[Communications] MWRD Commissioner Du Buclet Special Black History Month Edition #2

Fri Feb 19 14:29:27 CST 2021

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Hazel Johnson (1935 - 2011)
Hazel Johnson known as the “mother of environmental justice” first began to suspect there was something in the environment harmful to residents of her community of Altgeld Gardens when her husband died of lung cancer in 1969, at the age of 41. Later, four young girls died from cancer.

Johnson heard on TV that the area around Altgeld had the highest incidence of cancer in the city. Conducting a survey of Altgeld residents in the early 1980s, she learned that almost everyone knew someone who had been struck with cancer between age 35 and 55.

Altgeld was built on an old Pullman Palace Car Company dump, back in the 1940s which contained harmful asbestos. The Chicago Housing Authority initially denied this fact until Johnson, working in part with a fresh-faced community organizer named Barack Obama, forced them to acknowledge and address the issue in the mid-1980s. What Johnson learned led her to dub the neighborhood "The Toxic Donut".

When she raised concerns about environmental hazards at an
Illinois Environmental Protection Agency meeting she was sent complaint forms. She got residents to fill them out the forms, showing widespread health issues seeming to have been caused by air and water quality, she was told there was no proof of any health hazard in Altgeld Gardens. She then conducted a more formal survey showing the public health hazards with the help of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Health and the toxicologist Dr. Robert Ginsburg. It finally helped focus EPA attention on the polluted region.

Johnson did much of this work through
People for Community Recovery (PCR), an organization she had founded in 1979 to advocate for repairs in Altgeld Gardens, but which soon shifted its focus to broader issues of environmental justice.
Dr. Robert Bullard (1946 - Present)
Dr. Robert Bullard is often referred to as the “father of the environmental justice movement.” In 1979 Bullard was drawn into a case as an expert witness by his wife who was representing some Houston residents in their struggle against a plan to locate a municipal landfill next to their homes. The 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 the civil rights laws.

In his role,
Bullard conducted a study which documented the location of municipal waste disposal facilities in Houston. This study was the first comprehensive account of ecoracism in the United States. Bullard which found that African American neighborhoods in Houston were often chosen for toxic waste sites.

All 5 city-owned garbage dumps, 6 of 8 city-owned garbage incinerators, and 3 of the 4 privately owned landfills were sited in black neighborhoods, although blacks made up only 25 percent of the city's population. This discovery prompted
Bullard to begin a long academic and activist campaign against environmental racism.

Over the 1980s
Bullard widened his study of environmental racism to other predominately American communities ii the south. Again he found a clear overrepresentation of environmental hazards in black areas as compared to white areas, causing increased health risks to black citizens.

In 1990
Bullard published his first book, "Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality". In his book, Bullard wrote that the Environmental Justice Movement, a grassroots movement by people of color then spreading across America to protest environmental racism, signified a new convergence of the civil rights movement and the environmental movement of the 1960s.
Marjorie Richards (1941 - Present)

Margorie Richard holds the distinction as the first African-American to win the Goldman Environmental Prize. Richard’s fight against a Shell plant in Norco, Louisiana, a fixture since 1929, has been hailed as a landmark environmental justice victory.

Richard's grew up in the historically African-American neighborhood of Old Diamond in Norco, Louisiana, in a house just 25 feet away from Shell Chemicals plant’s fence line. Old Diamond was plagued with high rates of cancer, birth defects and other serious health ailments among the 1,500 residents who lived on the four square blocks sandwiched between the Shell plant.

According to Richard, the defining event in her decision to become an activist occurred in 1973 when a Shell pipeline exploded, knocking one house off its foundation killing an elderly woman and a teenage boy mowing the lawn. In 1988, another major industrial accident killed seven workers and released 159 million pounds of toxins into the air.

In 1989, Richard founded Concerned Citizens of Norco to seek justice from Shell in the form of fair and just resettlement costs for her family and her neighbors. She joined forces with environmentalists and researchers to release a report that showed that the Shell refinery in Norco releases more than 2 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air each year.

Thanks to Richard’s efforts in 2000, Shell agreed to reduce its emissions by 30 percent and improve its emergency evacuation routes. Shell also agreed to pay voluntary relocation costs for residents who lived on the two streets closest to the plant. But Richard and Concerned Citizens turned up the heat, leading to a meeting at the Shell offices in Norco where they secured a $5 million community development fund and full relocation for all four Old Diamond streets.
Contact Information
Our mailing address is:

Metropolitan Water Reclamation District
Commissioner Kimberly Du Buclet
100 East Erie Street
Chicago, IL 60611

Phone Number
312-751-5086
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