Your first paper, in 1979, was the first to use hard data to quantify environmental racism. What prompted you to look into this?
The study was done in support of Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corporation, the first U.S. lawsuit to challenge environmental racism using civil rights law. The lawyer for that case was Linda McKeever Bullard, my wife at the time, and she needed numbers to back up the argument that locating solid waste landfills in a particular neighborhood was a form of discrimination. The community was middle class, suburban and an unlikely place for a garbage dump. It was also predominantly Black.
My job was to design the study, collect the data, and present maps that showed where all the landfills, incinerators and solid waste sites were located in Houston from the 1920s up to 1979. We found that five out of five of the city-owned landfills were in predominantly Black neighborhoods, as were three out of four of the privately owned landfills. Six out of eight of the city's incinerators were in Black neighborhoods. Black people made up only 25 percent of Houston's population at the time, yet 82 percent of the garbage in the city was dumped on them.
We lost in court because we couldn't prove it was intentional discrimination. It was easier to show scientifically that this pattern reflected a form of discrimination and not random data, but it's more difficult to prove it in court.
When you saw how widespread this pollution was in Black communities, what did you think?
I was surprised. I was amazed and shocked. But I was even more surprised and shocked and disappointed that the judge didn't see it. This was 40-something years ago. The judge was an old white man who was calling Black plaintiffs in the case “Negresses.” That's a fancy, dressed-up way of calling you the N-word. The racial undertone was so thick. It was almost as if that case were brought too soon.
What was the public response to your initial studies?
Communities on the ground, the ones who were being poisoned and ignored, started to come together. Grassroots and civil rights groups began to build coalitions and collaborate. By 1990 we were organizing the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The industry attacked us. Some of us were sued. Some of us were intimidated and threatened. But we've kept fighting because we have justice on our side. A lot of people tried to debunk our work, but they never could. We had to fight with some of our environmental allies: conservation groups that were mostly white and affluent. They're with us now, but they were not always.