Environmental justice in postwar America: a documentary reader

✍ Scribed by Wells, Christopher W(Editor)

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 329
• Series: Weyerhaeuser environmental classics
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence--but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of them, such as pollution-emitting factories, waste-handling facilities, and big infrastructure projects, ended up in communities dominated by people of color. Constrained by long-standing practices of segregation that limited their housing and employment options, people of color bore an unequal share of postwar America's environmental burdens.

This reader collects a wide range of primary source documents on the rise and evolution of the environmental justice movement. The documents show how environmentalists in the 1970s recognized the unequal environmental burdens that people of color and low-income Americans had to bear, yet failed to take meaningful action to resolve them. Instead, activism by the affected communities themselves spurred the environmental justice movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental justice had become increasingly mainstream, and issues like climate justice, food justice, and green-collar jobs had taken their places alongside the protection of wilderness as "environmental" issues.

Environmental Justice in Postwar Americais a powerful tool for introducing students to the US environmental justice movement and the sometimes tense relationship between environmentalism and social justice.

For more information, visit the editor's website: http: //cwwells.net/PostwarEJ

✦ Table of Contents

The Nature Of Segregation --
"Where We Live" --
Russell Lee, Shack of Negro Family Farmers Living near Jarreau, Louisiana, 1938 --
John Vachon, Backed Up Sewer in Negro Slum District, Norfolk, Virginia, 1941 --
Carl Mydans, Kitchen of Negro Dwelling in Slum Area near House Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1935 --
Dorothea Lange, Migratory Mexican Field Worker's Home on the Edge of a Frozen Pea Field, Imperial Valley, California, 1937 --
Home Owners Loan Corporation, Los Angeles Data Sheet D52, 1939 --
John Vachon, Negro Children Standing in Front of Half Mile Concrete Wall, Detroit, Michigan, 1941 --
Examples of Racially Restrictive Real Estate Covenants --
Arthur S. Siegel, Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth Homes, a New U.S. Federal Housing Project, Caused by White Neighbors' Attempt to Prevent Negro Tenants from Moving In, 1942 --
Craig Thompson, "Growing Pains of a Brand-New City," 1954 --
Norris Vitchek, "Confessions of a Block-Buster," 1962 --
Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C., 1963 --
Fair Housing Protest, Seattle, Washington, 1964 --
Fair Housing Act of 1968 --
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, "Understanding Fair Housing," 1973 --
'Where We Work" --
Ruby T. Lomax, [Cotton Picking Scenes on Roger Williams Plantation in the Delta, New Drew, Mississippi], 1940 --
John Vachon, Steel Mill Workers, Bethlehem Company, Sparrow's Point, Maryland, 1940 --
Help Wanted White Only --
Lloyd H. Bailer, "The Negro Automobile Worker," 1943 --
Navajo Miners" Work at the Kerr-McGee Uranium Mine at Cove, Ariz, 1953 --
Mildred Pitts Walter, "Biographical Sketch," September 28, 2017 --
Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII: Equal Employment Opportunity --
Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University: "To Fulfill These Rights," 1965 --
"Exhibit 1 in City of Memphis vs. Martin Luther King, Jr.," 1968 --
"Where We Play" --
Victor H. Green, ed., Introduction, The Negro Motorist Green Book: 1950 --
Lewis Mountain Entrance Sign, Shenandoah National Park --
Colored Only Sign --
Mayor and City Council of Baltimore City v. Dawson, 1955 --
Civil Rights Demonstration at Fort Lauderdale's Segregated Public Beach, 1961 --
Jackson NAACP Branches to City and State Officials, May 12, 1963 --
A More Inclusive Environmentalism? from Earth day to Environmental Justice --
A New Civil Rights Critique --
Indians of All Tribes, "The Alcatraz Proclamation," 1969 --
Timothy Benally, '"So a Lot of the Navajo Ladies Became Widows'" --
El Malcriado, "Growers Spurn Negotiations on Poisons," 1969 --
Wilbur L. Thomas Jr., "Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities," 1970 --
Race, Environmentalism, and Environmental Governance --
Edmund S. Muskie, Speech at the Philadelphia Earth Week Rally, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, April 22, 1970 --
EPA Task Force on the Environmental Problems of the Inner City, Our Urban Environment and Our Most Endangered People, 1971 --
John. H. White, Chicago Ghetto on the South Side, 1974 --
Don Coombs, "The [Sierra] Club Looks at Itself," 1972 --
Toxics, Warren County, and The Documentation of Environmental Disparities --
Penelope Ploughman, Protest Signs in Front Yard Love Canal 99th Street Home, 1978 --
Protest Sign: Danger, Dioxin Kills, 1980 --
Robert T. Stafford, "Why Superfund Was Needed," 1981 --
Jenny Labalme, Anti-PCB Protests in Warren County, North Carolina, 1982 --
"A Warren County PCB Protest Song," 1982 --
General Accounting Office, "Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities," 1983 --
Cerrell Associates, Political Difficulties Facing Waste-to-Energy Conversion Plant Siting, 1984 --
United Church of Christ, "Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States," 1987 --
United Church of Christ, "Fifty Metropolitan Areas with Greatest Number of Blacks Living in Communities with Uncontrolled Waste Sites," 1987 --
Marianne Lavelle and Marcia Coyle, "Unequal Protection," 1992 --
Building The Movement --
Sam Kittner, The Great Louisiana Toxics March, 1988 --
Peggy Shepard and Chuck Sutton Protest New York City's North River Sewage Treatment Plant, 1988 --
SouthWest Organizing Project, "Letter to Big Ten Environmental Groups," March 16, 1990 --
Mark Gutierrez, From One Earth Day to the Next, 1990 --
Indigenous Environmental Network, "Unifying Principles," 1991 --
First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit Press Conference, October 24, 1991 --
Dana Alston, "Moving beyond the Barriers," 1991 --
"The Principles of Environmental justice," 1991 --
William K. Reilly, "Environmental Equity," 1992 --
Melissa Healy, "Administration Joins Fight for 'Environmental Justice' Pollution," 1993 --
William J. Clinton, Executive Order 12898, February 16, 1994 --
Dorceta E. Taylor, "Women of Color, Environmental Justice, and Ecofeminism," 1997 --
Luz Claudio, "Standing on Principle" --
"Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing," 1996 --
Public Citizen, "NAFTA's Broken Promises," 1997 --
The Environment and Justice in The Sustain Ability Era --
Institutional Legacies --
Richard Moore, "Government by the People" --
Christine Todd Whitman, "Memorandum," August 9, 2001 --
Second People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, "Principles of Working Together," 2002 --
Robert D. Bullard et al., "Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty," 2007 --
Marty Durlin, "The Shot Heard Round the West," 2010 --
Environmental Protection Agency, "Plan EJ 2014," 2011 --
Kristen Lombard!, Talia Buford, and Ronnie Greene, "Environmental Justice, Denied," 2015 --
Continuing EJ Activism --
Tracy Perkins, Buttonwillow Park, CA, January 30, 2009 --
Tracy Perkins, Wasco, CA, January 30, 2009 --
Online Meme on #NoDAPL --
Amy Goodman, "Unlicensed #DAPL Guards Attacked Water Protectors with Dogs & Pepper Spray," 2016 --
Brian Bienkowski, "2017 and Beyond: Justice Jumping Genres," Environmental Health News --
From Environmental Justice To Justice and The Environment --
"Bali Principles of Climate Justice," August 29, 2002 --
Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, "Rising Sea Levels," 2016 --
Brentin Mock, "For African Americans, Park Access Is about More Than Just Proximity," 2016 --
Norma Smith Olson, "Food Justice," 2013 --
Van Jones, "Power Shift Keynote," 2009 --
World Rainforest Movement, '"For a Change of Paradigm': Interview with Tom Goldtooth from the Indigenous Environmental Network," 2016.