By: Ava H.
Smog smoldered the windows of my mother’s childhood home on the Southeast side. After decades of living near O’Hare Airport, my grandmother, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer. These environmental disparities in Chicago are no accident, it’s a product of toxic injustices.
Hazel M. Johnson, the mother of environmental justice and Chicago resident, was one of the first people to discuss environmental racism. Through her own research in the 1970s, she identified Altgeld Gardens as Chicago's “toxic doughnut” on the Southside.
Originally in the 1960s, Hazel Johnson and her family of 6 children moved to Altgeld Gardens, a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Hazel visited before because her brother-in-law lived there, and she fell in love with the peaceful, spacious, green, serene neighborhood.
Turns out that this public housing paradise had dark secrets buried beneath it. Hazel’s husband passed away with lung cancer 1969, even though he was only 41. This was quite common with other neighbors in the area, as asthma and respiratory problems were becoming quite normal due to the area’s history of toxic waste.
Altgeld Gardens is an overwhelmingly Black community, with 62% of residents living below the poverty line. In Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., the hard work by white segregationists had shaped the city to make dumping toxins on minority communities possible.
Thus, Hazel began conducting health surveys to showcase how low-income residents are disproportionately affected by industrial pollution. Even today, the environmental justice movement is not very diverse. Nevertheless, Hazel didn’t let being an African American woman without a professional environmental background stop her. The activists in Altgeld Gardens had now teamed up with a young community organizer named Barack Obama, just graduated from Columbia University. They pressured the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) — which first denied an asbestos problem — to finally pay to remove it from all the houses. Then another shoe dropped. Hazel learned that barrels of polychlorinated biphenyl (commonly known as PCB), used as lubricant in old electrical transformers, had been illegally dumped in a storage unit in Altgeld Gardens in the 1970s. Her hard work certainly paid off, and she later lobbied Bill Clinton to sign the Environmental Justice Executive Order in the 1990s.
Photo from: The EPA Blog
Hazel Johnson passed away in 2011, but her legacy lives on, as her nonprofit People for Community Recovery (PCR) still works to fulfill their mission of “enhancing the quality of life of residents that live in communities, through the development policies and programs around the issues of the environment, health, housing, education, training, safety, economic opportunities, and inequities.”
Hazel Johnson
Photo from: People for Community Recovery
Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Hazel’s daughter Cheryl Johnson about her current role as Executive Director at PCR. She also works as a spokesperson, spreading awareness of what her mother has done, and continuing PCR’s mission.
Cheryl Johnson
Photo from: People for Community Recovery
Through the Environmental Careers Exploration for Youth program, Cheryl strives to help children learn the various environmental career pathways they can pursue. Whether they be through a college pathway or not, there are countless opportunities, from mitigating environmental lead hazards in homes, to becoming an environmental sociologist.
Because Altgeld Gardens is quite south from central Chicago, PCR hosts Toxic Tours to educate people from other neighborhoods about the environmental disparities that occur as a result of the immense segregation in Chicago. They are also for educating their own community about the toxicities that lay there, because it is not an adequate reason to buy a house simply for aesthetics, as it is integral to learn about the previous land use. After all, it could have originally been an abandoned landfill that they put houses over, which can be quite harmful for the cities’ chemical toxicity levels.
When asked about her greatest reward of working for PCR and her aspirations for the future, she pointed out how there is an immense increase in individuals talking about environmental justice issues, both on a local and national scale, which is quite rewarding for her after working for this for over 35 years. However, Chicago has a long way to go, since there are not any environmental justice laws currently in place from the city, county, or state level. Grateful for the current progress and hopeful for more action, Cheryl Johnson would like to help create an Environmental Center to train people in house, partner with the local industries in that area, and to see how we can train people to go work for that certain industry, while also providing better products, services, or technology for availability. Cheryl emphasizes that the overall purpose of the center would be to “have this type of training facility that brings academic institutions, industries, and communities together to learn how to solve some of the environmental problems in the community.”
PCR is a great example of how regardless of one’s background, individuals have the potential to effectively help their community and spread awareness of environmental justice’s urgency. After all, Cheryl stated, “We have to fight for our children. We have educated ourselves on environmental issues and the health threats from nearby polluting industry. We have not waited for government to come in and determine the cause of our illness. We may not have Ph.D. degrees, but we are the experts on our community.”
Photo from: People for Community Recovery
However, unlike big environmental groups like the Sierra Club or the National Resource Defense Fund, grassroots organizations like PCR do not receive the same amount of attention and funding. So if you are able to, donating any amount to PCR would make a much more meaningful impact than doing so at a nationally well known environmental organization.
Beth October 6, & Beth. (n.d.). Hazel M. Johnson, 'mother of the environmental Justice movement'. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://www.chipublib.org/blogs/post/hazel-m-johnson-mother-of-the-environmental-justice-movement/
The mother of environmental justice. (n.d.). Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://q.sustainability.illinois.edu/hazel-johnson-and-the-toxic-doughnut/
People for community recovery. (n.d.). Retrieved April 14, 2021, from http://www.peopleforcommunityrecovery.org/