The Wrong Complexion for Protection

How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities

Robert D. Bullard, Beverly Wright

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780814799932
• eBook ISBN: 9780814771938
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Uncovers the ways the United States government responds to natural and human-induced disasters in relation to race over the past eight decades

When the images of desperate, hungry, thirsty, sick, mostly black people circulated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it became apparent to the whole country that race did indeed matter when it came to government assistance. In The Wrong Complexion for Protection, Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright place the government response to natural and human-induced disasters in historical context over the past eight decades. They compare and contrast how the government responded to emergencies, including environmental and public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents, bioterrorism threats and show that African Americans are disproportionately affected. Bullard and Wright argue that uncovering and eliminating disparate disaster response can mean the difference between life and death for those most vulnerable in disastrous times.

1
Race, Place, and the Environment in a Small Southern Town

A Personal Perspective from Robert D. Bullard

Who we are often defines what we do. Many of our experiences also help define and shape our worldview. This chapter chronicles my early years growing up in the racially segregated South (Alabama and Louisiana) and the influence of those years on my thinking about race, environment, disaster, social equity, and government responsibility. It is written from a first-person perspective and provides unique insights into my journey to becoming an environmental sociologist and one of the founders of the environmental justice movement in the United States.

The analysis places in context three decades of research, policy work, and activism—all directed toward getting various levels of government to respond fairly and equitably to natural and man-made disasters and health emergencies in communities inhabited by African Americans and other people of color.¹ It should be made clear that much of what has transpired in my efforts to move environmental justice into mainstream thinking was largely a result of events and circumstances beyond my control and had a lot to do with being “drafted” into this struggle before the national movement took hold.

Much of the credit for getting me started is owed to Linda McKeever Bullard, my former wife, who for more than six years singlehandedly held back one of the second largest waste disposal companies in the world, Browning Ferris Industries (BFI), with her lawsuit and legal challenges. While I have gained some degree of notoriety for my environmental justice work, her contribution to developing the legal theory behind challenging environmental racism has pretty much gone unnoticed in the field. However, a few legal scholars, such as the late Luke Cole, recognized Linda’s work early on and patterned many of his legal theories and much of his analysis on her Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp. lawsuit.

Over the past three decades, I have written more than fifteen books and hundreds of articles that address environmental justice, environmental racism, land use and industrial facility siting, housing and residential segregation, transportation, suburban sprawl, smart growth, livable communities, regional equity, sustainable development, disaster response, and climate justice. All of my writings use an environmental justice and racial equity framework. Environmental justice is seen as not only a civil right but a basic human right.² Race matters. Also, place matters.

Long before I became a sociologist and an environmental justice scholar, growing up in the segregated South, I witnessed up close and personal how race and place combine to create opportunity for whites and barriers for blacks. For me, it was not theory or something I had to read in a book or discover in the library. Nevertheless, my parents provided me with a wealth of books and other reading materials so that I could expand my mental boundaries beyond my isolated small-town southern roots. This exposure led me to believe early on that clean air, clean water, and safe housing are basic human rights—even though they were denied me and many of my fellow black residents who lived in my segregated hometown in southern Alabama.

Making the Race-Environment Connection—My Early Years in Elba

Much of my writings over the past years are rooted in my early years growing up in the region that gave rise to the modern civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955—which began with Rosa Park’s single defiant act of refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.

Elba is a city located in Coffee County, Alabama. In 2000, the population was 4,185. The racial makeup of the Elba is 64 percent white, 34 percent black, and 2 percent other races. Elba is a typical small southern town where blacks and whites live in segregated neighborhoods. Although blacks made up one-third of the city’s population, whites governed the town as if its African American citizens were invisible. As late as 1964, a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, Elba’s blacks attended segregated schools and were still being served at the back door of restaurants or at the “colored” window (though the “colored” signs had come down).

In Elba, Jim Crow translated into white neighborhoods receiving the “best of the best,” including libraries, street lighting, paved roads, sewer and water lines, garbage pickup, swimming pools, and flood control measures years before black neighborhoods received these tax-supported services.

For decades, Elba’s segregated black neighborhoods flooded, while white neighborhoods remained high and dry. Streets in my all-black Mulberry Heights neighborhood and the school ground were often flooded. We were frequently forced to walk in ankle-deep water on unpaved muddy streets without sidewalks to get to school. On some occasions, floodwaters even made it into our classrooms. Not a hospitable place for a young black student to become an environmentalist—but a perfect laboratory for a black boy to learn about the harsh facts of life, fairness, and justice through a racial equity lens. Even the secondhand textbooks doled out to our school reminded us five days a week that life was not fair.

Because of it precarious location—the town sits at the confluence of Beaver Dam Creek, Whitewater Creek, and the Pea River—Elba has repeatedly flooded over the years. Some hard-hit black neighborhoods have not recovered from the 1990, 1994, and 1998 floods. Many black inhabitants have sunk deeper into poverty after each flood. Seven years after the last major flood, many streets in Elba’s black neighborhoods are not maintained, and scores of homes are boarded up. Few opportunities exist in this small southern town for blacks. Each subsequent flood has worsened their chance of economic mobility. Generally, high school graduation has meant a one-way ticket out of town. I left town to attend college in 1964. I was a graduating senior in 1968 at Alabama A&M University, a historically black university located in Huntsville, Alabama, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Every time I get a request for assistance from a black community fighting a landfill, garbage dump, or waste facility, a voice in my head always reminds me that Dr. King was called to Memphis in 1968 to support the environmental and economic justice struggle of 1,300 striking sanitation workers from Local 1733. The strike shut down garbage collection and sewer, water, and street maintenance. Clearly, the Memphis struggle was much more than a garbage strike. The “I AM A MAN” signs that black workers carried reflected the larger struggle for human dignity and human rights. Although Memphis was Dr. King’s “last campaign,” his legacy lives on even to this day.³ King’s legacy remains an integral part of my environmental, health, transportation, land use, smart growth, and climate justice research and policy work.

Impact of My Houston Years—the 1970s and Early 1980s

After receiving my Ph.D. degree in sociology from Iowa State University, I moved to Houston in 1976 and accepted a teaching position at Texas Southern University (TSU), one of the largest historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the country.

A decade after Dr. King was killed, I found myself drafted into a garbage struggle in Houston. In 1978, when I was just two years out of graduate school, my attorney wife, Linda McKeever Bullard, asked me to conduct research for a community she was working with that was trying to block the Whispering Pines landfill from being sited in the mostly black suburban Northwood Manor subdivision. The community formed the Northeast Community Action Group (NECAG) and led protests and demonstrations in front of the proposed landfill entrance, located just 1,400 feet from a school.

In 1979, Bullard filed a class-action lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., on behalf of black residents who were seeking to block Browning Ferris Industries (BFI), the second-largest waste disposal company in the world, from locating a “sanitary landfill” (we all know there is nothing “sanitary” about a place where household garbage is dumped) in the midst of a predominantly black middle-class neighborhood in northeast Houston.

Northwood Manor consists primarily of single-family moderate and middle-income homes. Residents in the neighborhood are served by the suburban 17,800-pupil North Forest Independent School District, a district where, in 1980, blacks made up more than 80 percent of the student body. The North Forest Independent School administration building is located at East Houston Dyersdale Road (Mesa Drive) and East Little York. A total of seven North Forest schools are located in the Northwood Manor area and within a one-mile radius of the landfill.

The 195-acre Whispering Pines landfill, located at 11800 East Houston-Dyersdale Road (Little York Off Mesa), is across East Little York Road from the North Forest Independent School District bus facilities, the Smiley High School Complex, a service center, and the Jones-Cowart Stadium and athletic fields. The landfill is only 1,400 feet from the three-thousand-student Smiley High School Complex, which did not have air conditioning in 1982.

The Whispering Pines landfill mound, as early as 1983, could be seen rising above the surrounding landscape on East Little York. A more graphic and panoramic view of Northwood Manor’s “Mount Trashmore” (a name given to the landfill by area residents) can be seen from modern Jones-Cowart Stadium, an outdoor arena where mostly young black high school students practice and play across the road from the sanitary landfill.

Overall, housing in Northwood Manor is well maintained; more than 88 percent of the residents own their homes. (Nationally, about 46 percent of blacks own their homes.) Driving through the neighborhood, one often sees children playing in the yards and on the sidewalks; the neighborhood appears to be composed largely of younger families with children.

My previous research on housing discrimination and residential segregation proved useful in making the transition to examining and mapping the spatial location of landfills, incinerators, and garbage dumps and the racial composition of the neighborhoods in which they are sited. The central theme of my analysis was that all communities are not created equal when it comes to the siting of locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) such as garbage dumps, landfills, and incinerators. Also, race and class dynamics, along with political disenfranchisement, interact to place some communities at special environmental and health risk from waste facility siting.⁴ If a community happens to be poor, black, and powerless, it receives less environmental protection in the placement of LULUs than an affluent, white, and politically powerful community.

In my research methods class, I designed a student project in which ten graduate students were able to assist me in tracking the location of solid-waste facility siting in Houston from the 1920s through 1978, when the permit for the Whispering Pine sanitary landfill was granted by the Texas Department of Health. At times, it seemed as though my students and I were more detectives than sociologists when trying to locate and map waste facilities in Houston over more than five decades. We were “connecting the dots” between race and waste facilities at a time when no standard methodology or research protocol was in place.⁵

In order for us to obtain the history of waste disposal facility siting in Houston, government records (city, county, and state documents) had to be manually retrieved because the files were not computerized in 1979. On-site visits, windshield surveys, and informal interviews, done in a sort of “sociologist as detective” role, were conducted as a reliability check. This was not an easy task. I often joke about the work that was done “BC” (Before Computers). It was also initiated pre-GIS (Geographic Information Systems).

Houston is basically flat, with many low-lying sections located below sea level. It is also the only major U.S. city without zoning. In our search for landfills, we discovered a few “mountains.” Anytime we found a mountain in Houston, we immediately became suspicious. They usually turned out to be old landfills. Houston also has more than five hundred neighborhoods spread over six hundred square miles. Houston’s black population is located in a broad belt that extends from the south-central and southeast portions of the city into northeast and north-central.

Houston’s no-zoning policy allowed for an erratic land-use pattern. The NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) practice was replaced with the PIBBY (Place in Blacks’ Back Yard) policy. The all-white, all-male Houston city government and private industry targeted Houston’s black neighborhoods to serve as the sites for landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps, and garbage transfer stations. Clearly, white men decided that Houston’s garbage dumps were not compatible with the city’s white neighborhoods. Having white women on the city council made little difference to where Houston sited landfills. This idea changed somewhat when the first African American, Judson Robinson Jr., was elected to the city council in 1971. Robinson had to quell a near-riot over the opening of a landfill in the predominantly black Trinity Gardens neighborhood.

Five decades of discriminatory land-use practices lowered black residents’ property values, accelerated the physical deterioration of black communities, and increased disinvestment in Houston’s black neighborhoods. Moreover, the discriminatory siting of solid-waste facilities stigmatized the black neighborhoods as “dumping grounds” for a host of other unwanted facilities, including salvage yards, recycling operations, and automobile “chop shops.”

Renewable deed restrictions were the only tool many residents had at their disposal to regulate nonresidential uses. However, residents in low-income areas often allowed deed restrictions to lapse because they were preoccupied with making a living and perhaps did not have the time, energy, or faith in government to get the signatures of neighborhood residents necessary to keep their deed restrictions in force. Moreover, the high occupancy turnover and large renter population in many Houston inner-city neighborhoods further weakened the efficacy of deed restrictions as a protectionist device.

Ineffective land-use regulations have created a nightmare for many of Houston’s neighborhoods—especially the ones that are ill equipped to fend off industrial encroachment. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the siting of nonresidential facilities heightened animosities between the black community and the local government. This was especially true in the case of solid-waste disposal siting. It was not until 1979, with Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., that black Houston mounted a frontal legal assault on environmental racism in waste facility siting. A new environmental justice theme emerged around the idea that “since everybody produces garbage, everybody should have to bear the burden of garbage disposal.” This principle made its way into the national environmental justice movement and later thwarted subsequent waste facility siting in Houston.

Public officials learned fast that solid-waste management could become a volatile political issue. Generally, controversy centered on charges that disposal sites were not equitably distributed among the city’s quadrants. Finding suitable sites for sanitary landfills had become a critical problem mainly because no one wanted to have a waste facility as a neighbor. The burden of having a municipal landfill, incinerator, transfer station, or some other type of waste disposal facility near one’s home was not equally borne by Houston’s neighborhoods.

In our research in support of the Bean lawsuit, we discovered some alarming trends. From the 1920s to the 1978, a total of seventeen solid-waste facilities were located in black Houston neighborhoods. Thirteen solid-waste disposal facilities were operated by the City of Houston from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s. The city operated eight garbage incinerators (five large units and three mini-units), six of which were located in mostly black neighborhoods, one was in a Hispanic neighborhood, and one was in a mostly white area.

All five of Houston’s large garbage incinerators were located in neighborhoods dominated by people of color—four black and one Hispanic; all five of the city-owned landfills were sited in black neighborhoods. One of the oldest city-owned incinerators was located in Houston’s Fourth Ward. This site dates back to the 1920s. Other city-owned incinerators included the Patterson Street site, the Kelly Street site, the Holmes Road site, and the Velasco site, located in the mostly Hispanic Second Ward or “Segundo Barrio.” The costs of operating these large incinerators and the problems of pollution generated by these systems were major factors in their closing.

Although blacks composed just over one-fourth of the city’s population, five out of five city-owned landfills (100 percent) and six of the eight city-owned incinerators (75 percent) were built in black Houston neighborhoods. From the 1920s through the 1970s, eleven of thirteen city-owned landfills and incinerators (84.6 percent) were built in black neighborhoods. Blacks during this same period made up only about 25 percent of Houston’s population.

It is clear that Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp. exposed the racist waste facility siting practices then prevalent in Houston. The Bean lawsuit also changed the city’s facility siting and solid-waste management practices after 1979 and forced the city to adopt a more aggressive waste minimization and recycling plan. Since the Bean lawsuit, not a single landfill has been sited in Houston.⁶

Bean also signaled a milestone and a turning point in environmentalism as practiced in the United States. Less than a decade after the First Earth Day, in 1970, and the discovery of the Love Canal horror story, in 1978, Houston protests against the Whispering Pines landfill in 1978 and the Bean lawsuit in 1979 focused the environmental dialogue on “environmental dumping on black people” as another form of racial discrimination, a framework that was missing from the mainstream, mostly white environmental movement and the mostly black civil rights movement.

Historically, Houston’s black neighborhoods were dumped on while receiving less than their fair share of residential services—including garbage collection, water and sewer services, and parks and green space. Black Houstonians had gotten use to living with neglect. While some progress was made over the years, Houston’s neglected black neighborhoods were visible signs that race still mattered.

In a 2002 special report on Houston’s neglected neighborhoods, the Houston Chronicle reporter Mike Snider explained that hasty annexations by the city had left a legacy of blight.⁷ Even the best efforts of the Houston Super Neighborhood Program, the cornerstone of the administration of Mayor Lee Brown, Houston’s first African American mayor, did little to reverse decades of systematic neglect. Under the program, the city was divided into eighty-eight “super neighborhoods.” These neighborhoods could choose to create resident councils and develop “action plans,” which were essentially wish lists, to deal with a range of urban problems, including improved routine main...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: Anatomy of Vulnerability
• 1. Race, Place, and the Environment in a Small Southern Town: A Personal Perspective from Robert D. Bullard
• 2. Growing Up in a City That Care Forgot, New Orleans: A Personal Perspective from Beverly Wright
• 3. The Legacy of Bias: Hurricanes, Droughts, and Floods
• 4. Recovery and Reconstruction in Post-Katrina New Orleans: A Time for Healing and Renewal
• 5. The Wrong Complexion for Protection: Response to Toxic Contamination
• 6. Nightmare on Eno Road: Poisoned Water and Toxic Racism in Dickson, Tennessee
• 7. Living and Dying on the Fenceline: Response to Industrial Accidents
• 8. Separate and Unequal Treatment: Responseto Health Emergencies, Human Experiments, and Bioterrorism Threats:
• 9. Critical Conditions: Fixing a Broken System
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Authors