2/15/2022
For Black History Month, Honor the Environmental Justice Activism of Hazel Johnson
Breaking Newstags: pollution, African American history, Chicago, Black History Month, urban history, Environmental Justice, Environmental racism
Hazel Johnson was not only my mother, she was the mother of the environmental justice (EJ) movement.
Hazel started organizing in our neighborhood, Altgeld Gardens, on the far southside of Chicago in the late 1970s. At the time, Altgeld residents and other Black, Brown and working class neighborhoods across the country were bearing the burden of toxic pollution and industrial dumping. But such terms as environmental justice and environmental racism were not commonplace back then like they are today. My mom dedicated her life to changing that. She fought for justice in Chicago and raised national awareness about the connections between socioeconomic, public health, and environmental inequities in low-income and communities of color—what we now call environmental racism.
For many reasons, women often do not receive the same recognition for their contributions to social movements as men. Those of us fighting the climate crisis on the front lines—working every day to dismantle the structural racism that got us here—know that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Hazel Johnson, one of the many women trailblazers in our movement, was one of them. At the same time my mother was working to address pollution and housing discrimination in Chicago, community environmental justice struggles were erupting in such places as Warren County, North Carolina, and the section of Louisiana now called Cancer Alley, where my mom was born. Those fights also were led mainly by Black women, who—like the civil rights organizers before them—often went unrecognized compared to their male peers.
My mom, like many other women, got started in the work simply because she cared about her community. She and my father John moved to Altgeld Gardens in Chicago in 1962, but their idyllic life took a turn in 1969 when John was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died weeks later at just 41 years old. Hazel later heard from neighbors about others experiencing cancer and respiratory diseases, such as asthma, and about mothers in the neighborhood with high rates of miscarriages or delivering babies with birth defects. She then discovered that her community had the area’s highest cancer rates and began investigating local environmental conditions.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
- The Mexican War Suggests Ukraine May End Up Conceding Crimea. World War I Suggests the Price May Be Tragic if it Doesn't
- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of