framework to examine the location of polluting facilities; government response to natural and human-made disasters; and the application and enforcement of laws, policies, and regulations governing equal protection and civil rights. The environmental justice framework rests on developing tools and strategies to eliminate unfair, unjust, and inequitable conditions and decisions. It also attempts to uncover the underlying assumptions that contribute to and produce inequality, including differential exposure, unfair treatment, and unequal protection. The framework brings to the surface the ethical, moral, and political questions of “who gets what, when, why, and how much?”
Various movements over the decades have challenged structural racism that devalued blacks and other people of color and their communities. These movements challenged the underlying assumptions that contribute to and reproduce inequality. The modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was largely an anti-racism and anti–white supremacy movement. The 1970s and 1980s ushered in a more focused era of targeting unequal and unfair pollution burdens borne by poor people, people of color, and other vulnerable populations—including children. The 1990s and 2000s expanded the equity and justice lens to include issues ranging from health equity, parks and green space, food security and healthy food access, sustainability, climate change, community resilience, racial profiling, policing, and criminal justice.
Legacy of the Modern Civil Rights Movement: 1950s and 1960s
The U.S. civil rights movement waged an assault on various forms of structural racism that penetrated the daily lives of African Americans and other people of color—in voting, housing, education, employment, transportation, and equal access to other public accommodations. Protesters—young and old—were beaten, hosed with water cannons, attacked with vicious police dogs, harassed, and jailed, and some were killed in their quest for equal treatment. Yet, they persisted in their intergenerational quest for justice.
It is worth noting that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis, Tennessee, in April 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 rights. Black sanitation workers were on strike because of unequal pay, discriminatory labor practices, and unsafe work conditions that resulted in disproportionately high rates of injuries and deaths among them. They were also striking to be treated as men—with the same dignity and respect accorded white city workers. For Memphis strikers, Black Workers Mattered. Memphis was Dr. King’s “last campaign.” He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, but his legacy lives on and is an integral part of anti-racism movements around jobs, environment, health, transportation, land use, smart growth, energy, climate, and criminal justice.
Houston Waste Study Historical Backdrop: 1970s
The historical backdrop of the environmental justice movement has its roots in small, isolated struggles found across the United States. A decade after Dr. King’s death, black homeowners in 1978 took on a fight against a municipal landfill proposal in a mostly black suburban community in Houston, Texas. The city has seen a dramatic demographic shift over the past three decades (Bullard, 1987). In 1980, it was 52.3 percent white, 27.4 percent black, 17.6 percent Hispanic, and 2.7 percent Asian and other. By 2010, Houston became a majority people-of-color city—25.6 percent Anglo, 43.8 percent Hispanic, 23.7 percent African American, and 6.0 percent Asian.
The Houston case study examined solid waste disposal in Houston from the 1970s through 2013. Houston is the nation’s fourth largest city with a population of some 2.3 million persons spread over more than 600 square miles and more than 500 neighborhoods. It is the only major American city without zoning. This no-zoning policy allowed for an erratic land-use pattern. As a result, the NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) practice was replaced with the “PIBBY” (Place in Blacks’ Back Yard) policy (Bullard, 1983). The all-white, all-male Houston city government and private industry targeted landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps, and garbage transfer stations for Houston’s black neighborhoods (Bullard, 1987). Five decades of this type of thinking and discriminatory land-use practices lowered black residents’ property values, accelerated physical deterioration, and increased disinvestment in Houston’s black neighborhoods. Houston’s black neighborhoods were in fact “unofficially zoned for garbage” (Bullard, 2005). Discriminatory siting of waste facilities stigmatized black neighborhoods as “dumping grounds” for a host of other unwanted services, including salvage yards and recycling (Rosen, 1994, pp. 223–229).
Ineffective land-use regulations created a nightmare for many of Houston’s neighborhoods—especially the ones that were 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 is especially true in the case of solid waste disposal. It was not until 1978, with Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., that Black Houston mounted a legal assault on environmental racism in solid waste facility siting (Bullard, 1983).
The Bean case exposed racism and the discriminatory practices of Houston’s waste facilities as well as its flawed no-zoning legacy. For example, the Whispering Pines Landfill that triggered the lawsuit was sited less than 1,500 feet from a public school and within a two-mile radius of a half-dozen other schools in the predominately black and poor North Forest Independent School District. Although the landfill was built and plaintiffs lost their legal case in 1984, the lawsuit changed the city’s solid waste facility siting practices after 1979 (Bullard, 2005). From the time of the lawsuit until the present, not a single Type I municipal landfill has been sited in Houston, in contrast to the 1920s to the late 1970s, when Black Houston became the “unofficial dumping grounds” for the city’s garbage (Bullard, 1983).
For decades, the city used two basic methods to dispose of its solid waste—incineration and landfill. Eleven of 13 city-owned landfills and incinerators (84.6 percent) were built in black neighborhoods. This city siting pattern set the stage for private waste disposal firms to follow. From 1970 to 1978, the Texas Department of Health (TDH) issued four sanitary Type I solid waste landfill permits, for the disposal of Houston’s solid waste, and all four were located in city council districts that were majority people of color.
In 2018, the brunt of waste disposal was still borne disproportionately by low-income people of color. In 2018, two Type I landfills, McCarty Landfill and Whispering Pines Landfill, operated in Houston, and both were in council district B, which is 93 percent people of color (53 percent black and 40 percent Hispanic). As mentioned earlier, after 1979 and the Bean case, no other Type I landfills were built in the city. Houston instead began sending much household garbage to four landfills located outside the city limits. In 2018, three of these four landfills were located in census tracts where the majority of the population is people of color—Waste Management (76.6 percent), Atascocita (86.0 percent), and BFI Blue Ridge (85.7 percent).
Birth of the Environmental Justice Movement: Warren County, North Carolina: 1980s
The national environmental justice movement in the United States was born in mostly African American, rural, and poor Warren County, North Carolina, in the early 1980s after the state government decided to dispose of 30,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the tiny town of Afton—more than 84 percent of the community was black in 1982 (Bullard, 2000). Protests ensued, resulting in more than 500 arrests. The landfill later became the most recognized symbol in the county, and Warren County became a symbol of the environmental justice movement. By 1993, the facility was failing with 13 feet of water trapped inside it (Exchange Project 2006). For a decade, community leaders pressed the state to clean up the leaky landfill. Although the PCB landfill has been cleaned up, the county is still economically worse off than the state as a whole. More
