“Environmental justice asks us to be collaborative. It asks us to set aside ego and to think of new ways to involve each other,” Lilley said.
At a recent webinar reviewing recent environmental justice victories around the Chesapeake Bay watershed, McEachin agreed.
“If we can make EJ personal, get to know folks who live in those [front line] communities, it will give a better appreciation for why we fight the fight.”
So let’s circle back to Theresa Landrum, the cancer survivor and EJ advocate in the notorious 48217.
Loyal to her family and her community, she lives on the same block where she grew up. She’s happy to tell you about her childhood and the neighborhood of her youth.
Her dad grew up as an orphaned sharecropper in Tennessee, and her mom was from Tennessee, too. Both were part of the Great Migration, as Black Americans moved north to find more opportunity and perhaps less prejudice. Of course, there was redlining – the practice of excluding people of color from buying homes in desirable areas – happening in the north. But in Ecorse, a community that had been annexed into Detroit in the 1920s but maintained its own identity, Blacks were allowed to buy property after World War II.
Landrum, the youngest in a family of five children, was born in one of the first Black-owned hospitals anywhere, staffed by all African American doctors.
“We had Black business owners, a Black bakery, Black florist, Black cleaners, a Black police officer, a Black principal…” and – not too far away – one of the first African American-owned skating rinks in the country.
“It was an African American mecca down here.”
She described the street where she grew up – it’s the street where she still lives. Then as now it features brick homes on tidy lots.
Back then, Landrum said, “The trees were so big and full and leafy that they connected over the street, and every backyard had a garden and multiple fruit trees. There was a huge strawberry patch at the corner house, and in back of us the Dewey family grew prize-winning Golden Delicious apples that they presented at the fair every year.”
To get into Detroit proper, her family would go a block over to Electric Street and ride the trolley. She remembered they had to cross three bridges before they got into downtown.
But things began changing significantly when she was still a little girl. In her classroom one day, she heard that some of her friends were going to be leaving because their homes had been taken by eminent domain – Interstate 75 was going to be built right through the neighborhood.
“I went into the cloakroom and cried,” Landrum said.
When she was young, there had been a woodland just a couple of blocks away, home to raccoons, rabbits, possums and turtles. Those disappeared forever with freeway construction, and once the land was cleared, for the first time they could see an oil refinery across the way that was adding storage tank after storage tank after storage tank. Industry was booming – there were steel mills and car manufacturers and salt mining companies and other petrochemical plants. There were smokestacks belching smoke, back in the days before emissions were regulated. And there were pipes discharging untreated wastewater into the river.