Test Your Knowledge on Environmental Justice and its Intersection with Race

Environmental Justice: History, Memphis Sanitation Strike, Warren County Landfill

• Environmental justice (EJ) issues have existed in the US for decades, disproportionately affecting minority and low-income communities.
• Enslaved Africans were exposed to environmental risks due to their work, and currently, these communities are more likely to live near toxic waste facilities, industrial facilities, or face food insecurity.
• EJ emerged as a way of framing a pattern of injustices that disproportionately exposed minority and low-income communities to toxic hazards, shaped by social movement activists and scholars.
• The Memphis sanitation strike began in 1968 after two garbage collectors were killed, and it was supported by the local NAACP chapter and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
• Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joined the strike but was later shot and killed, which intensified the strike and led to a deal for better wages and union recognition.
• Environmental racism refers to the disproportionate targeting of minority communities for toxic burdens, such as the siting of landfills, incinerators, or toxic industries.
• Warren County, North Carolina, became an iconic place symbolizing the coming together of the civil rights movement and the EJ movement when African American residents protested the EPA-approved placement of a landfill with contaminated waste in their area.
• The landfill in Warren County contained PCB-laden transformer fluid, which was illegally dumped along NC highways, contaminating about 240 miles of soil with dioxins and PCBs that cause various health problems, including cancer.
• The state erected large warning signs along the roadsides, and the dumpers and company owner were briefly jailed and fined under the new Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA).
• The contaminated soil had to be put in a landfill, which was located in Afton, NC, in Warren County, a predominantly black community with low GDP and poor living conditions.
• The Warren County landfill protest had a significant impact on the national conscience, marking the first time citizens mobilized in advance to protest a landfill and established such protests as a way of objecting to environmental threats.
• EJ frameworks help to understand whether race and/or socioeconomic status influence the location of environmental hazards, highlighting the need for environmental justice and equity.