Doctor Beverly Wright has been working in environmental justice
since before it had a name. In fact, she was so much at the
forefront of this movement that when she started, a lot of the
terms we now use for climate environmental work didn't exist
yet. We figured out how to educate
communities, how to connect them with the government, how to not
just collect data, but allow communities to learn how to
collect their own data. With citizen science, they have
names. All this that I did, they now
have names for it. Now they call it citizen
science. That's what we were doing.
They call it community based participatory research.
We started that in the 90s. Doctor Wright, or Doctor Bev, as
her students call her, grew up in New Orleans in a family with
deep roots in the area. I can trace my history back 7
generations to this town. Earlier in her career as a
professor of sociology, Dr. Wright rooted for students field
work in the New Orleans area, too.
And while New Orleans is known for things like Mardi Gras and
Creole cooking, there are other traditions of the Gulf Coast
region, like a long history of building petrochemical plants in
the backyards of black neighborhoods.
Yes. Cancer Alley is what we called
it. When Doctor Wright learned that
80% of African Americans in the New Orleans region lived within
3 miles of a toxic facility, she says that is when she went from
thinking of herself as a scholar to understanding her role as an
advocate scholar. After that I was a warrior for
this. Welcome to Path Breakers, a show
about what it takes to cut through the noise and red tape
and all of the other obstacles to progress.
I'm Tracy Pearson and I work on the communications team at the
Kresge Foundation. And I'm Jamie Bennett.
I work at the intersection of arts, culture, and equitable
community development. On each episode of this podcast,
we talk with a different path breaker, someone who's forging
new ways forward in their own community.
Today we have the joy of welcoming Dr. Beverly Wright,
founder and director of the Deep South Center for Environmental
Justice. We're going to talk to her about
her journey as an environmental justice pioneer, get some
information about the eye opening work she and her
students have produced to help get the movement off the ground,
and about the next generation of climate workers and justice
leaders at the Deep Southcenter who will pick up her baton.
Hello, Doctor Wright, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, hello to you, and thank you for inviting me.
We're going to talk how about a few things today, New Orleans,
your work in the environment sector, but also as a scholar
and advocate. And I think a lot of people when
they hear New Orleans, they think very festive and Mardi
Gras and partying and but there's also Hurricane Katrina
and it being the 20 year, I don't like the word anniversary.
Neither do I. But that happened 20 years ago.
It's not an anniversary, no, but it is a moment where we need to
hold space for what transpired. Yeah.
And so I want to talk to you about that from a climate
perspective and with you working in the South and the Gulf Coast
region, what's the feeling right now?
Well, I suspect that the feeling runs along a spectrum of, you
know, yes, we've survived to we're not where we should be and
feelings that New Orleans will never be the same for those of
us who live here. The changes that have been
occurring with the loss of population, in particular real
loss of our black middle class, who are mostly in the public
school system that has been completely taken over by what I
would call a failing charter school system.
The racial composition of our schools now are mostly white
teachers with all black students.
I think that the black population has lost much ground
and we've been pushed out. I think that our culture that is
the the heartbeat of this city is being stolen in a way that is
not as authentic as it used to be.
So I don't have any reason to celebrate.
The only celebration would be that my personal family, to some
extent all survived except my uncle who never made it back
home. Most of us were able to restore
our homes and my personal family.
But that is not true for so many people in the city of New
Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward, which has hit the hardest, but
it has it is so different from what it used to be now with the
kind of mixed income that they called putting out here in.
So a lot of poor people in a suburb with no real
transportation, no jobs out here, no sidewalks or walking
and you know, grocery stores miles apart, people having
across the Interstate by foot, chick running in between cars.
So it's really a disaster that has just exacerbated because of
what I call disaster capitalism that has really took root in my
city and gentrification at warp speed of all of the historic
neighborhoods. And so all of our hard gains,
which were really difficult in US truly racist and segregated
city to get, we're losing that. So for all the rave about the
city of New Orleans, how successful we were with coming
back, none of that was ever true for black people.
And the black population is poorer than what it was before
Katrina. We have a loss of transitional
wealth, black wealth in this city just by losing your house,
which is probably the, the biggest portion of our wealth.
If a, if a storm comes and it wipes out, you know, your house,
then where are you, especially if you can't rebuild.
And then we were fighting the discriminatory, discriminatory
process called the Road home program, which had a formula
that that was really crazy. It said that we will pay you one
of two things and we'll pay you the lowest value.
So they looked at the value of your house and the cost to
rebuild your house. They would take whichever 1 was
the low was the lowest value. So my house in a black
neighborhood maybe was worth 250.
The same house in a white neighborhood is worth 400,000.
The cost to rebuild is 380, but all I could get was 250.
So we went to court over that. And one, that this is a
discriminatory screening because you pick the lowest value.
So it means most of us did not have enough money to rebuild our
houses. So I don't feel like celebrating
at all. In fact, I wish I could leave
the city. But there's so many people who
want to talk, you know, they want to have these conversations
about all of this, not recognizing how painful this is
for most of us. You know, the celebration that
makes no sense. Memorial would be a better
memorial were to use then celebration for me so.
Yeah, Doctor, right. You talk a lot about your work
as climate justice. And when I think of climate
justice, I tend to think of the environmental realities, the
capitalist, the disaster capitalism.
You talk about the cultural realities.
Will you just for for listeners who sort of haven't talked in
that frame of climate justice, would you just help introduce us
to why you frame your work that way?
So I would say that I frame my work is environmental and
climate justice because I cannot separate environmental justice
from climate justice. In fact, the first people to
recognize the intersection of those two were people who lived
in toxic environments, fence lined with a polluting
facilities. And then as they began to learn
more about climate, they realized that the the facilities
that were making them sick, poisoning them, lowering their
property value, making it work nothing to anybody that was
living and breathing. So I we have so many graveyards
surrounding these facilities. They began to make they made the
connection between that and the change in the climate which they
were looking at first of all with, you know, small animals
disappearing, screens rusting and falling off their windows.
In three months, spotted cars. You could you knew they lived up
river because one side of their car would have these strange
spots where the paint had been eaten out.
And now they could also, you know, directly relate that to
the change in the climate, plants in their gardens no
longer growing and their general health.
Add to that. And this is what is so ironic.
Add to that COVID, the COVID virus that has this unusual
relationship with PM 2.5, that is what is released from
petrochemical facilities. It actually attaches itself to
these small molecules and when we breathe it in, it goes deeper
into our lungs. So our death rate faster, quick,
faster than most people and we die more quickly.
So it's a more virulent disease for us because we live near
toxic facilities than it is for those who don't.
So it's it's very difficult to separate these environmental
justice and climate justice. People of color are in double
double jeopardy of for both of them.
So they're in a double jeopardy situation from climate and
environmental justice. And the polluting industries are
the ones that are fueling, you know, carbon greenhouse gases,
which means that we are being attacked from two places.
So the the negative impact of what's going on from
environmental exposure is climate change and the impacts
doubly impact communities who live in these very highly
polluted areas. So climate justice was an
automatic for us when we made the connection.
In fact we did in as early as 2000 with a huge conference in
The Hague. It was called the Other Climates
Summit. And at that time we would we, I
have a picture and I love to take it out of a panel that we
had on climate justice that far back before anybody was making
the connections between the impacts on poor communities
living in these polluted areas and the climate.
Doctor Wright is this Is climate and environmental justice
something you saw yourself working in when you were a young
girl in New Orleans? Absolutely not.
How did you, how did you end up in this field?
I'm just so curious how you ended up in in such important
and dynamic and complex and layered work.
It was a strange road to where I am, and I didn't choose it.
It sort of fell on me, to be honest with you.
I I grew up in New Orleans never ever thinking that the
facilities were bad. They were always sold to us as
jobs and progress. Never, you know, death and
sickness and death. And I didn't realize that from
from my experiences in Louisiana.
I began to look in this direction when I was in Graduate
School. And my graduate professor,
Doctor Addie Levine, was also married to to her husband,
Maurie Levine, who was a psychologist working with people
who were being exposed to, you know, toxic facilities with
their children dying of leukemia.
So her husband was where it was called Love Canal.
It was the first in Niagara Falls.
It was the first toxic facility poisoning of, of a community.
So it's a facility poisoning of a whole community.
And I was a graduate student and she just kind of introduced me
to that. And I was a part.
I was like, oh, my God, The guys who worked there, their skin
would turn to a yellowish color from the chemicals that were
there. That's how you knew that you
know, it was there. It might that somehow you knew
where they worked and where they lived.
But no black people lived or worked in Love Canal.
Later, years later, I found out there was a huge housing project
across the street, but they were never brought into the fight and
they were also sick and dying, not from working in the plant
because they didn't have those jobs.
They wouldn't be in the projects if they had had those jobs, but
they were exposed. That is came maybe 14 years
later, I found out about the black people, but I found out
about what was going on in my own community first.
So after maybe 10 years of working at the University of New
Orleans with my major professor coming down and she would bring
her little slide projector and I'd introduce my class, the Love
Canal. I met Doctor Robert Bullard at a
Southern Sociological Association meeting, just
happened to meet him there. And he really, he said he found
out that I was from Louisiana. And he said, you know what, I
think we should work together on something.
I'm like, what? By then I was working on teen
pregnancy and a bunch of other things he said.
And he told me about what was going on in Houston, TX with his
wife Linda, who was a lawyer. And she was fighting the the
sighting of a landfills in a middle class black community and
couldn't understand why they picked this one black community
as big as Texas is. And the community that lived
there said they felt like they were being discriminated
against, you know, with them putting this landfill behind
their property, which would destroy their dream homes.
And so she asked him to do this. Can you help me find out where
all the other landfills are? Where are they?
And he did with his, with his class at Texas Southern
University was an assignment for them.
And it wasn't like it is now. I mean, you have to go down in
basements and courthouses and pull up old maps and stuff
'cause this was in the 70s. And his class did that project
and produced the results that showed that, you know, there
were maybe four other large landfills, all of them in three
of them in black communities and one was in you can guess what
other community it was Latino. So three of them were in black
communities, one in a Latino community, when in fact the
black population was only about 25%.
So he said to me, you know, this is happening in Texas.
It could be how happening in other places.
And since I lived in Louisiana, he said, why don't we work
together to see if we can identify all of these landfills?
And sure enough, he got a grant for about $20,000.
I think it was from a foundation whose name I can't remember
right now to do this study. And out of that came dumping in
Dixie, which is now like the textbook in environmental
justice in AT client and universes across the country.
And so from there I started working in Louisiana directly
with communities and there were a number of specific incidences
that made me change my whole career path from working with
teenage pregnancy. I was a social psychologist, but
I was also looking at Not in my backyard and how people deal
with finding out that they're living in a toxic environment.
Back then, it was all new, and most of the research was on
nuclear plants, you know, like people living around nuclear
facilities. That's where all the work was.
They weren't even dealing with petrochemical facilities because
I think at one time, we all thought it was pretty safe.
Nobody ever warned us about the toxins that came out of them.
We knew they were stinky, but we never dreamed that they were
poisonous, you know, just at the community level.
And Louisiana was a hot spot. I mean, they talk a lot about
Warrington, North Carolina, but what went on in Louisiana,
that's where the big fight was because of the petrochemical
industry and 85 mile stretch of land with 136 petrochemicals and
six refineries. Cancer Alley?
Yep. Yes.
So I mean you still can't find any place this the size that we
of the corridor with that many plants, not even in Texas.
Texas is a much bigger place than Louisiana is.
And we have almost only produces almost as much oil and gas as
Texas and more natural gas from here.
But we're a poor state, whereas Texas is not poor, but we are
very poor. And you can blame it on
corruption and stupidity. That's what I call it.
It's a combination of the two that has, you know, gotten us to
this place where this beautiful state that's known for its many
waterways and fishing and hunting and stuff is being
completely destroyed by pollution from the oil and gas
industry. But I fell into this by I got a
letter from the Office of Civil Rights, US Office of Civil
Rights, but it was a Louisiana branch to testify at a civil
rights hearing because communities were saying that
they were being poisoned by these facilities.
So I was like, OK, And they had found out about us just by
writing articles that bullet and I had been writing and going to
different conferences around the country, sort of listening to
people. So I got this letter to show up
there to testify about what was going on in Louisiana.
And I decided that before I did that, I was going to do as a
sociologist who's some participant observation because
I got my little MIT, my little minivan with a couple of my
students from Xavier, and we drove up and down the River
Road. And I was appalled.
It's one thing to read about supper.
I was appalled at what I saw and that fence line to all of these
facilities. I mean, like 6 feet away was the
fence line from Shell Motiva and all these plants.
I mean, I just had never seen anything like it.
And then you saw graveyards. It was just awful in the smells
and they were just terrible. And I got out of my van one time
with the kids to talk to a community person because I
didn't understand what I was seeing.
Like I would see Black communities, it would be Black
people living there, and then I'd see.
Just cement platforms. What do you call it That what
the house sits on? Just where?
A slab, A slab. I would see slab foundations,
like not far away, a whole huge section of just slab.
So I asked the black guy, old, older black man.
I said, well what's going on here?
I said what was over here? He said, oh, that's where the
white folks used to live. He said a boss came down about 8
years ago and said he was going to move us out and he never came
back. So I did the first GIS map
showing the spatial distribution of toxic facilities by race and
income and it basically showed that 80% of African Americans
living in the different parishes live within 3 miles of a toxic
facility versus their counterpoint who did not.
So it was this strange mapping of facility sightings that
showed black people being left behind while white people were
being moved to safety. And it showed the lack of
political clout that black people had, that it was easy for
politicians to just ignore them. And even to this day, we're
still fighting that right now. We're still fighting the same
thing with politicians being bought out by these facilities
and allowing our people to get sick and die.
So I was so by the when that when that happened, you know,
that was kind of it. One community in Geisma,
Louisiana. And in that community back back
then, we brought eat the EPA administrator, Carol Browner,
for a visit. And when we drove through the
communities, there were little white crosses on the lawns and
some of them had like 8, 3-4. And I asked them what did that
represent? They said it represent the
number of people in their household who had died of
cancer. And they believe that it was
tied to them living so close to these facilities.
I was done. I kind of jumped in it.
And all of our work really began after that early exposure.
And you know, while I'm thinking this is just happening in
Louisiana and I knew a little bit about Texas, I never
expected it to cross the whole United States of America.
And Doctor Wright, you, you've been a scholar, you're a
researcher, you're a teacher, you're an advocate, you're a
warrior. You brought all of that work
together when you founded the Deep South Center for
Environmental Justice, which you currently lead.
Would you just what is the center?
What is the work of the center? What is this thing that you've
built? So it's this is a long story
too, because the center has evolved.
But I was a college professor and a researcher, and when I
left the University of New Orleans and then went to Wake
Forest University to teach, and then came back to New Orleans to
start the Deep Southcenter for Environmental Justice, what I
learned was that academic researchers were really not
doing research that benefited the communities where they
lived. And the research that they did
in Louisiana was mostly for the benefit of the oil and gas
industry that was supporting most of it.
And when they did research with community people on their
problems, it was for tenure. It was not set up in a way that
it was shared back with communities.
It wasn't put to use in any way to bring about policy changes.
It just went into an article for tenure.
And it was also unethical because they made promises to
communities that what that they never kept promises that they
couldn't keep just to get into the door to collect the data.
And I looked at that and I'm like, this is not who I want to
be. This is not the kind of
researcher that I would ever want to be.
I've all of them work the way that I was raised.
I was always raised to give back, and you needed to give
back to your community. So even in teaching, it was
about educating students so they could be better stewards of this
earth in their community, working to better the quality of
life for all of us. That's just who I am and what I
saw was not. So I started the center really
to because of all of the pollution.
I'm like, communities don't really know what's going on.
And they were asking questions. They were like the in fact not
asking questions. They were telling me we believe
that we're sick because of this facility.
We don't know what's coming out of those smokestacks.
We know there's flaring all night.
We can't sleep. We know they're horrible smells.
We know that our people have rare cancers, not common
cancers, but they're rare. And they couldn't understand
why. Well, you know, very, very
quickly I began to understand why.
It's because they are exposed to multiple chemicals at one time.
Not one chemical in the science was dealing with one chemical at
a time, right? You take a community being
exposed to all of this and every time they went to court, they
would lose the battle because you know, the the industry would
come in with their big time lawyers and say, wow, you know,
what we're releasing is not a neurotoxin.
You know, it's, it's, it doesn't cause brain cancer.
And this and that and the other while there, that one chemical
did not, but the, the research did not exist.
Hear me? The research did not exist when
we first started to show the synergistic or combination
effects of these chemicals. We've come a long ways.
When you hear cumulative impact, people pushing for cumulative
impact and you see the fierce pushback from industry, it's
because they know that this would absolutely prove that they
are poisoning and not that they are the cause of sickness and
death in our communities from exposure to multiple carcinogens
at one time. So this big push against it and
every time you push it, oh, it's too complicated.
But what about this one? All of that's a smokescreen to
keep us from getting to the bottom of this.
And so I, I figured out that, well, if I'm going to be a
different kind of researcher, what should I be doing to make
this whole process of collecting data for evidence so that you
could change the quality of your life or be in control of that?
How should, how could I do this? And so when I first started out,
I was, you know, sort of in my little cubicles trying to think
of a hypothesis and pulling down all these books and reading and
stuff. And I wrote a number of research
grants. Never got any of them funded.
When I started talking directly to communities, I said, well,
what do you think the problem is?
They'd say. And they said, I said, So what
do you think we should do? And they told me.
So I went back and wrote a proposal representing what they
said. And the first year I opened the
center, I got 13 grants funded. I'd never gotten 1 funded on my
own. Now I wrote about 35, you know
what I mean? But of that 35 or so, I got 13
funded in the first year. They weren't all huge grants,
some of them were 30,020 thousand, but I did manage to
win a $250,000 grant from EPA and some of the small
foundations. And that's how the center then
started, you know, from an idea where a number of us came
together from some of the HBCUS and Uno.
And then I came up with this whole process for working with
communities and developed this model that I now call the
Communiversity model, that, by the way, I've been implementing
for the last 33 years. And it's been now been evaluated
to show that our process absolutely works.
And to be honest, it's all about democracy.
Democracy means power to the people.
How do you get the people really involved in the political arena
that that ends up putting them truly in charge of decisions
that directly impact their lives?
That's what democracy is supposed to be.
And during that time, when we started the center, we had like
16 communities that joined our Advisory Board and we just got
to work. It was all education for us.
We had workshops every week in some communities.
We introduced them to EPA, to DEQ.
We did. We, we also was like a travel
agency where we, we literally took them to DC to meet with the
different divisions within EPA, develop relationships with those
people. And what resulted from that was
that EPA started listening. And once they started listening,
then we could get some action, you know, moving forward on
policies. We started fighting permits, you
know, that were coming through, developing the data, working
with lawyers to to be able to push back against a lot of these
permits. We lost.
We won some. We lost a lot of it because the
laws don't support us. They're based on industry
standards, not human health. So if you have standards that's
supposed to be protecting communities with the standards
are industry standards and not health standards, that's how you
get cancer Alley. Well, Doctor Wright, how do we
begin to sort of cultivate the leaders we need next?
What what do we do to sort of make sure that there's a next
doctor right to pick up the relay race that that you
started? Yeah, well, I'm trying very hard
to do that now. I'd say right now the majority
of my staff are in their 30s. So one thing you do is, is
cultivate the next generation. It's not easy, you know, and it
does take years, but we have to do it.
And I believe it or not, I think that young people are ready.
I think they're just tired of us.
I'm tired of us. You know what we do at the
center without HBCU, Climate Change Consortium and our big
conference with young people. I've watched a lot of young
people who are going to be medical doctors become
environmental scientists. You know, they, they make the
change into something related to the environment for working
directly with people. And a young woman who wanted to
be a doctor, she now wants to be, she came to our conference
with all of these black kids everywhere, smart as a whip,
doing all kinds of amazing research.
And she told her mother, I want to be an environmental engineer
and I want to work with people the way that you do because with
this group, I feel so much love and people supporting one
another and that she what she wants to do.
So that's what our conference does with young people.
But for the Deep Southcenter, I'm trying very hard to make
sure that that the legacy remains and that the mission
isn't toward it because it's easy to follow the money and
lose your way. We've managed not to do that.
And I tell people my work, I'm working to close down deep
Southcenter. In other words, where we've done
enough, that is our work is no longer needed.
I don't know when that's, but that's our job to really work to
make that we are no longer needed, that we've accomplished
our goals. I don't it's certainly not going
to happen. I don't think it'll happen in my
lifetime, but I think it can happen with the next generation
if we keep working, if we keep educating.
And I tell people all the time, I've never seen a community that
had all of the information make a bad decision for their
community. When do you bite the hand that
feeds you? When it feeds you poison?
That's so right. Well, Doctor, right, We
appreciate you coming onto the podcast and sharing some of your
wisdom with us and your knowledge and of course, all of
the work that you have done over the duration of your career.
Thank you so much. Doctor Wright, thank you so much
for everything that you shared. I feel guilty asking you to do
anything more. But at the end of each episode,
we do a lightning round with our guests.
And Tracy, you know, will you, will you kick us off for that?
Very quickly, rapid fire. These are rapid fire questions.
I'm a professor. It's hard for us to answer in
one word. I'll try.
OK, what is the first book you remember reading?
You're going back all the way to elementary school.
The first one I read was something about Jane, Jane and
Jack. You're ordering a sandwich
dressed or undressed. Dressed.
Always dressed. Amen.
Yes, it's almost August, but now that we're still in July, what's
your song of the summer? Anything that says stay cool.
I know in that Louisiana humidity, yes.
Summer Breeze feel fine. That's mine growing in the magic
in my mind, that Doctor Bell. Doctor Wright, do you have a
collection of anything? I do have a collection of
holiday dishes and stuff. I'm a real holiday person.
Katrina took my mother's Christmas dishes so but I'm I'm
saving them for my children. If you wrote your memoir today,
what would the title be? Or Are you ready to share the
title of your book? Yeah, my mother's eyes.
Oh, my mother's eyes. I love that.
Yeah, how I see things through. I think back so often with what
she told me and how I didn't understand it then.
So illumination is what's happening at this point in my
life. Thinking back to your days in
the classroom, what was your favorite class to teach?
Well, the only thing I talked back then was introduction to
sociology and and introduction to social psychology.
But I love teaching the sociology of women.
So I taught that class back in the day and I I really love that
class. Was did you have a favorite
class that you took as a student it.
Was sociology. Obviously done.
Oh. Yeah, I love, I love sociology
because because it was so relevant to life, if you know
what I mean. Now relevant to life, it helps
you to understand social structures and the impacts that
they have on on your lives and how people become who they are
and what part government plays in molding society.
So so it was sociology and that's why I majored in
sociology with a concentration though in social psychology
because I was always interested in how people think.
I. Love that.
And finally, who was a path breaker in your life?
Who's someone who paved the way for you?
The path breaker in my life to me was my mother and the other
person would be Doctor Adeline Levine, who passed away.
She was my major professor and one of my major professors.
She was really second, but she became first because she helped
guided me through an environment that I knew nothing about,
completely white environment. I was in Buffalo, NY, People
were white, the snow was white, everything was white.
I was cold and very unhappy and didn't know how to manage the
system. And I remember she she told me,
she said, come here little girl, you got two things against you.
You're black and you're female. She said, but we going to get
out of here. And she did.
She became one of my best friends.
I loved her dearly. She was hard as hell.
I hated her at some point, but I began to realize what she was
doing. So my mom and Addie goes to.
Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Doctor
Bev. It's amazing.
Thank you. Thank you for letting us learn
with you, I really appreciate it.
Well, you're quite welcome and thank you for being interested
in the Deep Southcenter for Environmental Justice.
Doctor Wright is the founder and executive director of the Deep
Southcenter for Environmental Justice.
Path Breakers is produced by the Kresge Foundation, which was
founded in 1924 with a mission to promote human progress.
Today, Kresge works to expand equity and opportunity in
America's cities. Read the stories of all of this
season's Path Breakers and learn about our grant making and
social investing work in Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans,
Fresno, and cities across the US at kresge.org.
To hear more stories from the Path Breakers, be sure to
subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Our producers are Juliet Hindley and Zach Rosen.
Managing editor is Krista Yankee.
Our show art is by Rochelle Baker and Creative direction by
Alejandro Herrera. Special thanks to my colleagues
on the Environment team in the American Cities Program for
lifting up Doctor Wright and speaking her name as a truly
phenomenal path breaker. We'll talk to you all next week.