From friend to foe and back again: industry and environmental action in the urban south.

Publication: Urban Anthropology & Studies of Cultural Systems & World Economic Development

Publication Date: 22-MAR-05

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2005 The Institute Inc.

In 1946, Peter Saulsberry paid $50 for a 50' x 100' plot of land just outside downtown Augusta. (1) His plot lay smack in the middle of a large triangular field of swampland that stretched between two railroad tracks and the Merry Brothers Brickyard. In the midst of another field, the Piedmont Wood Preserving Company (which became Southern Wood Piedmont in 1970) processed telephone poles. Although swampy, the low price of the land, its proximity to downtown Augusta, and the fact that it had been set aside as a place for African Americans, lured Saulsberry and several other families from their hometown of Waynesboro, Georgia. Augusta was expanding rapidly in the years following World War II, and factory and service jobs were plentiful in the area (Cashin 1980). Men could walk to work at Merry Brothers, Babcock and Wilcox ceramics factory, Piedmont Wood, or a new Georgia Power plant. Women could take the bus a few miles into Augusta's "Hill" section to work as domestics. Those who (like Saulsberry) had saved enough money from military service and/or farming could actually afford to buy property. Moving to Augusta thus offered rural African American families a double wage, a chance for economic mobility, and a chance to build equity. Within 10 years, the field of swampland now known as Hyde Park had transformed into a nascent neighborhood, which would eventually house approximately 200 families.

At the same time, however, life was not easy for Hyde Park residents. While they may have found employment, most still struggled to make ends meet amid the daily injustices of the Jim Crow era. Until 1970, residents did not receive city water, and used outdoor pumps connected to underground wells. In addition, they had no gas or sewer lines, paved roads or street lights. Living in a "swamp" also meant that flooding was a major problem. In fact, residents loved to recall how certain families with canoes would paddle from house to house, ensuring that all the kids in the neighborhood made it to school. What residents did not know was that the flood water carried toxic chemicals, as did the water they pumped in their backyard wells and the wood chips that they burned in their stoves.

Like too many communities across the United States, in the late 20th century Hyde Park residents discovered that the hands that had been feeding them had also been poisoning them. Much has been written about contaminated communities and the burgeoning U.S. environmental justice movement. Such literature describes and analyzes the plights of white, working class communities as well as African American, Hispanic American, and multi-ethnic neighborhoods, as well as Native American peoples. These studies provide extremely useful accounts of how communities have fought back against the industries that have polluted them, how they cope with living in toxic conditions and how they have formed networks with other communities in the course of fighting for their own environmental justice. (2)

However, much of this literature provides short-term analyses of environmental justice cases. As a result, the attitudes of community members and local residents toward their industrial neighbors are depicted as a unitary and uniform shift. In other words, the story generally goes: industry provides jobs for community; industry pollutes community; community feels betrayed and fights back against industry. Here, I argue that the nature of residents' relationships to industry cannot be summarily described by such familiar narratives. Rather, a long-term look at an environmental justice community reveals that residents had complicated ideas about the role of industry in their lives. As time went on, those ideas were perpetually in flux, and they were contested within the neighborhood.

Similarly, in describing the role of state institutions in environmental justice struggles, social science literature has tended either to foreground it, or subordinate it to the role of industry. For example, sociologist David Pellow argues for the primacy of corporations, which often "create the very frameworks (that is, the parameters) within which state policy can be made" (Pellow 2001: 51). On the other hand, Foley and Yambert find that the state "structures all the rest, providing the arena and the rules of the game within which more local political struggles can be carried out" (1989: 39). In contrast, this paper uses a longitudinal, ethnographic analysis to contend that both industrial and state institutions play shifting and ambiguous roles. Communities then react to these roles strategically, sometimes even reshaping them. Environmental justice struggles must thus be considered in the context of a host of interlocking systems of injustices and discrimination, as well as shifting political and economic contexts.

Data for this paper were collected during 14 months of concentrated fieldwork in Augusta, Georgia, and six shorter return visits. The elements of this fieldwork were fourfold. First, to facilitate participant observation, I volunteered as a full-time staff member for Hyde and Aragon Park Improvement Committee (HAPIC). In addition to helping out with daily tasks (such as after-school tutoring, adult computer training classes, making flyers, grant-writing and organizing community cleanup days), I attended organizational meetings including large gatherings that invited the entire community and small strategy sessions among group leaders. I also attended rallies, City Council hearings, and public forums, in most cases, I recorded my observations by taking notes, although a few meetings were tape recorded with permission of all attendees present.

Second, I conducted approximately 18 semidirected, open-ended interviews with environmental justice activists at their homes, offices, or the Hyde Park community center. Each interview averaged 45 to 90 minutes in length, and I spoke to many interviewees two to three times. To capture the attitudes and understandings of a variety of activists, I interviewed HAPIC leaders as well as regular participants who attended meetings, but did not take leadership roles. With the permission of informants, I tape recorded all interviews and later transcribed them. I have changed the names of people who asked that I do so. In most cases, however, the people quoted here have requested that their names remain unchanged. These people have reviewed the parts of the paper that pertain to them, and they have given consent for its publication. (3)

Third, some of the material presented emerges from secondary research. This research included collecting census data, newspaper articles, environmental health studies, and soil reports. Finally, I assisted Augusta State University (ASU)'s sociology department with the creation and execution of a quantitative survey of Hyde Park. ASU students went door-to-door and completed 176 questionnaires, or between 61.5% and 70.4% of Hyde Park's adult population (Sociology Research Methods Students et al. 1998). The survey consisted of 41 questions designed to measure residents' attitudes and opinions about neighborhood concerns and behaviors as well as environmental issues and the HAPIC organization.

Using the findings garnered from this research, I explore the complex political economy involved in instances of community contamination. Importantly, I argue that Hyde Park residents' narratives signify the ways in which their relations to, and understandings of, local industry and related political institutions shifted over time. I first show how community members' perceptions initially moved from viewing industry as a provider to viewing it as an enemy, and how that change occurred against a culturally specific backdrop. Next, I trace some of the ways in which strategies for addressing industrial pollution shifted over the years in response to the unfolding of specific, localized events, as well as larger political and social changes. I then discuss the varying role of governmental institutions in mediating community/industry conflicts. I conclude by discussing more recent events in Hyde Park (circa 2000-2004) that reflect cleavages in neighborhood solidarity. These cleavages, I argue, can be attributed to changing economic and political structures, both locally and nationally.

In Between the Tracks: Locating Hyde Park

In the 1940s and 1950s, moving to a neighborhood like Hyde Park was attractive for several reasons. Perhaps the most important of those was the fact that, for $50, the African American farm laborers of Waynesboro and other nearby rural areas could finally acquire their own piece of land. As long-time resident Charles Utley explained:

A lot of families moved in that were [from] the rural areas. Because in the rural areas, you couldn't own the land. You were crop sharers [sic]. And that was the reason my family moved here because otherwise they would never have the opportunity to purchase the land. They had to sharecrop it. And they had saved up money to move to this area.

In addition, Hyde Park was close to a number of industries. By the end of the 1940s, Babcock and Wilcox, a thermal ceramics factory on the neighborhood's edge, was Augusta's fifth largest employer (Chamber of Commerce 1947). Merry Brothers Brickyard, on its opposite edge, was also booming and hired a good number of Hyde Park men. In the mid-1950s, approximately 100 homes in Hyde Park (all of which were black-owned) filled three streets, and employment was at nearly 100%. Residents built three or four churches and opened several businesses. Most of these ran at night and on the weekends, after their proprietors finished long days of factory work.

Work was hard and money was tight, but the community was even tighter. Neighbors found ways to pool their resources, sharing cars, televisions, and garden produce. Charles Utley remembered:

We had no cars. Very few cars in this area. You had a car, you cherished it. We had a community television. I would go to your house if I wanted to watch television because I didn't have one. There were maybe two televisions on Walnut Street for the whole street. And we would always watch television on Sundays. And the primary show would be the Ed Sullivan show. So we would all get together.

Utley's narrative describes a close-knit community, where neighbors shared what they had with one another. Mary Utley (Charles' mother) played a major role in maintaining such neighborhood unity. She organized transportation to take seniors to doctor's appointments, formed programs for local children, and planned various neighborhood events. Robert Striggles, who also grew up in the neighborhood in the 1950s, painted a similar portrait of an exceptionally close community. Striggles said:

So it really wasn't a bad area to live in up until about 20 years ago.... Before that everyone in this area owned their own home.... Summertime, the activities that we had out here, it was nothing but a ball field. Where the recreation center is there? Right in that area. Before then,...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.