corporate-influenced federal agencies like the EPA, and how difficult it was for people without any political power to get something done about their situation. As an environmentalist and a sociologist, I could see that justice needed to be paired with the word environment, and that environment needed to include the people who inhabit it.
My first trip to Carver Terrace (located about three hours away) was for a national conference on environmental justice in 1989. A FUSE member and an ECA member had attended an inspiring meeting and demonstration in Wichita, Kansas, that brought together grassroots environmental leaders from many states. They suggested Texarkana as the next site. The Texarkana EJ conference brought in national leaders from the anti-toxics movement, including Lois Gibbs, a white working-class mother who had organized support to win the first federal buyout of a contaminated community in Love Canal, New York. She went on to become director of the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes (CCHW, later renamed the Center for Health, Environment & Justice), a resource base created to help other contaminated communities with scientific information and action strategies.
In addition to talks by national anti-toxic leaders and environmentalists, the program included a “citizen’s public hearing,” a rally with speeches by experienced activists from around the country, informal strategizing sessions, and a culminating march through Carver Terrace demanding a federal buyout. Lois Gibbs and other speakers strongly emphasized that legal strategies could go only so far and that, based on experience of grassroots anti-toxics groups around the country, political organizing and direct action tactics were more effective. She advocated putting a “face” on the problem—identifying specific politicians and others who were accountable. Environmental writers who attended publicized the story nationally, and Jim Presley of FUSE wrote an article for the Texas Observer titled “Toxicana, U.S.A.” As in Jacksonville, the “city fathers” were not happy.
The conference provides an early snapshot of this segment of the EJ movement, and how it envisioned (framed) environmental justice. Presentations focused on toxic chemicals, critiques of corporate capitalism, ineffective state and federal agencies, the need for more democracy, and building grassroots coalitions to challenge unequal treatment. Most of the speakers were white, including Larry and Shelia Wilson from the Highlander Center, an organization that had crossed racial lines for social justice since the 1930s, cultivating social change activists for the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and more (Marguerite Casey Foundation, 2015). Pat Bryant, of the Gulf Coast Tenants’ Association and one of the few African American environmental leaders at the conference, underscored the emerging EJ movement’s significance:
I’m looking here at a whole community of refugees—soon to be refugees from your own community! I live in New Orleans where there are many refugees from Central America who have been on the wrong end of the foreign and military policy of the United States government, and now I’m looking at the prospect that by the year 2000 all across this country, people who live and die to make this country will be refugees in their own communities. That is a very shocking, but real, understanding of what is happening. The numbers are so staggering, brothers and sisters, that you undoubtedly are part of the movement of the ‘90s. (Presley, 1989, 9)
I came to Carver Terrace to learn, and to express solidarity through my ECA involvement. Like Don Preston, I was a conscience constituent (but with much less knowledge and experience). Later that year, I represented the ECA at a Stop Toxic Pollution (STP) workshop at the Highlander Center and heard more firsthand testimony from residents around the country who had become anti-toxics organizers. Their stories had similar ingredients: toxic sites leading to suffering through illness and devalued homes and land; residents who weren’t high on the social hierarchy of power, whether they were white or people of color; local, regional, and federal authorities who were unresponsive or outright denied the problem; stigmatizing of (and sometimes violent threats against) residents for “stirring up trouble”; and overall a strong sense of injustice.
The next year, the ECA helped organize a Rally for the Environment at the state capitol in Little Rock to protest the state’s decision to burn the dioxin in Jacksonville. National organizations and grassroots activists from around the country turned up, since the decision was seen as setting a terrible precedent (in effect, “a toxic landfill in the sky”). From CTCAG and FUSE, I heard the latest updates about Carver Terrace. The more I learned, the more I felt the urgency and importance of this unfolding story. Soon after that, I accepted an invitation from CTCAG/FUSE to do a sociological study of the community that would help document and analyze what was happening there.
Documenting Thecarver Terrace Case
My mother could outwork me two to one…. She went down weighing 98 pounds before her death…. She was telling it in church, and she was shouting to it on Sunday, she was telling them all, it’s poison over here that’s killing people, EPA is lying to us! When we had a march out here in the neighborhood, she was one of the first, and she marched all the way in every march. Once I lost her to the chemicals here—and I know that’s what it was, you know, no one has to second guess—I made her a promise that I would never let her down, and I would never stop the fight. The more involved I am, the more that part of her is living.
On a hot July day, Patsy Oliver drove me through the neighborhood, narrating a house-by-house story of economic and medical disasters. The catalogue of shattered dreams was disheartening. By then, some houses had been on the market for as little as $7,000, and worsening floods had invaded part of the neighborhood. Oliver herself had replaced the floor in her home for the third time and had lost her mother, Mattie Warren, to cancer in the previous year. It was one of many sudden deaths that shocked the community.
Loss came in so many forms that it would be easy to focus only on that part of the story. But the residents’ resolute fight for social and environmental justice is just as remarkable. Over a period of many months, during short, intense research trips scheduled between my work obligations, I interviewed residents, attended many types of meetings, pored over documents, and thought hard about what EJ means in practice. I continued to visit the community during the transition to a buyout, and afterward I located and reinterviewed a number of families in their new homes. Using qualitative research methods, I did my best to create a holistic case study that would offer comparisons to other communities and preserve some of the unique details of this one. Like many of my colleagues, I hoped that my research, teaching, and writing about EJ would make some positive difference.
Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism
In the 1980s and 1990s, different narrative strands were coming together around the concept of environmental justice, including one focused on environmental racism. At that time, environmental racism most often referred to the disproportionate targeting of minority communities for toxic burdens (like 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 in 1982 African American residents engaged in direct action protests against the EPA-approved placing of a landfill with contaminated waste in their area despite the potential health hazards (see Chapter 1 in this volume).
In his 1990 book Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, Robert Bullard not only researched the pattern of disproportionate impact on minority communities but also engaged in active outreach to affected communities (including Carver Terrace) to make the research usable in a fight against environmental racism. As Dorceta Taylor (2000) and others have pointed out, mainstream organizations focused on reducing human damage to the environment (often construed as “wilderness”) but ignored social justice issues and the everyday spaces where people live. Thus, an EJ agenda was badly needed.
Although early images associated
