Chapter five
Danielle Bailey grew up in Walnut Cove, North Carolina, a town of about fifteen hundred in Stokes County. As a child in the 1980s, she cherished warm, lazy weekends at Belews Lake—pronounced “Blues”—several miles from her home near Main Street. She recalled lounging on the tree-lined banks of the nearly four-thousand-acre lake and dipping into the blue-green water that shimmered when the sun hit the surface in just the right spots. Years later, after two semesters at North Carolina A&T, she returned home to marry her high school sweetheart, Tony Lash, pregnant with their first child. When the couple decided to buy a house to raise their son, Anthony, and their daughter, Amani, who was to come five years later, they chose a two-story, three-bedroom brick home on Pine Hall Road, not far from the lake Danielle had loved as a child. Living close to a body of water that provided recreation and pleasure and attracted people from the nearby counties on weekends for boating, fishing, and swimming to Danielle signaled prosperity.
These days fewer people gather at Belews Lake, especially on weekdays, when only one or two boats float lazily near the shore. At some sections of what is actually a reservoir, created in the 1970s to provide cooling waters for Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station, the water is less fresh than turgid and tepid. On Saturdays, the parking lot at the recreational access entrance on Pine Hall Road is full of trucks with boat trailers in tow as their owners troll for spotted bass. Though a sign encourages fishing, most of these fishermen have no idea that between 1974, the year Duke Energy located one of the largest coal-fired electric generating plants in the state in tiny Walnut Cove, and 1986, nineteen species of fish were killed off by toxic wastewater released by the facility, according to a 2002 study by the U.S. Forest Service.
For many who, like the young Danielle Bailey, were drawn to the waters of Belews Lake, the stacks of the plant that loom in the near distance belching out thick white steam barely register. They do not know that the lake and the land around it might have sickened Danielle—and many of her neighbors. In 2014, the danger became glaringly apparent when a 324-acre pond containing coal ash, a toxic by-product of the plant laced with unsafe levels of lithium, radium, selenium, mercury, and other harmful substances, spilled into the lake after a 48-inch storm pipe burst. Belews Creek and the Dan River, which snake through Stokes County, were also contaminated. Because the pond was unlined, over time pollution also seeped into the soil and groundwater. Coal ash is also buried across the area in landfills, which look like gentle rolling hills. Though no one can prove it definitively, living in this toxic area, which Danielle Bailey-Lash called home for many years, might have led to her brain cancer.
Where you live matters. From birth to death, the conditions in the social and physical environment where people make their homes, work, attend school, play, and pray have a significant influence on health outcomes. Those in the public health field call these conditions social determinants of health. Living in safe communities, with adequate health-care services, outdoor space, clean air and water, public transportation, and affordable healthy food—as well as education, employment, and social support—contributes to longer, healthier lives. And the opposite is true: when residents lack a healthy environment and basic services and support, their lives are cut short. When I returned to the South Side of Chicago in 2020 to see where my Mississippi-born grandparents and their siblings settled during the Great Migration—and which my immediate family left in 1969—I could see the outsized effects of race and place on health.
In January 2020, my mother and I traveled to Chicago. While there, she wanted to show me her old stomping grounds, and we had a long list of locations to visit, most of them in the Englewood section. It included one of her childhood homes, the house she and my father had lived in shortly after their wedding, her elementary and high schools, and the elementary school I had attended before we moved to Denver. I was most excited to revisit Mr. Brice’s, a liquor shop on Vernon Avenue owned by my dad’s close friend. On Saturdays my father would stop in to hang out and talk about fishing with Mr. Brice, who would give my sister and me free candy and ice cream sandwiches. His store served as a welcoming kind of community center for the neighborhood. The oaky smell of any liquor store still brings back that memory.
But the working-class Black community we remembered with warmth and nostalgia was gone; we were shocked by the condition of Englewood and other South Side neighborhoods. My mother’s childhood home had been razed, reduced to a garbage-filled vacant lot. The home she lived in with my father was boarded up, as was her elementary school, Betsy Ross. Mine, John Harvard Public School, was still there, now known as the Harvard School of Excellence, but the houses across the street were abandoned, as were several nearby business storefronts. Englewood High School, which my mom attended with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, had been closed in 2008 due to poor performance. Mr. Brice’s was long gone. I had expected gentrification, but this community of about twenty-four thousand residents—in the middle of the country’s third-largest city—reminded me of the rural Mississippi my family had left behind. We later learned that Chicago has the country’s widest racial disparity in life expectancy—a gap of thirty years between Streeterville (nine miles north), where people expect to live to ninety, and my mom’s old neighborhood, Englewood, where people live to only age sixty.
Where they live also matters to the people of Walnut Cove, who are suffering under the weight of an inequity that can damage the health of a community: environmental injustice. From foul water in Flint, Michigan, to deadly chemicals that have poisoned a large corridor of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley, Black and poor communities shoulder a disproportionate burden of the nation’s pollution, which has been well documented for decades, thanks to a pileup of evidence that scientists and policy makers began gathering beginning in the 1970s. A wide-ranging report from 2017 added to the stockpile of proof: “Fumes Across the Fence-Line,” compiled by the NAACP and the Clean Air Task Force, showed that African Americans are 75 percent more likely than the average American to live in so-called fence-line communities. These are defined as areas near facilities that emit hazardous waste. Breathing air poisoned by emissions is the most direct, unavoidable consequence of life in a fence-line community, depriving residents of their most fundamental right, the right to breathe. Installing facilities that inflict negative health, social, and economic outcomes on communities that generally didn’t want them has been called a new kind of Jim Crow.
In 2018, researchers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proved that though poverty matters as far as who is exposed to pollution, race plays an outsized role. A study conducted by the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment looked at facilities emitting air pollution, along with the racial and economic profiles of surrounding communities, and found that Black Americans are subjected to higher levels of air pollution than white Americans regardless of their wealth. The research, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health, noted that Black Americans are exposed to 1.54 times more of the kind of sooty pollution that comes from burning fossil fuels than the population at large. This dirty air is associated with lung disease, including asthma, as well as heart disease and premature death. Ironically, another study, published in 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that despite disproportionate exposure to air pollution, Black and Latinx people are less likely than whites to consume the goods and services that produce it. For example, compared with white people, Black Americans are more frequently exposed to the emissions from plants and factories that produce fuel, though, per capita, they fly and drive less.
The urgency of this environmental crisis has been hastened by climate change. When a weather disaster strikes, people of color are hit first, worst, longest, and hardest. In December 2017, several months after Hurricane Harvey produced catastrophic flooding in Texas and other states, two scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, used government data to calculate that the record rainfall, which added up to fifty inches in some areas, was 38 percent higher than would be expected if the world were not growing warmer. Black and brown people shouldered the brunt of the disaster, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and killed nearly one hundred people. Those in fence-line communities, already burdened by pollution from oil, gas, and chemical plants, faced a kind of double jeopardy when the wind and rains came.
Lowndes County, Alabama, provides a stark example of the ways climate change has amplified the severe effects of a long-standing environmental crisis. This historically Black community has for decades been contaminated by raw sewage resulting from an inadequate waste system. More recently, long, erratic rainy seasons and warmer temperatures triggered by climate change have created an emergence of hookworm in the community. When it rains, wastewater bubbles up into homes through sinks, tubs, and toilets, and puddles of sewage contaminated with human waste collect in the soil that gave the Black Belt states of the South their name. A 2017 survey by the Baylor College of Medicine found that more than one-third of Lowndes County residents tested positive for hookworm, a tropical disease associated with developing countries and long thought to be eradicated in the United States. Humans contract this intestinal parasite through dirt contaminated with feces. In 2017, a United Nations official toured the area and noted that the contamination was “very uncommon in the First World. It’s not a sight that one normally sees.” Tragically, Lowndes County is located along the route of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march—a symbol of pride and resistance.
In May 2010, Danielle Bailey-Lash, then thirty-five and with two young children at home, was working as an administrator for her mother, Sandra, who owned Sandy’s Playschool, a day-care center not far from her daughter’s home on Pine Hall Road. Danielle had been suffering from agonizing migraines for months, and pain medication provided little relief. Sometimes the pain was so intense that only walking around with an ice pack on her head as she went about her duties at the day-care center provided any relief. But on May 8, the pain rose to brain-splitting intensity. Sandra looked at her daughter, who was in so much pain that she could barely turn her head, and insisted, “Call Tony and have him take you to the emergency room.” At the ER at what was then known as Forsyth Memorial Hospital, doctors discovered a tumor over Danielle’s right ear the size of a baseball and admitted her right away. She was diagnosed with stage 3 glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and given three to six months to live. She required a craniotomy to remove part of her skull in order to take out the tumor. Her mother organized terrified family members into shifts so Danielle would never be alone in the hospital. She brought in the bishop of her church and gathered Danielle’s husband, aunt, and uncle for prayer vigils at her bedside. Days after her surgery, drifting in and out of sleep, her head wrapped in bandages and swollen three times its normal size, Danielle told her mom not to be afraid. With a kind of otherworldly calm, she explained that God had spoken to her and Jesus had come into the room. “I am at peace, Mom,” she said. “I am going to be fine.” After a punishing round of chemotherapy and radiation treatments, the cancer eventually went into remission, and Danielle insisted that her friends and family stay positive about her condition and prognosis.
Almost four hundred miles north, in Washington, D.C., Caroline Armijo heard from a mutual friend that Danielle had had surgery. Caroline and Danielle had known each other since they met in gym class in seventh grade at Southeastern Middle School in Walnut Cove. The bookish girls, one Black, the other white, got along right away. After graduation from South Stokes High School, they went their separate ways—Danielle to North Carolina A&T, a historically Black university, Caroline to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. There, Caroline met her husband, Enrique, and in 2005 the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a lawyer. She leaned into her artistic talents, and they started a family. When Caroline learned that Danielle’s surgery was the result of a brain tumor, she was rattled. From her mother and others back home, she had begun hearing about so many friends, neighbors, and relatives diagnosed with cancer: her mom’s cousin died of leukemia, the beloved director of a funeral home passed away from breast cancer, a childhood neighbor who loved to fish in Belews Lake died from a brain tumor, and his best friend also died from brain cancer. And now Danielle. Though cancer is an unpredictable disease that sometimes strikes without logic, she wondered why her friend, a young, healthy nonsmoker and nondrinker, would contract an aggressive form of brain cancer whose median age at diagnosis in the United States is sixty-four. Shaken, Caroline decided to look into what could be going on in their hometown. She befriended experts on the internet and read books and listened to podcasts about the environment. She had never heard of coal ash and googled “is coal ash toxic?” Eventually, she discovered a report from the environmental group Earthjustice, which had mounted an advocacy campaign, Coal Ash Contaminates Our Lives. She learned that each year in the United States, 140 million tons of coal ash pollution are produced by coal plants, with nearly 750 sites around the country storing some form of the substance. Seventy percent of coal ash ponds are located in poor communities, and nearly all of them have leaked into nearby water sources, according to EPA data, disgorging known environmental toxicants into the land and water. She also came to understand that North Carolina had more than one hundred coal ash disposal sites and that her friend Danielle and her family were living down the road from one.
By 2012, when Caroline returned to North Carolina with her husband and the first of their two children, settling in Greensboro, about forty-five minutes from Walnut Cove, she knew it was time to have a heart-to-heart with Danielle. By then, Caroline’s first cousin had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and his wife’s best friend had passed away a year earlier from a brain tumor, one of four people in their social circle in their fifties who had died. Caroline didn’t want to overwhelm Danielle, who had outlived her original doomsday prognosis and was struggling back from a second craniotomy, but she felt compelled to warn her that the poison from Duke Energy might be the cause of her cancer. The two friends emailed, and as gently as possible Caroline explained what she knew. Danielle remembered being in denial, unable to believe that the lake she loved could be harming her, that the company down the road could be poisoning the community with no remorse or retribution, and that the government could allow something like this to happen. But when Caroline eventually told her, “I wish you could move,” she listened. A home inspection also shocked her into action: it found elevated levels of radon, a radioactive gas that can cause cancer, in her drinking water. Given the contamination, health officials advised her to avoid drinking, cooking with, or doing laundry with her tap water, and not to take showers for longer than a few minutes at a time. Two years later, the state would admit trying to cover up the extent of the crisis after a toxicologist working under the governor testified that state officials told residents their water was safe knowing it wasn’t. Danielle thought of her daughter, Amani, born small and premature, playing on a tire swing and splashing into the waters of the lake. And of herself, and the cancer that was eating away her brain, and decided she had to get out.
In 2014, she and her daughter moved from the house on Pine Hall Road into Regency Apartments, a brick complex in the center of the town of Walnut Cove, miles away from the lake and plant. She also forced herself to come to the difficult conclusion that something sinister was going on, and accompanied Caroline to a meeting of Appalachian Voices, an environmental justice organization that had been pressuring Duke Energy to clean up the local coal ash mess. Danielle, shy and trusting by nature, was not a natural activist. But a monumental crisis helped cement her decision to take her first steps into environmental advocacy: the same year Danielle left Pine Hall Road, another Duke Energy plant, downstream from Walnut Cove, spilled nearly forty thousand tons of coal ash and twenty-seven million gallons of wastewater into the Dan River. This event, which received national media attention, spiked her already burdened community with more toxic pollutants. Many local residents learned about the disaster from Facebook. At the same time, their feeds were flooded with prayers for a ten-year-old neighbor of Danielle’s who had survived a brain tumor but was now fighting lung cancer.
Along with attending Appalachian Voices meetings, Danielle tried to sound the alarm in small ways. At one point, while waiting to go into treatment at the regional medical facility where she received cancer care, she saw two other people from her small town. When she mentioned the connection between herself, her neighbors, and the Duke plant to her health-care providers, she says they brushed her off. When she brought flyers about coal ash, pointed to a few more people from Walnut Cove undergoing cancer treatment at their center, and told them about her ten-year-old neighbor, they didn’t believe her. Even when she brought her cancer specialists the home inspection that showed her water was tainted, they didn’t take her seriously. Instead, she was referred to a nutritionist, who told her to avoid eating food from cans to prevent exposure to aluminum, which has no direct connection to brain cancer.
Black people have long been blamed for the health problems that plague them, with little acknowledgment of the condition of their communities. The centuries-old focus on genetic and physiological differences between Blacks and whites has masked the brutal effects of racial discrimination and structural inequality. In 1896, when African Americans were reeling and still recovering from the effects of 250 years of enslavement and struggling through the reactionary years of Jim Crow, Frederick L. Hoffman, a German immigrant and statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company of America, published Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. His much-lauded report attributed poor health outcomes of African Americans to racial inferiority and genetic susceptibility—or, in his words, a “race proclivity to disease and death.” The 330-page article, a mash-up of statistics, eugenic theory, observation, and speculation, was published in the then-prestigious journal Publications of the American Economic Association and used statistical data to deny Black Americans life insurance. Race Traits remained the gold standard for evidence-based statistical research into race and health for years. It supported the myth that Black Americans died because they were inferior, and they were inferior because they died. “It is not in the conditions of life,” Hoffman wrote, “but in the race traits and tendencies that we find the causes of excessive mortality.”
To counter Hoffman, the eminent Black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois undertook his own investigation into the health conditions and high mortality rates of Blacks and made a point of highlighting the social conditions that Hoffman had so studiously ignored. Du Bois and his team did extensive shoe-leather fieldwork that he would turn into his 1899 opus, The Philadelphia Negro, canvassing neighborhoods and interviewing residents in twenty-five hundred households. In a later work, The Health and Physique of the Negro American, Du Bois wrote, “With the improved sanitary condition, improved education and better economic opportunities, the mortality of the race may and probably will steadily decrease until it becomes normal.” Du Bois was unsparing on the lack of compassion for the health and well-being of Black Americans. “The most difficult social problem in the matter of Negro health is the peculiar attitude of the nation toward the well-being of the race,” Du Bois wrote in The Philadelphia Negro. There were, he continued, “few other cases in the history of civilized peoples where human suffering has been viewed with such peculiar indifference.”
Fifty years after civil rights legislation addressed the legacy of discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and other institutions of the country, America remains deeply segregated. Blacks and other people of color are more likely than whites to live in communities with high rates of poverty, where physical and social structures are crumbling, abandoned, and left to die. Even educated, affluent Blacks live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working-class incomes, which is spelled out in a 2002 report, “Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks and Hispanics in Metropolitan America.” Some of this segregation is by choice: many Black people prefer to live in the communities they were raised in, surrounded by a cushion of familiarity, family, and culture. Most of the segregation, though, is not chosen but created by economic forces. Only 44 percent of Black Americans own their homes, compared with about 65 percent of all Americans and 74 percent of whites. Homeownership, a pillar of the so-called American dream, decreased for Black Americans in the decade and a half since 2004, erasing most of the gains made since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, which outlawed housing discrimination. Numerous studies show that bias by realtors and mortgage lenders contributes to the lack of housing options and opportunities for African Americans. And many Blacks simply cannot afford to buy homes or move. If, like Danielle Bailey-Lash, their property has been devalued by pollution they didn’t invite, the problem is compounded. This contributes to a wealth gap between white and Black families that has more than tripled in the last fifty years, according to the Federal Reserve, making the median net worth of white families ten times higher than that of Black families.
Inequality in the conditions of Black communities compared with others is far from new, and racism has been spilled all over the problem for nearly a century. Many areas where the streets remain unsafe, the air and water are dirtiest, and affordable, healthy food and outdoor space are lacking were subject to redlining, a policy that began in the early part of the last century. In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) used color-coded maps that encouraged mortgage lenders to withhold credit from certain communities in 239 cities. These maps graded areas—A (“best”—green), B (“still desirable”—blue), C (“definitely declining”—yellow), and D (“hazardous”—red)—encouraging lending in predominantly white and more affluent areas and discouraging lending in areas with residents of color, especially “Negroes.” The Federal Housing Administration later relied on these maps, along with its own underwriting manuals, which resulted in lending institutions issuing fewer mortgages in C and D areas than in other parts of the city, helping to create entrenched segregation, disinvestment, and decay.
Although the practice of redlining was declared illegal in the late 1960s, its impact persists today and has contributed to housing instability, inequitable access to health-promoting resources, and unhealthy living conditions. A 2020 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition made an explicit link between the effects of redlining and current health outcomes. Chronic illnesses like asthma, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease, obesity, and stroke were more prevalent in redlined communities, and life expectancy was cut by 3.6 years in neighborhoods that received the HOLC’s D rating.
The Chicago communities where my mother came of age and where residents die young were not just redlined; they were also subject to the predatory practice of contract buying. In the 1950s, speculators created home sale contracts to trap African American families who were eager to purchase homes but whose housing choices were restricted by racial segregation and redlining. These contracts offered Black buyers the false impression of a mortgage but without the protections. Instead, buyers made monthly installments at high interest rates toward bloated purchase prices but did not gain ownership until the contract was paid in full and all conditions met. That meant that contract sellers held the deed of the home and were able to evict the buyers for any missed payments. During the payment period, Black contract buyers accumulated no equity in their homes. According to the 2019 report “The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago,” released by the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, this practice extracted between $3.2 and $4.0 billion from Chicago’s Black community. “The curse of contract sales still reverberates through Chicago’s black neighborhoods (and their urban counterparts nationwide),” wrote the Duke researchers, “and helps explain the vast wealth divide between blacks and whites.” When I asked my mother how my grandfather managed to scrape together the money to buy the family’s first home on East Sixty-Fourth Place sometime in the 1950s, she explained that he didn’t have enough for a down payment, so he bought it on contract. “Dad was always terrified about missing a payment because he could lose the building at any time,” she told me.
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Polluting facilities tend to be located in areas where residents are least able to fight back against them—communities where people of color live and where poor people reside. Stokes County is mostly white. Residents Black and white, middle class and poor, have been exposed to Duke Energy’s pollution and poisoned by it since it first located the Belews Creek Steam Station in Walnut Cove the year Danielle and Caroline were born. But the county’s poor and Black residents live closest to the plant, the landfills, and the pond and are least able to relocate.
Communities that are both Black and poor have long proven the most vulnerable. Forty years ago, activists began beating the drum about a pattern of situating facilities that contaminate the air, water, and soil—including incinerators, oil refineries, smelters, sewage treatment plants, landfills, and chemical plants—near communities of color, or placing housing where Black, brown, and poor citizens will live close to these kinds of facilities. The first stirrings of the Black-led environmental justice movement date to the late 1970s, out of a convergence of a growing interest in environmental issues with the civil rights and Black Power movements. In 1978, Robert Bullard, then a young professor of sociology at Texas Southern University, walked through the door of his home in Houston and was greeted with the news that his then wife, Linda McKeever Bullard, a lawyer, was suing the City of Houston, Harris County, and the State of Texas—Bullard’s employer—in federal court. The suit charged the government agencies, as well as Browning-Ferris Industries, a now-defunct private waste management company, with racial discrimination in siting the Whispering Pines municipal landfill in the predominantly Black Northwood Manor neighborhood in suburban Houston. When they first saw trees being cut down and Bobcats overturning dirt, residents, mostly middle-class homeowners, thought the construction was a shopping mall or new subdivision.
Bullard, who is now a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at TSU, signed on to help his wife’s case.
In the days before internet research, Bullard and a handful of his students combed state and city records on paper or microfiche, walked through neighborhoods using foldout census tract maps, and went door to door, sometimes sticking surveys underneath the wipers of cars in an attempt to locate the waste facilities in the city. Houston is relatively flat, so Bullard advised his students to keep an eye out for hills, which often signaled the site of an old landfill. In the end, they discovered that all five municipal dumps, six of eight city-operated garbage incinerators, and three of four private landfills were located in Black communities—though African Americans made up only 25 percent of the population at that time. Bullard believed the data showed a pattern of biased decisions over years and years by city officials. The siting of Whispering Pines felt like the height of disrespect: the new landfill was thirteen hundred feet from a high school in a Black school district and within two miles of at least half a dozen elementary schools, leaving children smelling garbage in their classrooms on Houston’s many hot and humid days.
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Though his wife lost the lawsuit and the Whispering Pines landfill still operates, Bullard’s work piqued his interest in looking for patterns of environmental racism. In his 1990 book, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, he argued that pollution from solid waste facilities, hazardous waste landfills, and toxic waste dumps and chemical emissions from industrial facilities were exacting a heavy toll on Black communities across the country. Using case studies—including Sumter County, Alabama, which is the site of the nation’s largest hazardous waste landfill—Bullard showed that toxic dumping and unwanted land uses have followed a path of least resistance, meaning they end up sited in Black and poor communities. His book became a bible for the environmental justice movement.
As Bullard was writing Dumping in Dixie, residents of Warren County, North Carolina—120 miles north of Walnut Cove—mounted a six-day protest against a toxic landfill being placed in the area of the state with the highest concentration of African Americans and nearly the lowest per capita income. The toxins had an extraordinary origin: In 1978, residents in fourteen North Carolina counties noticed on their way to school, work, and church dark streaks of a greasy substance along the shoulders of 240 miles of roadway. From June to August of that year the Ward Transformer Company sprayed more than thirty thousand gallons of oil thick with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the middle of the night, five hundred miles from New York, in order to avoid the cost of proper disposal. The so-called midnight dumpers went to jail, leaving state officials to decide where to place the toxic sludge; PCBs are known to cause birth defects, liver and skin disorders, and cancer. They chose Warren County. In 1982, after several years of organizing, the county made national news when five hundred residents and environmental and civil rights activists were arrested in an effort to stop construction of the Warren County landfill, which was slated to contain sixty thousand tons of contaminated soil. Men, women, and children, both Black and white, held signs that read, “NO PCBs,” “We Care About Our Future,” and “Dump Hunt in the Dump,” referring to North Carolina’s then governor, Jim Hunt. A line of Black men, arms behind their heads, lay in the street, blocking dump trucks full of toxic soil, an image that remains an iconic symbol of civil rights activism. A group of mostly women and children, arms locked, clung to each other while being wrenched apart and dragged into buses by state troopers and national guard officers who had been summoned to break up the rallies. The evening news featured dramatic video of prominent Black leaders, watched by highway patrolmen, marching arm in arm with the local organizers as they sang the protest song “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.”
Though the rallies, marching, arrests, and media attention weren’t enough to prevent the landfill from moving forward, they did galvanize a growing environmental justice movement. The following year, the U.S. General Accounting Office examined the link between hazardous waste landfill placement and communities of color. The research found that Blacks made up a majority in three of the four communities with hazardous waste landfills in EPA Region 4, comprising eight southern states. Damning data continued to pile up. In 1987, the United Church of Christ (UCC) Commission for Racial Justice issued a landmark report noting that three out of five Black and Hispanic Americans, or twenty-three million people, resided in communities that housed uncontrolled toxic waste sites, areas where an accumulation of hazardous substances creates a threat to the health and safety of individuals or the environment or both. The study, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, was the first to examine race, class, and the environment on a national level. It also noted that although socioeconomic status played an important role in the location of hazardous waste sites, race was the most significant factor among the variables analyzed. In 2007, the UCC revisited the research with Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, 1987–2007, an equally data-driven report with Bullard as a principal author, which found that racial disparities in the location of toxic waste facilities were “greater than previously reported.” People of color constituted the majority of the population in communities within 1.8 miles of a polluting facility, and again, race—not income or property values—was the most potent predictor. In time for Black History Month in 2020, the UCC released yet another report, “Breath to the People”: Sacred Air and Toxic Pollution, this time partnering with a nonprofit group called the Environmental Integrity Project. This new research reinforced what the group first uncovered three decades earlier: that people of color and the poor are more likely to live within one mile of the hundred most toxic areas of America. The authors of this report noted that more than 112,500 children under age five live within three miles of the nation’s one hundred super-polluting facilities and more than 11,500 live within a mile, calling the problem “a moral crisis.”
Just after the national spotlight shone on Warren County, and the UCC released its initial report, the federal government was shamed into action. Early in 1990, the Congressional Black Caucus met with EPA officials to discuss the poisoning of communities of color and why the government agency was not addressing the needs of its constituents. In 1992, the EPA created the Office of Environmental Justice in order to focus on issues of environmental inequality. The new office hired Mustafa Ali, a young Black University of West Virginia graduate, to serve as an environmental specialist. Born and raised in West Virginia, in the heart of coal country, Ali had interned at the EPA through a program designed to recruit people of color into environmental careers. Once the job offer came, Ali, then twenty-two, decided to skip a PhD program in Atlanta, cut his signature hair, which had grown in long waves that grazed the middle of his back, and work for the federal government. In 1994, the newly elected president, Bill Clinton, signed into law a bill to address adverse health and environmental conditions in minority and low-income populations. The government also established a multimillion-dollar grants program to support grassroots organizations working on environmental justice issues.
The changes at the EPA dovetailed neatly with the environmental justice movement happening on the ground. Ali had a foot in both worlds. At the time, there were still people in senior positions in the Environmental Protection Agency and other places who believed that the impacts on these communities weren’t real and that local residents had to be imagining or exaggerating the pollution and its effects. Over the next two decades and under four presidents, Ali would climb the ranks until, in 2008, he was named director of the Office of Environmental Justice and special adviser to the EPA administrator on environmental justice issues. Though during his tenure the EPA was criticized for not doing enough to combat environmental issues in communities of color and poor communities and the Flint water catastrophe also unfolded during his term, Ali and his colleagues assisted fifteen hundred communities with small grants to address local environmental issues.
Then, in 2017, Donald Trump appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. Before he could decorate his D.C. office, Pruitt, a climate change denier and friend of the fossil fuel industry who as Oklahoma’s attorney general sued the EPA multiple times, proposed to gut the agency’s budget from $8 to $6 billion and reduce the agency’s staff of fifteen thousand by 20 percent. The proposal also called for dismantling the Office of Environmental Justice and eliminating the small grants program, and Ali soon noticed that the new cast of EPA administrators had begun to ice him out of meetings. In March 2017, after calling his parents, talking to his mentors, and praying, Ali made the gut-wrenching decision to resign from the EPA. On March 8, 2017, he turned in his resignation, just short of twenty-five years at the agency, which meant he would not qualify for his full pension. But he didn’t go out quietly. His three-page, single-spaced resignation letter to Pruitt detailed the agency’s environmental justice successes and pleaded with eloquence and urgency but not bitterness that the EPA not turn its back on marginalized communities. “Administrator Pruitt, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring people together,” he wrote, “to ensure that all communities have safe places to live, learn, work, play and pray and to ensure that our most vulnerable communities, who have been struggling for clean air to breathe and clean water to drink becomes a reality for them and their children.” The letter went viral and has reportedly been viewed more than one million times. Before his last day on the job, Ali says he tried to meet with Pruitt, to look his boss in the eye and share his viewpoint respectfully, but the EPA administrator refused. Ali went on to become vice president for environmental justice, climate, and community revitalization at the National Wildlife Federation, and his EPA position was never filled. A year and a half later, in July 2018, Scott Pruitt resigned in the face of a dozen ethics investigations, including lavish spending for foreign travel and purchasing a $43,000 secure phone booth with taxpayer funds. Before Pruitt was pushed out, an arm of his agency, the National Center for Environmental Assessment, released a report that showed that Black Americans are exposed to 1.5 times more air pollutants that contribute to issues like heart and lung disease than white people, and people living in poverty had 1.3 times the exposure of those who are not poor. Pruitt was replaced by Andrew Wheeler, also a climate change denier, who spent much of his career as a lobbyist for the coal industry.
Danielle took a tentative step into the environmental justice spotlight in 2018. The previous year, the Reverend Dr. William Barber, the civil rights activist and MacArthur genius, had resurrected the Poor People’s Campaign. Reverend Barber’s twenty-first-century version of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s war on poverty pointed to ecological destruction and climate change as pillars of the campaign. The campaign outline states, “Our policies have not fundamentally valued human life or the ecological systems in which we live. Instead, it has prioritized private, corporate and financial interests over our precious natural resources…We have a fundamental right to clean water, air and a healthy environment and public resources to monitor, penalize and reverse the polluting impacts of fossil fuel industries.”
Along with the former vice president Al Gore, Barber took a two-day swing through North Carolina, where Barber was raised and has spent much of his life, in order to see the effects of environmental racism for himself and talk directly to people living in polluted communities. At the same time the campaign was examining pollution in North Carolina’s poor communities and communities of color, Donald Trump’s EPA overhauled Obama administration regulations on coal ash, giving industry and states more authority over its disposal. The week after the North Carolina tour, the EPA would relax rules on air pollution from coal-fired plants like the Belews Creek Steam Station, even as the agency predicted the change would cause up to fourteen hundred deaths a year over the next decade.
On August 13, Reverend Barber and Gore joined a roomful of Walnut Cove residents—as well as local and national media—in the chapel of the Rising Star Baptist Church. On that day, which was her forty-fifth birthday, Danielle nervously approached the lectern, her hair falling in a thick sheet over the surgical scar on the right side of her head. It was her first time speaking in public on a national stage. “I used to live on Pine Hall Road about three miles from Belews Creek,” she began, her voice unsteady. “I thought it was such a blessing to have that house, because we could walk down our driveway through the woods and get in the water. We would swim in that water, eat the fish from the water. How did I not know it was dangerous to live near a power plant?”
As she continued the story of her symptoms and brain cancer diagnosis, she mentioned Caroline, and the importance of their friendship, and Caroline moved from another part of the room to stand by her friend’s side. “I believe that God kept me alive for a purpose,” said Danielle. “I never knew what my purpose was, but now I know my purpose is to fight this good fight. The same way that I had to believe that I was healed when they told me I was going to die is the same faith that I have to believe that we are going to win this fight.”
Later, Reverend Barber held a press conference on the boat ramp of Belews Lake’s Pine Hall Road entrance, the lake looking murky and green in the background. Leaning heavily on a cane, Reverend Barber, a mountain of a man, spoke to the crowd in his blistering baritone. He shared a story of challenging an elected official who had suggested coal ash wasn’t a real problem. “If the coal ash is not that problematic, then you go down, get some coal ash in a jar and drink some of that coal ash,” he told The Stokes News. “Don’t tell us that it’s alright. I bet you they don’t have coal ash dumping around the governor’s mansion. I bet you your legislature isn’t anywhere near a coal ash pond. I bet you don’t find it in wealthy communities.”
Danielle’s heartfelt testimony in her hometown struck a chord with Gore and his daughter Karenna, the director of Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, and she was invited to the main stage at the Climate Reality Project’s Leadership Corps Training in Atlanta in mid-March 2019. The brainchild of Al Gore, this event attracted two thousand mostly young white activists who had come to learn about environmental and climate justice. Despite the project’s efforts to reflect the communities most affected by environmental poisoning, Reverend Barber, Robert Bullard, Mustafa Ali, and a handful of others were the rare Black faces in a sea of white activists. At this point, after a third craniotomy, Danielle was using a wearable device called Optune to keep the cancer at bay. Created specifically for patients with glioblastoma, it produces low-intensity, wavelike electric fields through adhesive patches attached to the skull to slow or stop cancer cells from dividing, and at best to destroy them. The device runs continuously, powered by a portable charger. Caroline accompanied Danielle from Walnut Cove to Atlanta to help her get through airport security with the Optune and handle the bulky medical equipment.
On Thursday, March 14, at 11:00 a.m., Danielle took the stage to speak on a panel called “Stories from the Frontlines: The Climate Crisis, a Social Justice Crisis.” She joined Russel Honoré, a retired lieutenant general who coordinated the military relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina; the Reverend Paul Wilson, pastor of Union Hill and Union Grove Baptist Churches, in Union Hill, Virginia, a town founded by enslaved Black people that was in a bare-knuckle battle against Dominion Energy, which planned to locate a gas-fire compressor station that would release toxic emissions into the area; and Katherine Cummings, an activist who fought against the siting of a coal-burning power plant eight miles from her home in rural Georgia. The discussion was moderated by Gore in a cavernous room in the Georgia World Congress Center. Danielle, wearing a light-brown turban with knit flowers on the right side as well as her battery backpack, looked small and tentative, sandwiched onstage between two of the men, her hands folded in her lap. In the program she was described only as an “impacted community member.” But as she spoke, the audience quieted. In her natural self-effacing way, she said she felt “stupid” for swimming in Belews Lake and eating fish from it, and shifted attention to Caroline, who was watching her from the audience, crediting her friend with urging her to move away from the plant. Though she spoke the least onstage, dwarfed by several big personalities, including Gore’s, when Danielle described surviving past her three- to six-month expiration date, threw up her hands, smiled, and said, “But here I am,” the audience applauded. Two weeks after the conference in Atlanta, the activism of Danielle and her scrappy neighbors would pay off: on April 1, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality ordered Duke Energy to remove all coal ash from nine basins at six plants in the state, including the Belews Creek station. The good news was short-lived: almost immediately, Duke announced it would fight the order, returning to court to insist that rather than dig up the toxic ash and move it away from where people live, it would keep it in place in those locations, sealed with a cap.
Though Black people like Danielle bear the physical and emotional hardships of the environmental crisis, they tend to be left out of the membership and leadership of the environmental movement. That means that though some notable Black environmental activists have broken through—including Bullard, Ali, Beverly Wright, Catherine Flowers, Will Allen, Majora Carter, and Peggy Shepard—the face of environmental activism is more likely to be Greta Thunberg, the spunky Swedish teenager who was named Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, not someone like Danielle living environmental injustice on the ground. Protests and movement conferences like Gore’s are filled with mostly young white people, not Black people whose families have lived near polluting facilities for generations, their bodies ravaged by the effects of toxic emissions.
The homogeneity of the mainstream environmental establishment spurred the emergence of a Black-led environmental justice movement. In 1990, with the media spotlight on the protests in Warren County, North Carolina, and the evidence from the United Church of Christ study proving that African Americans suffer most from pollution, activists on the ground got little support from organizations like Greenpeace, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the National Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund. In March 1990, more than a hundred grassroots activists signed a letter accusing the ten most prominent environmental groups of racism. The letter pointed to the lack of people of color in decision-making roles and to inaction in addressing the environmental problems of oppressed communities. In the end, the activists demanded that this group of ten cease operations in communities of color within sixty days until they had increased staffing of people of color to between 35 and 40 percent. That didn’t happen. The following year, more than five hundred people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The weekend event in 1991 produced a seventeen-point platform to combat environmental racism and also helped dispel the assumption that Black and brown people are not interested in or active on environmental issues. The first point: “Environmental justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction.”
Over the years, the broader movement has nodded toward diversity. Bullard, one of the organizers of the 1991 conference, who has written or co-authored eighteen books about environmental justice and is widely known as the father of environmental justice, founded the HBCU Climate Change Consortium in 2011 with a colleague, Beverly Wright. Their goal is to diversify the leadership of the environmental movement. A 2018 survey conducted by Yale University professor Dorceta Taylor found that white people made up 85 percent of the staffs and 80 percent of the boards of 2,057 environmental nonprofits despite making up 60 percent of the population. A 2019 report released by Green 2.0, a working group that examines the intersection of the environment and race, showed that people of color make up only 4 percent of the senior staff of 40 environmental foundations.
By the fall of 2019, the order to force Duke to clean up the coal ash mess remained tied up in court, and Danielle’s health had begun to decline. When shaving her head to accommodate the Optune device, her mother found a worrisome bump on her daughter’s skull. Danielle was also losing weight and had become alarmingly thin—shrinking from a size 12 to a 4. Still, she remained positive and urged everyone around her to do the same, and she pushed her life forward. She resumed taking classes at Guilford Technical Community College in Greensboro and continued to be active in both her church and the environmental groups fighting to get Duke to do the right thing. The activism and public spotlight had ignited something in Danielle, and she decided to run for a seat on the Town of Walnut Cove Board of Commissioners.
At the end of October, a biopsy of the bump her mother had uncovered showed that the cancer had come roaring back. By then, both her mom and Caroline also noticed cognitive changes. Danielle would sometimes become disoriented, lose her purse, forget how to get home from a trip to the store, or not recognize people she had known for years, including her children. On November 5, she won the election, but rather than be excited, she seemed confused. When Caroline gave her friend a congratulatory hug, she seemed not to recognize her. A few days after her victory, Danielle was admitted to the hospital, and her condition worsened until eventually she transitioned to hospice care. She passed away just before midnight on November 30, her sister Michelle at her bedside. Danielle was forty-five years old.
On December 31, 2019, the residents of Walnut Cove finally and definitively won the fight against Duke Energy. The company reached a settlement with the state Department of Environmental Quality and agreed to remove eighty million tons of coal ash from around the state. The substance would be excavated and placed in lined storage pits to avoid leakage that further poisons the soil and water. Caroline and about forty local activists and members of Appalachian Voices gathered on Saturday, January 18, 2020, to celebrate the victory. But it felt bittersweet: they had won the battle but lost Danielle, whose memory hung over the event, whose absence stung.
Still, Danielle’s legacy and the positive spirit she insisted on linger. Her mother, Sandra, visits her daughter’s grave site on sunny days. Danielle is buried on the edge of Fairview Cemetery in London, one of three Black communities in the area. When I traveled to Stokes County in 2020, the site was designated with a simple metal marker, while the family decided on a proper gravestone. Danielle’s mom had wedged a bright bouquet of pink silk roses on top. She prefers them to real flowers, which wilt and die and make her feel sad. At home, she keeps the nameplate of the office her daughter was never able to fill: Danielle Bailey-Lash, Commissioner. She was the first Black woman elected to the board of commissioners of their town and would’ve been the first to serve. The gold nameplate sits in the front of a bookshelf, behind a collage of photographs of Danielle. On February 21, about three months after his mother’s death, Danielle’s son, Anthony, and his wife had their second child. They named her Eyden Danielle.
Caroline thinks about her friend every day, sometimes several times, and is determined to keep her memory alive. In 2018, inspired by Danielle, she created the Lilies Project, a grant-funded initiative, with the goal of making public art out of coal ash. In early 2020, Caroline unveiled the first of three labyrinths made of bricks manufactured at a facility not far from Danielle’s home that contain trace amounts of coal ash. That first installment, inlaid in a grassy yard behind Christ Episcopal Church near the center of town, will be followed by a concrete labyrinth in a public park and a third made of canvas to be used at various community groups. All of this art will be part of a guided tour of the town. Caroline chose the labyrinth, a twisty maze, with one single circuitous path to the center and out again, as a symbol of all Danielle stood for: spirituality, beauty, courage, healing, dignity, and love.