago also are waiting, “to see what they can and can’t get away with.”

If the scrapyard facility gets final approval, it would be a gut punch for the community. But people are prepared to hit back, he explained.

“We’re going to fight,” he said. “We have nothing else to lose.”

About this story

Story editing by Susan Levine. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Copy editing by Allison Cho and Jordan Melendrez. Design and development by Frank Hulley-Jones.