Sullivan, who is African-American, ignored the letter. Dakota Access Pipeline: Judge Hands Tribes, Environmental Groups A Victory It is a major victory for the Native American tribes and environmental groups … No one wants a factory, a landfill or a diesel bus garage for a neighbor.

Environmental Justice: One Texas Man’s Refinery Fight, Port Arthur, Texas: American Sacrifice Zone. Courtesy of A Fierce Green Fire, Video Link. This Southeast Side community has helped give a voice to the environmental justice movement. Several studies published in the 1980s and early 1990s gave charges of environmental racism new credibility. When social inequity is the issue, NRDC campaigner Rob Friedman falls back on the basics: people skills. When fighting to survive hurricanes and oil spills, Gulf Coast locals have NRDC attorney Al Huang on their side.

[1] Cole, L, & Foster, S, From the Ground Up, (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 10. Poor, rural and overwhelmingly black, Warren County, North Carolina, might seem an unlikely spot for the birth of a political movement. The California garbage dump project would have desecrated sacred tribal lands, destroyed vital wildlife habitat, and put local waters at risk. The Afton protests energized a new faction within the civil rights movement that saw the environment as another front in the struggle for justice. Six weeks of marches and nonviolent street protests followed, and more than 500 people were arrested -- the first arrests in U.S. history over the siting of a landfill. Environmental awareness and social justice mix provocatively at the Whitney Museum’s new show, “Between the Waters”. The video below provides supplementary context to environmental justice and the Environmental Justice Movement. More forms of current Native American resistance efforts and environmental justice efforts will be discussed in the “resistance” sections of the case studies. With Chavis serving as its director, the CRJ published Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, a 1987 report that became an indispensable tool in galvanizing support for environmental justice action. The report, by the UCC's Director of Research Charles Lee, showed that race was the single most important factor in determining where toxic waste facilities were sited in the United States.

When Fauntroy returned to Washington, he tasked Congress's General Accounting Office with determining whether communities of color suffered disproportionate negative impacts from the siting and construction of hazardous waste landfills within them. Environmental justice advocates have shown that this is no accident. Trump likens our “inner cities” to war zones . Many veterans of the civil rights movement -- often affiliated with black churches -- showed up in Afton, helping to attract national media attention.

Communities of color have been battling this injustice for decades.
But many frustrated residents and their allies, furious that state officials had dismissed concerns over PCBs leaching into drinking water supplies, met the trucks. That year, several environmental justice leaders co-signed a widely publicized letter to the "Big 10" environmental groups, including NRDC, accusing them of racial bias in policy development, hiring and the make up of their boards, and challenging them to address toxic contamination in the communities and workplaces of people of color and the poor. The  video below shows an interview from Tara Houska, a Tribal Rights Attorney, after the Flint Water Crisis that gained massive media attention in early 2016. Among them were Reverend Ben Chavis and Reverend Joseph Lowery, then of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Reverend Leon White of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. And they stopped them, lying down on roads leading into the landfill. The term environmental justice is used to describe the disproportionate distribution of environmental hazards in the United States, in which “poor people and people of color bear a greater share of the pollution than richer people and white people.”[1] While, this term was not officially signed into an Executive Order by President Bill Clinton in 1994, there have been many major contributions that have helped to shape the development of what is considered the Environmental Justice Movement. Environmental justice continues to be an important part of the struggle to improve and maintain a clean and healthful environment, especially for those who have traditionally lived, worked and played closest to the sources of pollution. Since the creation of the Agency’s environmental justice program in 1992, EPA understood the need to work with both federally recognized tribes and all other indigenous peoples to effectively provide for environmental and public health protection in Indian country and in areas of interest to tribes and other indigenous peoples. And in the case of Latino communities, important information in English-only documents was out of reach for affected residents who spoke only Spanish. Mothers of East L.A., originally organized to stop the siting of a prison in the East Los Angeles community, turned its attention to opposing a hazardous waste incinerator and has subsequently taken on other local environmental and social issues. Many early environmental justice leaders came out of the civil rights movement. The statistics provide clear evidence of what the movement rightly calls "environmental racism." . NRDC is proud to partner with environmental justice communities and grassroots organizations around the country, often contributing technical resources and legal and policy tools to communities' ongoing fight for healthy, vibrant neighborhoods. Communities of color, which are often poor, are routinely targeted to host facilities that have negative environmental impacts -- say, a landfill, dirty industrial plant or truck depot.

A landmark class-action lawsuit settlement has 400,000 New York City public housing residents breathing easier. In 1967, African-American students took to the streets of Houston to oppose a city garbage dump in their community that had claimed the life of a child. Other communities of color had organized to oppose environmental threats before Warren County. But the Warren County protests marked the first instance of an environmental protest by people of color that garnered widespread national attention. In the early 1960s, Latino farm workers organized by Cesar Chavez fought for workplace rights, including protection from harmful pesticides in the farm fields of California's San Joaquin valley. More evidence of environmental racism came through the efforts of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ), under the leadership of Reverend Benjamin Chavis, who had also stood with the protesters at Afton. They brought to the environmental movement the same tactics they had used in civil rights struggles -- marches, petitions, rallies, coalition building, community empowerment through education, litigation and nonviolent direct action. Championed primarily by African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and Pacific Islanders and Native Americans, the environmental justice movement addresses a statistical fact: people who live, work and play in America's most polluted environments are commonly people of color and the poor.