Latria Graham: The Roots of Environmental Injustices

BROKEN GROUND SEASON 8 

EPISODE 1. LATRIA GRAHAM: THE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICES 

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HOST: Did you know that, at one point, there were almost 50 THOUSAND plantations here in the South? The grand homes, the cabins of the enslaved, the fields of cotton, tobacco, and indigo were once ubiquitous. So much so, that if you’ve spent any time here, there’s a decent chance you’ve shopped, or eaten a meal, or even just driven across plantation fields once worked by enslaved laborers. In fact, you may be on a former plantation at this very moment, as you’re listening to this podcast. Would you even know? That massive presence matters because even if we no longer see or acknowledge these plantation systems, they continue to haunt us today – influencing which side of town gets a park and which gets an oil refinery, who gets to breathe clean air and who gets sick. 

Latria Graham: From the food that we eat and where it comes from and how that’s acquired, to the way we work …  

HOST: This is writer Latria Graham. 

Latria Graham: Everything that we do is tied back to this unequal power that started on plantations. 

HOST: Now, as the Trump administration tries to whitewash our history and undo decades of progress on environmental justice, it’s more important than ever to talk about slavery and the plantation system’s enduring effects on our health and environment. 

Latria Graham: As Americans, we’re gonna have to take a long, long, long look at all the links in that chain.    

HOST:  In this season of the podcast, we’re going to EXPLORE those links. And we’ll learn how SOME southern communities are working to BREAK that chain. Stay with us.  

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HOST: This is Broken Ground, a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center. I’m Leanna First-Arai, your host. Here at Broken Ground, we dig up environmental stories in the South, and introduce you to the people at the heart of them. 

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HOST: If you’ve been a regular listener to Broken Ground, you know we tell a lot of stories about southerners fighting environmental injustices in our region.  

Justin Pearson at Memphis rally: … and that’s why we’re going to march … 

HOST: Rallying their neighbors.  Lobbying their city councilors.  Pressing back on permits for polluters.  

Justin Pearson at Memphis rally: … we believe that a movement for justice cannot be defeated … 

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HOST: Well, this season we’re digging deeper to get to the ROOTS of those injustices. We’ll be looking not just at last week’s permit approval, or last year’s zoning decision. Not just at quote, unquote “urban renewal” in the 1950s or redlining maps in the 1930s. We’ll be looking all the way back to the days of plantation slavery in this country. And we’re doing it as part of SELC’s multimedia storytelling series “Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward.” To get us started, we’ve invited someone who’s spent a long time thinking about this legacy as well.  

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Latria Graham: Plantations and environmental justice are intertwined for me. 

HOST: Latria Graham. 

Latria Graham: What we have is a portrait of human exploitation and natural exploitation. And we really have to spend time thinking about plantation and enslavement, which is uncomfortable, people don’t wanna do, and current modern day pollution.  

HOST: Latria is a storyteller, a college professor, a farmer, a fifth-generation South Carolinian, and a writer. She writes a column about “ethical travel” for Afar Magazine, and a column called “This Land” for the southern culture magazine, Garden and Gun. 

Latria Graham: “This Land” is about all of the disappearing aspects of the South that are leaving us either due to climate change or suburbanization, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what was and what may no longer be. 

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HOST: Of course, one of the things that WAS here in the South, was plantation slavery.  Though slavery existed across much of the country, the South was, at one point, home to 46 THOUSAND plantations. And ONE IN THREE southern residents were enslaved. This unfathomably brutal institution lasted for nearly 250 years – from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619, to the end of the American Civil War in 1865. 

Latria Graham: Slavery may have ended 160 years ago, but the policies and the power dynamics that it put into play all those years ago still affects us today.  

HOST: Those plantation power dynamics have also had a lasting impact on our natural environment. And therefore, the environmental injustices we face. Today, Black Americans are more likely to live near landfills. More likely to breathe polluted air. More likely to suffer from worsening heat waves and flooding. For Latria, environmental justice really comes down to one question: 

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Latria Graham: Who has right to health. It sounds very specific and very small, but that really is the question, right? This idea of who deserves to live a full healthy life that has clean water, breathable air.  

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Latria Graham: Because you’re dealing with hundreds of years of limited political power for people, but also ecological extraction. And as Americans, we’re gonna have to take a long, long, long look at all the links in that chain.  

HOST: Some of the first links in that chain from plantations to pollution are “Freedmen communities” or “Free towns.” These were Black communities founded by newly emancipated men and women, many of whom stayed close to the plantations on which they had been enslaved. There they built homes, businesses, churches and schools.  

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Announcer, Negro Durham Marches On: With this well rounded variety of services and conveniences already established in Hayti, there should be no limit to the future development and progress of the community.  

HOST:  This film from 1948 is talking about Hayti, a Freedmen community in Durham, North Carolina. There, Black folks didn’t just survive; they thrived for generations. 

Announcer, Negro Durham Marches On: The lifeblood of the community is represented in this busy populace, going vigorously about their daily activities. 

HOST:  A century ago,  free towns like Hayti offered hard-won independence and a modicum of safety. Today, however … 

Latria Graham: Many of them are in peril if they exist at all. 

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HOST: Of course, demographics aside, plenty of towns across the South have withered due to aging populations, the loss of jobs, and declining tax bases. But Black-led free towns have been a focal point for other fierce forces as well, both natural and manmade. Take flooding. 

Latria Graham: When I think about a Freedmen community, they’re often on undesirable land at the time. They are often on coasts or along rivers, they are swampy, sometimes they flood. I am thinking about Princeville in North Carolina.  

CBS 17 News Anchor Sean Maroney: Tonight an historic Edgecombe County town, has been forced to evacuate because of the threat of flooding.  

HOST: Princeville, North Carolina was the country’s very first Freedmen community, founded in 1865 as “Freedom Hill.” A misleading name, because the town sits on low land along the Tar River that was deemed too swampy for the nearby white community of Tarboro. 

Latria Graham: There were two sides to the Tar River. There was the white side and the Black side. And when hurricanes come, it floods the Black side. 

CBS 17 News Anchor Sean Maroney: People along the Neuse and Tar Rivers there remain on alert tonight. 80 percent of the town of Princeville is believed to be underwater after the Tar River crested there. 

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HOST: This long-ago funneling of newly emancipated people to low-lying land that nobody else wanted, helps explain why Black communities today are nearly TWICE as likely to experience a severe flooding event here in the South, relative to their neighbors. 

Latria Graham: I am in one of those communities, I’ve written an essay called “Nuisance.” You know, this idea of nuisance flooding. Every time it rains hard, just about, my mom’s house floods and she loses a bit of herself. You know, if you’re sitting in a chair and you’re reading a book and you put the book down and it rains the next day, you’ve lost your book. We were seeing this with maybe four inches of rain and now more people are seeing it with six inches of rain. We are a key indicator of something that is happening in our region.  

HOST:  She’s right, of course. With climate change leading to larger, slower storms and heavier rainfall, the risk of flooding is increasing ACROSS the South.   Though, according to the journal Nature Climate Change, that risk is likely to increase TWICE as fast in areas with predominantly Black communities. Climate and geography aside, the vast majority of obstacles faced by these towns over the last century and a half have been manmade. 

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Latria Graham: Freedmen communities don’t get to exist within a vacuum. Racism and systemic injustice means that there are always people creating pipelines to drain resources, or rights, or things away from.   

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HOST: Freedmen communities, often by design, had little political power, and so many have faced a cascade of social and environmental indignities, including: a lack of public services and disinvestment, over-policing and racial violence, the plundering of natural resources like forests and minerals, the construction of pipelines and highways through neighborhoods, a lack of grocery stores and green space, flooding and excessive heat. And perhaps most noticeable of all, the siting of landfills, chemical plants and other polluting industries, which can, of course, have devastating health consequences. 

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Latria Graham: When we think about Africatown, which is in Alabama, being very close to a chemical plant, right? And it used to rain down ash on these folks.  

NBC 15 News Anchor Greg Peterson: Well, tonight an NBC 15 reality check.  Residents in the Africatown community have been complaining for decades about mysterious illnesses ravaging families.  

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HOST: Africatown was established just north of Mobile Bay in 1866 by the last group of enslaved people ever brought to this country, on the slave ship Clotilda. It has tremendous historic importance, but has also faced significant industrial pollution from manufacturers like International Paper. That closed here 25 years ago, but toxic chemicals continue to leach from its grounds.  

WKRG News 5 Reporter Bill Riales: The whole community is surrounded by industry. Now, almost 250 residents have signed on with a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Mobile claiming the byproduct from the paper mill caused cancer cases to dramatically climb in the community.  

Africatown Resident Thelma Maiben-Owens: We have lost so many people in this area from cancer. 

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HOST: Today, the EPA estimates that there are dozens of active industrial facilities in just a 3.5 square mile area around Africatown. How does that happen? Exactly how does a majority Black community like Africatown, or Southwest Memphis, or Hopewell, Virginia become inundated with industrial polluters? Let’s look at the chain of events.  

For decades beginning in the early 1900s, white officials used exclusionary zoning laws to preserve the most desirable parts of town for white people. Black residents were pushed into neighborhoods that butted up to or even overlapped with zones designated for industry. In a kind of vicious cycle, Black property values then fell as industry compromised the neighborhood, effectively trapping many residents in under-valued homes, and making it that much easier for MORE industry to move in.  

As if that wasn’t enough, in the 1930s, banks began creating color-coded red-lining maps that designated these neighborhoods “risky.” That made it difficult – if not impossible – for residents to obtain mortgages, secure business loans, or even borrow smaller amounts of money to repair a bathroom or fix a leaky roof. 

Then, after decades of disinvestment and industrialization, many of these neighborhoods were deemed “blighted” by city officials. That, in turn, made them easy targets later on for so-called “urban renewal” in the 1950s. That federally funded program led to the bulldozing of Black homes and businesses in nearly 2,000 communities across the country. And it quite literally helped clear the way for highway construction, which then introduced a whole new source of air pollution in the 1970s. 

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Latria Graham: All of these policies, all of these laws, all of this red tape.  When you create all of these hurdles, at some point people are not gonna be able to clear them. We put so much emphasis on the individual, right, when there’s so much more to it than that. 

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HOST:  In Freedmen towns lucky enough to escape industrial bombardment, a different threat may loom. Take the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. There, descendants of enslaved West Africans have kept the Gullah Geechee culture alive.  

Latria Graham: Folks are having to fight taxes as well as flooding, when their land is rezoned or reappraised because they are building housing developments and beach condos. 

Associated Press Reporter Sharon Johnson: Miles away on St. Helena Island, Gullah descendants clash over past and present. 

Gullah-N-Geechie Mahn Tours Owner Kitty Green: We knew that if you allow all that to come in, tax base goes up. You know, African Americans lose land and their way of life.  

Latria Graham: So I’m thinking about a lot of the places that I have been. There is a systematic dismantling of those places. 

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Latria Graham: There are so many ways to take money and resources and well being away from these communities. And America’s gotten really good at writing laws and policies that allow people to, to take those things. Whether it is by violence or intimidation. Thinking about the Wilmington massacre that happened in North Carolina. That was a thriving Black community. When we’re thinking about many of the Black beaches. We’re even talking about heirs’ property – who gets to inherit land.  

HOST: Heirs’ property – that’s H-E-I-R-S – means the landowner died without a will, a relatively common occurrence in historically Black communities where folks were often ill-served by the white bureaucracy. Without a will, a person’s heirs – however many there are, wherever they are – have equal claim to the property. And that can cause more than a family rift. 

Latria Graham: If you have heirs’ property, and it’s got multiple people’s names on it and it floods, you’re not eligible for things like FEMA. And if you’re not eligible for FEMA, you can’t repair your house. A developer can come in and scoop this up for pennies on the dollar, and you’ve automatically lost generational wealth. 

HOST: Latria actually had her own painful experience with heirs’ property. 

Latria Graham: My family owns land in Silverstreet, South Carolina, which is in Newberry County. This land has been in our family about a hundred years. And this is an area that made my family self-sufficient. You know, my brother and I are both artists and my dad was like, ‘As long as you can feed yourself, you can always pursue your art, and this land will always be here for that.’ And then it wasn’t. It was an heirs’ property because my dad died without a will.  

HOST:  After their dad passed, a much older half-brother they didn’t know showed up looking for an outsized inheritance, demanding far more money than the family could give. Latria fought for seven years to avoid having to sell the family land in order to pay him off. 

Latria Graham:  Between trying to buy out his share and the lawyer fees, I couldn’t keep it. And the farm was sold at auction in September of 2020. 

HOST: Latria is now writing a book about the ordeal.  

Latria Graham: Tentatively titled, Uneven Ground: A Memoir of a Family, a Culture, and a Land in Peril. And it is about what it’s like to lose a sense of home and a sense of history, what does it mean for your sense of self to fade.  

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Latria Graham: I don’t have an accent. You know, my accent comes out when I’m talking to my mom or when I used to talk to my grandmother, or when I’m drunk or when I’m angry, right? There are a couple little key moments, but this idea that in losing that anchor in the world, you start to lose certain ways. I am the last farmer in my family.  Last person that really knows the trees and that family land.    

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HOST: Unfortunately, Latria’s experience is not unique. Though Black Americans owned some 16 MILLION acres of farmland in 1910, by the end of the century, only TEN PERCENT of that land remained in Black hands. Some was lost to racial intimidation or outright violence against Black farmers. Some to exploitation of heirs’ property rules. And some to discriminatory lending policies that denied Black farmers the loans that white farmers easily received. The impact of that loss is hard to measure.  

Latria Graham: Getting people to understand that having a piece of land that allowed your family to live and survive and make tradition may not be worth anything now economically but it is still … it holds your dead. It holds your memories, it holds your love, it holds your people in a way that is very hard to monetize. 

HOST: And for many people, that piece of land is also their first and deepest connection to the natural world. The first place they planted a garden, or hosted a family barbecue, or learned to tell a robin from a cardinal.  

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HOST: This, in part, may help explain why some people have been reluctant to move away from these original Freedmen communities, even as their neighborhoods continued to flood, grew more polluted, or became hemmed in by highways or new housing developments. And, of course, for some Black property owners …  

Latria Graham: Even if they wanted to sell it, they couldn’t really even give it away because of everything that’s around it. It’s a double whammy.   

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HOST: For communities weighted down with social and environmental problems, Latria hopes passersby can look past the smokestacks and the shuttered buildings … past the landfill or the litter … and think about the roots of those injustices.  

Latria Graham: I want folks to question why things are the way things are. What forces are at play? What policies have been enacted that create this kind of neglect? I want them to see faces and understand that there are families here and those families have hopes and dreams and desires just like the people driving through these Freedmen communities.  

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HOST:  Understanding how these places came to be has taken on a new sense of urgency as the Trump administration has flipped the concept of environmental justice on its head, referring to it as “illegal and immoral discrimination.”  

CBS 24/7 Anchor Lindsey Reiser: The head of the Environmental Protection Agency announced 31 actions rolling back key public health and climate change policies. 

CBS Mornings Plus Co-Host Adriana Diaz: The Trump administration has also fired hundreds of EPA employees and revealed plans to shut down the EPA’s Environmental Justice division.  

PBS NewsHour Anchor John Yang: Now the Trump administration is eliminating these environmental justice offices as part of its effort to end DEI programs and to cut what it sees as wasteful spending. 

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HOST:  That quote unquote “wasteful spending” apparently includes lots of money meant to address long-standing inequities in Black communities. For starters, the administration defunded a new air monitoring program in heavily industrialized Black neighborhoods in North Birmingham, Alabama. It’s cut funding for a solar program that helps low-income Georgians reduce their electricity bills. It’s pulled money meant to finally help flood victims in Princeville, North Carolina relocate to higher ground. And it has snatched back a desperately needed grant meant to help repair sewage infrastructure in Lowndes County, Alabama. Sewage disposal there is in such abysmal shape that it has unleashed a public health crisis, with Black residents contracting hookworm in their own backyards.  

Latria Graham: What is the value of a life, becomes the big question. And it is the question that America has been grappling with ever since people landed on these shores.  

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HOST:     In addition to these devastating cuts, the Trump administration is also doing something Latria finds absurd: it’s deleting terms like “climate science,” “racial inequality” and “clean energy” from government websites and documents.  

Latria Graham: The idea of, like, banning words, banning ideas, erasing … I was like, how powerful is that? That you’re so scared of a word, that you’re so scared of an idea that you think you have to take it out of the lexicon. 

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HOST: Latria points out that no solutions will be found if we can’t even talk about the problem.  

Latria Graham: My opinion is until we really grapple with enslavement and find a way to talk about the economic neglect and think about a remedy, we’re going to just kind of be stuck in this loop. Understanding our history shows us the ways that we can change. 

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HOST: And that change is not just for the benefit of the people who’ve been suffering from the legacy of plantation slavery. Air pollution doesn’t respect fencelines. Forever chemicals don’t stay at a river’s outflow pipe. And, of course, even if greenhouse gases are primarily being pumped from factories in lower-income neighborhoods, the climate change they’re fueling affects all of us. As Latria says, what happens to the least of us, will happen to the rest of us. 

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Latria Graham: What people often believe is that Black people are going to completely bear the brunt of this. But what we often find through lived experience – and I can say this as someone living in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who dealt with Hurricane Helene – is that areas that are thought to be climate havens, like Asheville, North Carolina, those issues came for them too. Folks are going to start to understand the choices that were made, when it comes to exploitation and degradation for money, they won’t be worth it in the end. 

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Latria: Because I’m, I’m working on a book, I bought my eighth grade history book. Eighth grade was South Carolina history the whole time. And enslaved people are mentioned in, like, a paragraph or two, in a 400-page textbook. I know more about the Pony Express than I do about Reconstruction, right? And that was by design. America’s not great at reflection. We often live in a state of nostalgia and we really have a hard time looking at the undesirable narratives that don’t have a redemptive arc.  

HOST:   For some Americans, our “Plantations to Pollution” story COULD be one of those, quote, “undesirable narratives with no redemptive arc.” But that description only works if you assume that the pollution is the END of a Freedmen community’s story, and not the middle. Here at Broken Ground, we look for stories where southerners are fighting for justice … where they’re trying to write their own, happier ending. And so we’re going to bring you a few of those stories this season, as we continue exploring the links between historic plantations and modern day environmental injustices. As Latria says, there’s real value in telling those stories. 

Latria:  Stories show all the ways that we have survived and it gives us a vehicle for hope. It gives us a vehicle  for future.  

HOST:  That was author Latria Graham. Her book, tentatively titled Uneven Ground is due out in the spring of 2027. In the meantime, you can read her column “This Land” in Garden and Gun Magazine. 

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HOST: That does it for this episode of Broken Ground. I hope you’ll join us for the rest of the season as we dig into the historical roots of environmental injustices. You can find all of our previous Broken Ground episodes at Broken Ground Podcast dot o-r-g. There, you’ll also find a link to our multimedia storytelling series, “Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward.” Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the nation’s most powerful defenders of the environment, rooted in the South. It’s produced by Emily Richardson-Lorente, Noa Greenspan, Jennie Daley and me, Leanna First-Arai. With special thanks to Ko Bragg, Sam Lenga, and Pria Mahadevan. The spiritual you heard in this episode was performed by Ann Caldwell and the Magnolia Singers. Our theme music is by Eric Knutson. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love it if you’d write us a review on your favorite podcast app and mention Broken Ground to a friend. Thanks for listening.  

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