Polluted Promises

Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town

Melissa Checker

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780814716588
• eBook ISBN: 9780814790458
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Association for Humanist Sociology 2007 Book Award co-winner

Julian Steward Award 2006 Runner-Up

One community's fight against industrial contamination and environmental racism

Over the past two decades, environmental racism has become the rallying cry for many communities as they discover the contaminations of toxic chemicals and industrial waste in their own backyards.

Living next door to factories and industrial sites for years, the people in these communities often have record health problems and debilitating medical conditions. Melissa Checker tells the story of one such neighborhood, Hyde Park, in Augusta, Georgia, and the tenacious activism of its two hundred African American families. This community, at one time surrounded by nine polluting industries, is struggling to make their voices heard and their community safe again.

Polluted Promises shows that even in the post-civil rights era, race and class are still key factors in determining the politics of pollution.

Index

“Abeyance structures,” 228n83

Activism: activist consciousness, 33–34

of black teachers, 50

and ethnography, 8, 31–34

in Hyde Park, 31

and identity, 34, 120–121, 146–147, 216n71

and strategy, 23, 216n71

success of, 32–33. See also HAPIC (Hyde and Aragon Park Improvement Committee); Social movements

African Americans: arrest rates of (2004), 9

Baptist practices of, 167–168

college enrollment of, 25

deaths of, 25

democracy, definitions of, 31–32

diabetes among, 119

environment, definitions of, 75–76

environmentalism to, 88–89

and health care, 25

health of, 13, 119

homeownership among, 25, 80, 185

hypertension, 119

interclass antagonisms among, 142

and jail sentences, 185

and land theft, 47, 218n31

landownership to, 75–81

and Lewinsky scandal, 227n56, 233n7

life expectancy among (2004), 8

male earnings among (2004), 8

middle-class, in the South, 50

migration from the South, 61

northern, in the South, 61, 80

and poverty rates, 25

and religion, 170

residential mobility among, 29

social scientists’

view of, 25–29

and southernness, 42–43

as teachers, 50, 185

“underclass” among, 27–29

unemployment among, 25, 61

in Virginia Subdivision, 128

wartime service of, 219n60

women’s voluntary associations, 110

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 49

All Our Kin (Stack), 27

American Dream, 81, 86, 102

An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 26

Antinuclear groups, 172

Aragon Park (Augusta, Georgia), 52, 96, 111

Arsenic, 6, 83

Arsenical keratosis, 125

Atlanta (Georgia), 61–62, 217n8

Atlanta Gas Light Company, 220n80

ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry): and Hyde Park, 6, 118, 122, 125–126, 127, 183

response to EPA study, 128–129

and Virginia Subdivision, 91

Augusta (Georgia), 39–67

1960s in, 55–57

Aragon Park neighborhood of, 52, 96, 111

black churches in, 44

black disempowerment in, 45

black high schools in, 44–45, 46, 50

black income in (1949), 51

black population growth in, 62

black self-suffici...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• One You Can Run, but You Can’t Hyde
• Two Race-ing the Environment
• Three Old Heads
• Four Strange Fruit
• Five Foot Soldiers
• Six Staying on Board
• Seven No Progress without Struggle
• Appendix A: Methods
• Appendix B: Getting Involved
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author