“We have abused the planet mercilessly for years, and now we are paying the price,” Hazel Johnson told a journalist in January 1995. Though Johnson, known as the “mother of the environmental justice movement,” spoke these words nearly 30 years ago, they resonate today as wildfires and record-breaking temperatures have been seen across Louisiana, driven in part by fossil fuel emissions.
Born in south Louisiana, Johnson was instrumental in introducing federal legislation that recognized the disproportionate burden of pollution on communities of color, and established environmental justice as a new facet of the civil rights movement.
According to People for Community Recovery, the environmental justice group she founded, Johnson was born on January 25, 1935 in New Orleans. Over the course of her life, Johnson often spoke of being from Cancer Alley — an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Orleans to West Baton Rouge parishes, where currently more than 150 petrochemical facilities expose local residents to one of the highest cancer risks in the country
Johnson was the only one of her siblings to live past their first birthday, and both of her parents died before her marriage in 1955, at the age of 20. With little family, Johnson and her husband John left the Jim Crow-era South for Chicago as part of the Great Migration, a time of mass movement of African Americans from the South to the North in hopes of a better life.
But Johnson had moved from Cancer Alley only to land in what she later called a “toxic donut” — the Altgeld Gardens public housing development in Chicago’s South Side, built in 1945 to house Black veterans returning from World War II.
Much like parts of south Louisiana where people report high levels of asthma, respiratory illness and cancer, Johnson’s new home in the North had its own troubles with pollution-linked illness. Unknown to Johnson and her husband, the public housing development where they moved in 1962 sat on top of old sewage canals, toxic landfills and a nearby industrial incinerator. Within seven years, Johnson’s husband had contracted and died of lung cancer.
Following his death, Johnson’s grief and outrage drove her to investigate her neighbors’ other, seemingly related illnesses. What she discovered was a startlingly high cancer rate, which she linked to nearby industrial dumping sites, an incinerator and years of sewage and wastewater that ran directly through her neighborhood.
In the early 1980s, as the founder of People for Community Recovery, Johnson pushed for accountability and government oversight. Home by home, she surveyed the residents of Altgeld Gardens, writing down their ailments and family losses, eventually compiling her findings in a report to the decade-old Environmental Protection Agency. She had hoped that the EPA would take action, but after her first attempt, she “received a letter advising her that there existed no proof of any health hazard in Altgeld Gardens,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
But Johnson would not be put off. She started a second study in 1988, this time supported by the University of Chicago School of Public Health and St. James Hospital. Their findings, published in 1993, showed alarming rates of respiratory illness, stillbirths and babies with birth defects and other health problems in the neighborhood.
Pressured by Johnson and the NAACP to examine environmental racism, the Clinton administration turned its attention to the issues in Johnson’s backyard.
In 1994, Johnson’s relentless advocacy helped spur the passage of the Environmental Justice Order, which established a working group between eleven federal agencies to “deliver environmental justice to all communities across America.”
In their era of grassroots activism, Johnson and her collaborators fought to block other industrial dumping facilities from being placed in Altgeld. They established a new health clinic, and pressured the EPA to conduct better toxins testing and develop plans on how to remove pollutants from the soil and water of impacted communities. Johnson also trained a new generation of environmental activists.
One of her early collaborators would go on to become president. As a young organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama was well-known to Johnson and her daughter Cheryl, who recalled how he once sat in their living room while working with Altgeld Gardens residents on environmental issues.
Johnson’s daughter Cheryl now carries on Johnson’s work as People for Community Recovery’s executive director, continuing to be an integral part of the nation’s environmental justice movement.
The tools of environmental justice built by Johnson and her peers continue to be used today by activists in Cancer Alley, like Sharon Lavigne, founder of RISE St. James, and her daughters Shamyra and Shammell, who advocate for greater agency oversight in the region.
And in an era of eroding trust in federal promises for effective regulation and environmental justice, Johnson’s work and her fight are all the more relevant.
“If we want a safe environment for our children and grandchildren, we must clean up our act, no matter how hard a task it might be,” Johnson said in 1995. She died on January 12, 2011 at the age of 76.
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