Environmental Justice Means Clean Water and Safety from Floods

Before I left New York City to work at MCIR for six months, a documentarian told me about visiting a festival in Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta, some years ago. The organizers had advised her not to drink the water, and she wasn’t surprised when she saw it was bright yellow. 

My stint at MCIR is focused on domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been particularly hard on women of color. I am white, but like most reporters, I am aware that activists tend to know each other. To find my way into domestic violence, I have been talking to Mississippians working for environmental justice in communities of color.

Arriving from a city that has the best water in the world – it even tastes good! and that’s not just New York braggadocio—I was amazed to discover that Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, has periodic water alerts, and that the water can look something like what my friend saw in Clarksdale.

Mississippi’s water wasn’t always that way. Novelist Diane McPhail grew up in Clarksdale in the 1950s and early 1960s. She remembers pure, clean artesian-well water and never any water alert.

Nowadays, the Delta’s water suffers from high-tech agriculture’s chemical run-off. But not all water pollution is Mississippi’s fault. When the state’s water comes from the Mississippi River, it can be full of run-off from Iowa, Illinois, and other agricultural states to the north.

On the Pearl River, whose water goes to Jackson, the problem too often is an aging sewage treatment plant. Since 2005, Reilly Morse has been a lawyer with the Mississippi Center for Justice (MCJ), an affiliate of the national Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. He explained that the sewage treatment plant, like other deteriorating infrastructure in Jackson, is the result of “white flight” to the suburbs. There is not enough tax base in Jackson, which is now 80 percent black, for the city to raise funds to repair the sewage plant.

For some black communities in Mississippi, the problem can be too much water: flooding combined with destruction of wooded wetlands when they are cleared for development. A member of the Mississippi chapter of the Sierra Club described growing up in north Gulfport: “When it rained and water washed through our neighborhood streets, we would run out to wade it. Then the water would disappear – because it had been absorbed by wetlands.”

In the early 2000s, Morse at the MCJ helped residents of Turkey Creek, a community in north Gulfport that was founded in 1866 by emancipated slaves. Together, their descendants fought off a developer and the city of Gulfport to keep the creek as an urban greenway, and to put their neighborhood on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

On Earth Day in April 2020, Mississippi Public Television rebroadcast Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek, a documentary which follows Derrick Evans, a young descendant of a couple who were among the community’s original founders. Evans helped organize resistance to development and to displacement after Hurricane Katrina. The film ends on an environmental cliffhanger in 2010, with the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

How is Turkey Creek’s crusade for environmental justice faring in this 2020 season of severe storms? Watch this space: I will let you know.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amclissf@gmail.com.