[Excerpt] In December 1992, more than 2500 people from the cities, small towns, and countryside of 14 Southern states gathered in New Orleans for a Southern Community-Labor Conference for Environmental Justice. In one sense, the conference was part of a new environmental movement, for that\u27s the issue that fired it. But in another sense, this is a new social justice movement, for it has redefined the term  environmentalism  to include all of the life conditions of a community

Braden, Anne

English

DigitalCommons@ILR

Labor Research Review 
Volume 1 | Number 20 
Building on Diversity: The New Unionism Article 7 
1993 
Environmental Justice = Social Justice: Southern Organizing 
Heralds New Movement 
Anne Braden 
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© 1993 by Labor Research Review 
Environmental Justice = Social Justice: Southern Organizing Heralds New 
Movement 
Abstract 
[Excerpt] In December 1992, more than 2500 people from the cities, small towns, and countryside of 14 
Southern states gathered in New Orleans for a Southern Community-Labor Conference for Environmental 
Justice. In one sense, the conference was part of a new environmental movement, for that's the issue that 
fired it. But in another sense, this is a new social justice movement, for it has redefined the term 
"environmentalism" to include all of the life conditions of a community. 
Keywords 
environmentalism, social justice, union organizing 
This article is available in Labor Research Review: https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/lrr/vol1/iss20/7 
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L A B O R R E S E A R C H R E V I E W # 2 0 
Environmental 
Justice = 
Social Justice 
Southern organizing heralds new movement 
*Anne Broden 
In December 1992, more than 2500 people from the cities, small 
towns, and countryside of 14 Southern states gathered in New 
Orleans for a Southern Community-Labor Conference for Environ-
mental Justice. In one sense, the conference was part of a new 
environmental movement, for that's the issue that fired it. But in 
another sense, this is a new social justice movement, for it has 
redefined the term ' 'environmentalism'' to include all of the life 
conditions of a community. 
People came to New Orleans because they're fighting for their 
lives against toxic dumping and industrial and military pollution 
which are producing wholesale poisoning of Southern communities. 
Charlotte Keys, African American leader of an organization called 
Jesus People Against Pollution in Columbia, Mississippi, laid out 
the situation: "Our people are dying. We can't take it anymore." 
Columbia is a little town near Hattiesburg which was never 
touched by the civil rights movement. Now, each Sunday almost 
1000 people gather in mass meetings, as part of a drive that is 
demanding relocation and lifetime medical care for people poisoned 
by residue from a chemical plant that exploded there in the 1970s. 
• Anne Braden is a journalist, and for the last 45 years has been active in the Southern 
civil rights, civil liberties, peace, and labor movements. She is co-chair of the Southern 
Organizing Committee for Economic Justice which sponsored the 1992 conference. 
64 Labor Research Review # 2 0 
At the New Orleans conference, people from Columbia met 
others who had come with a similar sense of urgency from other 
communities: for example, Native Americans from Cherokee, 
North Carolina; Latino farmworkers from Central Florida; African 
Americans living on top of toxic waste dumps in Gainesville, 
Georgia, and Chattanooga, Tennessee; both African Americans and 
whites fighting nuclear poisoning from the Savannah River Plant 
in South Carolina; Latinos in Texas organizing against poisoning 
by runaway shops located across the border in Mexico; white 
working class people fighting similar battles in Yellow Creek, 
Kentucky, Minden West Virginia, and other Appalachian com-
munities. At least 500 conference participants were young people, 
many middle school and high school age, who are joining in this 
fight for clean communities. 
The Southern Community-Labor Conference for Environmen-
tal Justice was a milestone in the development of a powerful move-
ment that has been building over the past decade in Southern 
communities of color, and on a parallel but until recently separate 
path, in working class white communities. The movement first 
became visible in the early 1980s when people in Warren County, 
North Carolina, lay in front of trucks to keep PCBs out of their 
community. Soon similar movements were growing in other 
African American communities, and in 1987 the Commission for 
Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ issued a landmark 
report documenting that toxic dumping is done disproportionately 
in communities of color. 
Meantime, the Gulf Coast Tenant Organization (a coalition of 
tenant groups across three Deep South states, which hosted the 
1992 conference) was evolving into an environmental organization. 
Its members realized that their lives were threatened by poisons 
pouring from chemical plants along Cancer Alley between New 
Orleans and Baton Rouge. 
The Gulf Coast Tenants, working with the SouthWest Organiz-
ing Project in New Mexico, called for a broad anti-racist approach 
to environmental issues, which they called "environmental 
justice." These two organizations mobilized grassroots partici-
pation in a historic gathering sponsored by the United Church of 
Christ in October 1991: The People of Color Environmental 
Leadership Summit. This gathering brought together 600 delegates 
from Native American, Latino, African American, and Asian 
American communities who adopted 17 Principles of Environmen-
tal Justice and issued a Call to Action against what they described 
as worldwide genocide against people of color. The event changed 
the center of gravity of environmental activity in our nation, and 
Building on Diversity 65 
signaled the emergence of a new movement that many of us 
believe offers hope to all our people. 
The 1992 conference in New Orleans was a follow-up to that 
Summit, part of a year-long networking program to communicate 
this message of hope and to help people involved in local strug-
gles break out of their isolation. In New Orleans, people saw with 
their own eyes that they were part of a huge movement. 
LABOR'S ROLE IN THE 
SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT 
Whether the New Orleans gathering as also a community-labor 
conference as it was billed, is open to question. Its sponsor, the 
Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice 
(SOC), certainly wanted it to be that. But as a co-chair of SOC, 
I cannot honestly say that we fully succeeded in that effort. 
In 1991, SOC had sponsored a year-long organizing project and 
regional conference on strengthening community-labor coalitions 
to protect the right of Southern workers to organize. That con-
ference was co-sponsored by seven international unions and Jobs 
with Justice; union organizers and members were an integral part 
of the process. The conference itself stimulated new local alliances, 
which have continued. When we began our 1992 concentration 
on environmental justice, one goal was to build on and expand 
that community-labor cooperation. 
On the surface some of this happened. Eleven labor bodies either 
endorsed the New Orleans conference or gave financial support. 
The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists also endorsed it and urged 
its constituency to attend. And certainly most of the Southerners 
at the New Orleans event were working people—or unemployed 
people who desperately want to be workers. Many of them were 
union members, back home. But I am not sure they saw this 
gathering as part of their "union" activity. And labor was not an 
integral part of the process as it had been in our 1991 work. 
This may have been partly, or largely, because we did not do 
enough to make the connections clear. It could also be because 
many union organizers in the South do not at this time see 
themselves as providing motor power for broader social justice 
movements, particularly the environmental justice movement. 
Their backs have been to the wall recently, more so than in the 
past. Just organizing workers on the job, then battling to get con-
tracts, may seem to them all they can do. 
There are exceptions, of course. For example, the United Paper-
workers International Union has a whole program encouraging 
66 Labor Research Review # 2 0 
its members to work against community poisoning. The United 
Farm Workers in Texas is deeply involved in environmental and 
other coalitions. Linda Cromer, Organizing Director of the Retail, 
Wholesale, Department Store Workers Union (RWDSU), who 
organizes Southern poultry workers (many of whom attended the 
conference), believes it is impossible to separate struggles against 
workplace poisoning and community poisoning. She points out 
that poultry plant operators are some of the worst polluters of 
both. For example, Cromer says, "We know of instances where 
company representatives have taken poisoned refuse from the 
poultry plants and dumped the material into community streams 
in the middle of the night." 
People like James Orange, who came out of the civil rights move-
ment and now works for the Industrial Union Department of the 
AFL-CIO, constantly look for ways to bring community groups 
together with labor. The Furniture Workers Division of IUE con-
sistently reaches out for community support, and gives support 
to community groups; for example, it provides printing, copying, 
office, and staff support from its Memphis office to a group fighting 
a landfill in an African American community in rural West 
Tennessee. 
Willie Rudd, Furniture Workers president who led a workshop 
at the New Orleans conference says: "We are concerned about 
the total lives of the people we represent, and hope to represent. 
Even if we can achieve healthy conditions where they work, if 
they go home to poisoned neighborhoods, that's our problem. We 
have to be involved." 
\ 
Building on Diversity 67 
Another example of a union which constantly works in coali-
tion with both environmental efforts and other social justice 
thrusts is the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees (MASE), a 
part of the Public Workers Division of the Communications 
Workers of America. Its members are also activists, for example, 
in Jesus People Against Pollution in Columbia, Miss., and in other 
such groups across the state. And they are part of a coalition that 
joins the concerns of the state workers they represent with those 
of people who depend on state services. Bill Chandler, MASE 
Organizing Director, says, "Unions win in the South to the extent 
that they are part of broad social justice movements." 
Southern union history bears out this contention. Labor's 
strongest periods have come when it played a leading role a broad 
social movement. That was true in the 1930s, when labor was in 
the forefront of general social reform and made dramatic gains 
even under the repression of that time. That changed in the late 
'40s when the Cold War and internal red-hunts weakened the labor 
movement and it retreated from social issues, including racism. 
In the '50s and '60s, although national labor leaders came down 
and marched in civil rights demonstrations, Southern labor was 
never a part of this; in fact, in those days it was common know-
ledge that the Ku Klux Klan operated openly in many local union 
offices throughout the South. And Southern labor stagnated for 
more than a decade. 
Labor began to revive as some workers in the ranks—including 
whites—recognized the power of the civil rights movement arising 
in African American communities. For example, at one point, 
white South Carolina steelworkers traveled to Atlanta to seek help 
from an African American civil rights group—and got it. Civil 
rights laws were opening jobs to Blacks in industries like Textile 
that had previously been all-white. They brought their militancy 
organizing skills, and struggles into the shops, and vital new 
organizing drives developed. 
Ever since then, it's been when and where union and commu-
nity came together that victories were won. For example, the Delta 
Pride catfish workers in Mississippi won their strike in 1991 
because of two elements: a determined workforce and a South wide 
boycott organized by community-based groups like the Southern 
Christian Leadership Conference and SOC. It seems likely that 
more people in Southern unions will soon see that their future 
is intertwined with the new environmental justice movement that 
is mushrooming all around them. 
Unlike some traditional environmental organizations, this new 
movement does not ignore the question of what happens to jobs 
\ 
68 Labor Research Review #20 
when environmental regulations are enforced. As Tony Mazzocchi 
of the Oil, Chemical, & Atomic Workers (OCAW), stressed in a 
workshop at the New Orleans conference, there is no easy answer. 
Building an ecologically sound economy will involve a major tran-
sition for our society. That means, Mazzocchi said, launching 
programs big and imaginative enough to meet needs of working 
people during the transition. OCAW proposes a Superfund for 
Workers, modeled on the GI Bill after World War II, to provide 
income and educational benefits to workers while they learn new 
skills and professions. Many community people at the conference 
had not heard this idea before, but as working people building 
a broad social justice movement, they responded and are incor-
porating the Superfund proposal into their organizing agendas. 
This energy from the grassroots provides the motor power that 
can bring labor proposals like the Superfund to greater national 
attention. 
CROSSING THE COLOR LINE 
Another thing union activists can get from this movement is 
some clues to organizing across the color line. That remains a 
formidable challenge in the environmental justice movement also. 
But right now this may be the most racially-diverse movement 
in the country. 
The New Orleans conference was about 70 percent people of 
color and 30 percent white. This movement is based most strongly 
in communities of color, but it is very open to white participa-
tion. The question of people-of-color leadership still causes some 
problems for many whites, especially when it's discussed in 
theory. For example, in New Orleans, some middle class white 
environmentalists were still asking how they can get people of 
color involved in "their" organizations rather than how they can 
link up with movements led by people of color. 
Working class whites have shown more receptivity to this kind 
of coalition-building. For example, Jim Branson, former miner and 
union organizer, now a community organizer in Appalachia, notes 
that working class whites have long had problems similar to those 
of people of color in trying to work in coalitions with middle class 
whites. They tend to get left out when the chips are down. 
When SOC first began bringing Deep South African Americans 
together with working class whites in Appalachia, there were 
severe tensions. When African Americans said their communities 
are the ones most targeted for poisoning, some people thought 
they were saying "toxics don't kill white people." The whites knew 
\ 
Building on Diversity 69 
that was not so, because their loved ones were dying too. But 
nobody was saying that; it was a communications problem. And 
communication problems often get resolved best as people act 
together. 
That began to happen in the Southeast in September 1992 as 
SOC brought 100 people together from communities of color and 
white working class areas at an EPA-sponsored conference in 
Atlanta which had been designed to quiet down the new move-
ment. People sat in a circle, Native American style, and shared 
their stories. They then proceeded to take over the conference, 
presented 42 demands for immediate clean-up in their commu-
nities, and formed a task force which has continued to work 
together and negotiate with EPA. That task force includes both 
people of color and whites, with people of color clearly in the 
leadership and everyone participating. No one has yet questioned 
the leadership. The overriding thing is that the coalition is going 
somewhere and is strengthening people who previously fought 
losing battles alone. 
One thing is clear. The new environmental justice movement 
will grow—and, in the opinion of many observers, it will shake 
the country even more profoundly than did the civil rights move-
ment of the '50s and '60s. But it will be stronger and will bring 
change more quickly if the labor movement and other important 
allies join now, in the early stages of the struggle. • 
"Understanding the Conflict between Jobs and the Environment: 
The Proposal for a Superfund," by the Oi l , Chemical, and Atomic 
Workers, P.O. Box 281200, Lakewood, CO 80228. 
"Southern Manifesto for Environmental and Economic Justice," is 
the document produced from the December 1992 conference, 
available from SOC at PO Box 10518, Atlanta, GA 30310 


Environmental Justice = Social Justice: Southern Organizing Heralds New Movement

[Excerpt] In December 1992, more than 2500 people from the cities, small towns, and countryside of 14 Southern states gathered in New Orleans for a Southern Community-Labor Conference for Environmental Justice. In one sense, the conference was part of a new environmental movement, for that's the issue that fired it. But in another sense, this is a new social justice movement, for it has redefined the term "environmentalism" to include all of the life conditions of a community.Issue_20____Article_10.pdf: 938 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

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