The value of following your curiosity may not be evident in the present but over the course of your life you might see how it shaped you into someone that you had not planned let alone imagined. Robert D. Bullard is the son of Nehemiah and Myrtle Brundidge Bullard, the fourth of five children born in Elba, Alabama in 1946.
Dr. Bullard is the father of the environmental justice movement but he did not set out to become that, through a series of events he was led to his calling. In 1979 his wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard brought the first ever case of environmental discrimination to the court. The lawsuit, Bean vs. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc charged discrimination in the placement of a landfill facility in a predominately Black neighborhood in Houston, TX. Dr. Bullard, then a sociology professor, was an expert witness in the case. He became curious about waste facilities and Black communities, so his students conducted a study.
In that study he found the overwhelming majority of waste management plants were in fact, in Black neighborhoods. Dr. Bullard went on to expand his study to communities throughout the South. In 1990 he wrote his first book “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality” in which he details how waste management facilities end up in Black communities exposing them to health hazards that lead to serious, long term health issues. He went to organize people of color groups from around the country for the first ever gathering of environmental activists of color in 1991. Since then he has written numerous books, helped to create an office of Environmental Justice within the EPA, given expert testimony in hundreds of cases but most importantly Dr. Bullard continues traveling around the country supporting hundreds of People of Color (POC) grassroots environmental justice groups.
https://drroberbullard.com
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Father of Environmental Justice
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