Transcripts

Hazel Johnson (00:17):

I'm supposed to be given the history of PCR. Some of the things that we have done, some of you have heard me say it by 99 times and some of you haven't. We have a lot of people that has cancer, we have infants and the majority of them is girls, that was born with some type of brain damage. We have a lot of people that suffer respiratory problems and if you notice, I do too in order to breathe.

(00:47):

My work is known nationally. I go all out of town making presentations, talking about the things I have done here in the city of Chicago. And with this, we hope to prove that our health problem is related to pollution. Thank you.

Damon Williams (01:05):

Welcome to Help This Garden Grow.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:08):

My name's Daniel.

Damon Williams (01:09):

And I'm Damon.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:10):

The story we're about to tell you, the story of Hazel Johnson, changed our lives and we needed to change yours too.

Damon Williams (01:22):

I don't know if you've noticed this, but things ain't been going great.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:26):

What do you mean, Damon?

Damon Williams (01:27):

Well you know, there's...

Speaker 4 (01:29):

A snowstorm and brutal cold hit an unprepared energy system and left nearly 5 million customers in the dark.

Damon Williams (01:37):

And...

Speaker 5 (01:38):

A train derailed, causing a massive explosion and fire.

Damon Williams (01:43):

Don't forget about...

Speaker 6 (01:44):

For 18 months, lead and harmful bacteria leached into the tap water of nearly 100,000 Flint, Michigan residents from 2014 to 2015.

Damon Williams (01:55):

There's also...

Speaker 7 (01:57):

Black Americans are at least twice as likely to die of COVID-19 than whites, almost four times more likely when you control for the fact that the Black population is younger.

Damon Williams (02:07):

And of course...

Speaker 8 (02:08):

Scientists warn today that climate change is warming the planet to the point where it's causing irreversible damage in some parts of the world.

Damon Williams (02:17):

All around us, we see systems collapsing and infrastructure failing.

Daniel Kisslinger (02:21):

We're living in the collapse of the systems that govern our lives, and we're having to deal with the consequences every day.

Damon Williams (02:27):

And the truth of this reality can be so big and heavy. For many of us, it's easier to cope with this reality by avoiding what's happening around us.

Daniel Kisslinger (02:36):

But there are always people who don't avoid these truths, either because they choose not to or because the harm of these truths is impacting their daily life so directly that they can't ignore it even if they wanted to.

(02:48):

Some of these folks decide to do something about it. They fight to challenge these destructive systems while imagining and enacting new possibilities.

Damon Williams (02:59):

And these are our people. It's been our honor to be interconnected with a multi-generational coalition of people, organizations, and spaces that have committed themselves to liberation and have come together as a movement.

Daniel Kisslinger (03:12):

This movement has run campaigns, created media projects, built community hubs.

Damon Williams (03:18):

Put their bodies on the line, fed people, sheltered people, and challenged power.

Daniel Kisslinger (03:24):

It's continued a revolutionary lineage of freedom making and radical imagination that has helped transform Chicago and the rest of the world.

Damon Williams (03:34):

And it is from striving to learn about and align with these liberatory lineages that we heard about this powerful woman who was known as the mother of environmental justice.

(03:45):

In listening and learning from environmental justice changemakers in our city, one figure kept coming up time and time again.

Daniel Kisslinger (03:51):

The name was Hazel Johnson, and it was a name that, kind of surprisingly to us we didn't really know that much about. We'd maybe heard of her in passing or someone we knew had talked about working with her, but we didn't really know much about this woman who these brilliant visionaries were naming as so important to them.

(04:12):

So we did what we always do. The first step of our very thorough research process that we always do when we want to learn more about a person. We Googled to see if there was a documentary. We couldn't find one. What we found instead was a spattering of news clips.

Speaker 9 (04:30):

Hazel Johnson.

Speaker 10 (04:31):

Hazel Johnson.

Speaker 11 (04:32):

Hazel Johnson.

Speaker 12 (04:33):

Hazel Johnson got her start in environmental activism. She's considered to be the mother of the environmental justice movement.

Speaker 13 (04:40):

Hazel Johnson and her husband moved to the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex in 1962, and she jumped into action after seeing firsthand the high rates of respiratory problems and cancer in the community.

(04:54):

Johnson started People for Community Recovery. She fought for clean water, mobilized residents, and her activism led to a presidential award and changes at the federal level.

Damon Williams (05:06):

Based on what we've been hearing and what we wanted to learn, these clips did not do Hazel justice. To really understand. Hazel, you have to hear us speak.

Speaker 14 (05:18):

This is WTTW, channel 11, Chicago,

Speaker 15 (05:22):

Hazel Johnson, you live in Altgeld Gardens in the middle of all of the expressways and chemical plants and sludge drying beds. Could you tell us, for those of us who don't come into your neighborhood, what is it like? What does it smell like and what is it like to live there on a day-to-day basis?

Hazel Johnson (05:38):

It is like living in hell because of the odor that makes you sick all the time, and it's sickening to know that people in our area, it is an isolated error, it is a forgotten area that no one cares about. We have infants that's born with deformities. We have a lot of respiratory problems, we have cancer. We have people that has to live on oxygen tanks in their home.

Speaker 15 (06:06):

Do you believe that that is related to the pollution?

Hazel Johnson (06:07):

Sure, I do.

Speaker 16 (06:08):

May I ask you what you think needs to be done in order to deal with this problem then? Do you want to shut down all the industry around here or do you want to move people out? What do you want to do?

Hazel Johnson (06:18):

Close all the industry down and relocate the people. I've been asking that for years.

Speaker 16 (06:25):

You want to close all the industry?

Hazel Johnson (06:26):

Sure I do. Human health come first.

Speaker 16 (06:30):

What will people-

Hazel Johnson (06:31):

That's the problem with the industry is the politicians and everybody else that care about the bucks. But what is happening to people health? And I don't think that my community should share the burden for the whole city of Chicago and we've been doing it ever since 1863.

Speaker 16 (06:46):

So you say you either move the people-

Hazel Johnson (06:47):

Now it's time for them to do something for us.

Speaker 15 (06:50):

Is there a middle ground? Can you come to some kind of agreement with these companies?

Hazel Johnson (06:54):

No, we not going to compromise with these people in the companies. We want them closed down because we feel that they're affecting our health while they're making millions of dollar each year.

Damon Williams (07:07):

Now that's what I'm talking about. She ain't playing with these people. Just to witness her poise, her commitment, she not moving an inch. She really is a badass in how she holds it down.

Daniel Kisslinger (07:17):

Yeah, I mean she's facing a sea of incredibly '80s white hair and weird talk show vibes, and she's up there unshaken.

Damon Williams (07:27):

This radical truth-telling and fearless commitment is what's needed to deal with all the problems of today and the problems that we know are to come. So we invite you to join us on this journey to learn everything we can about Hazel Johnson, her organization, People for Community Recovery, and the gift she and the environmental justice movement has given us. A legacy and a pathway to survive, to repair, and to build a healthier, sustainable world.

Daniel Kisslinger (07:54):

To unwrap this gift, we need to know the right questions to ask. We believe that the best way to tell a story isn't to demand answers, but to find the people who love the person you're trying to learn about and to develop the questions and then search for the answers together. In this case, it's clear who we needed to be doing that work with. The current director of the organization Hazel started, People for Community Recovery, is her daughter Cheryl Johnson.

Cheryl Johnson (08:23):

Oh, so you going to ask me questions? Okay, cool.

Damon Williams (08:30):

Cheryl has gracefully carried the baton of her mother's legacy and not only has Cheryl been generous in telling this story, but she's also agreed to be our partner in building this project.

Daniel Kisslinger (08:40):

And Cheryl didn't want to do this alone. Together, we built our creative cabinet, an advisory council of sorts made up of contemporary environmental justice leaders in Chicago who Cheryl sees as part of her mother's legacy. Together, we've built the questions and themes that we need to guide us on this path of trying to understand Hazel and her legacy.

Adella Bass (09:03):

My name is Adella Bass and I am a lead liaison with People for Community Recovery. I still live in the same area. I'm just a little bit further down the street from Altgeld Gardens where PCR is located.

Kyra Woods (09:19):

My name is Kyra Woods. I grew up here in Chicago in the Beverly neighborhood on the southwest side. I currently work as a policy advisor with the city, but if asked what I do, I would say that I pride myself as being a problem solver and a great question asker.

Juliana Pino (09:43):

My name is Juliana Pino. Much of my work is organized through the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization where I direct our public policy work, but I also am involved in a lot of different movements in Chicago. I'm honored and blessed to collaborate with many different people throughout Chicago and to learn every day about the different ways that violence shows up in folks' lives and what we could be doing to end that violence and get real justice.

Olga Bautista (10:11):

My name is Olga Bautista. I am from the southeast side of Chicago. I was born and raised here and I'm a mom, a wife, and my husband and I are raising our two daughters in the same neighborhood that we grew up in. Things have changed and evolved for the better because of the activism and the movements that I'm really proud to have led in this neighborhood.

Tonyisha Harris (10:35):

My name is Tonyisha Harris. I am 24 years old. I grew up in South Shore. My official title is Chicago Land Conservation Manager at the Illinois Environmental Council, and I work in policy legislation and organizing for the environment.

Damon Williams (10:53):

Tonyisha has since moved on and is now the associate director of communications and partnership at Action for the Climate Emergency.

Daniel Kisslinger (11:01):

Now that we have our cabinet, we're finally ready to sit down with Cheryl.

(11:05):

I think we can start with the same question that we start all of our interviews with, and it's a two-part question. And the question is, in this time, and define time however you will, this hour, this moment, this season, this lifetime, how is the world treating you and how are you treating the world?

Cheryl Johnson (11:24):

Have the world treating me and how I'm treating the world? Well, I start with how I'm treating the world. I'm a type of person that people gravitate to. I'm a caring person. I have sympathy. I can understand. I connect with people. Even dogs in my neighborhood love me. I know my neighbor dog's name. I enjoy myself. There'll be some ups and downs and sometimes I get lonely because I come from a large family. I come from a family of nine. There's only two of us left, me and my baby sister. We was a very close-knitted family.

(12:13):

So life is good and challenging. I just hate the fact that we got to deal with a lot of implicit bias, prejudice, institutional racism, and the whole misconception that I'm trying to demystify is about the life of people who live in public housing. Now, how I'd see the world, only could relate it to the work that I do. Today, it's rewarding. It's almost like I tell people I can breathe now. At one point I was always angry in this movement because people took us for granted. They didn't believe that environmental justice was a real thing and environmental racism happened and the fact that our community was always targeted to be harmed.

(13:13):

I've been involved with the organization for 40 years, but I've been working here for 36 years and to see the trials of the tribulation that my mother went through 40 years ago and the abuse that she had to endure with it, but it didn't stop her. I just wish she was here to see that the work that she has done over the years is getting the recognition that it should.

Damon Williams (13:37):

All right, before we go forward, we have to break down two really important pieces to this story.

Daniel Kisslinger (13:42):

We have to be able to define public housing and we have to define environmental justice.

Damon Williams (13:50):

First, let's start with public housing. This story of Hazel's legacy takes place in Altgeld Gardens, an ambitious post-war public housing development, one of many builds in Chicago and around the United States in the mid 20th century.

(14:04):

Following the Great Depression, we see the federal government collaborating with cities to experiment in new efforts of public housing that in many ways started as intentional forms of slum clearance. And although many races and ethnicities occupied these spaces, within a few decades of these developments being built, the phrase "public housing" became stigmatized and synonymous with conceptions of Black poverty and plight, mainly due to the practice of redlining and racist housing policy that severely limited the options for Black people in communities to live and to create home with a sense of dignity.

(14:37):

By the time me and Daniel came around in the world, the "projects" had been largely abandoned, under-resourced and divested from, and were falling into disrepair. And in Chicago, the same government that built them a few decades earlier and then abandoned them decided to tear them down en masse with disregard for the people that live there. From that vantage point, it's hard to remember that Altgeld Gardens, like so many other housing developments, for many, was originally seen as a step-up.

Cheryl Johnson (15:07):

One of the main things that we have to be clear about is that housing was always, in the city of Chicago, a challenge for Black people. We always lived in one of the most deplorable areas in the city of Chicago. Altgeld Garden was the garden spot. It was a beautiful, even though from his historically, it is a highly contaminated area. But it became our home, and it's hard to just uplift your home and relocate somewhere else.

Damon Williams (15:36):

What we've come to know is that this space was surrounded by toxicity in a spot now known as the Toxic Donut. And on a personal level, the Gardens has been an important place for my family. My grandmother lived there for a few years during her childhood and often tell me memories about this mythical bus line that would take her from 130th down Michigan Avenue. My mother was occasionally babysat in the Gardens by extended family members. My dad even went to Carver High School for a semester, which is located in the Gardens.

(16:06):

So for me, the gardens mostly existed in my imagination and in these stories of the past. And when I would think about this space or hear stories, it would almost feel like a flashback scene in a movie. I knew that my family and community had connection to this space, but I did not fully understand the history of this land and the significance of the community. In starting to ask people about the Gardens, it was clear to me I wasn't the only one who wasn't fully aware of its history. Even people who grew up in the Gardens didn't fully know the history of this land or even know Hazel as a historical figure.

Dr. Joy West (16:41):

Left Altgeld Gardens for college in 1981.

Damon Williams (16:46):

That's Dr. Joy West, a longtime physician and advocate for public health who fights racial disparities in the health system, who's also a close and dear friend of my family.

Dr. Joy West (16:56):

As I look back, there were signs of the impact on our health of being in this Toxic Donut, but at the time we didn't know. It was not uncommon for everybody to have eczema. It wasn't uncommon that everybody had asthma. I remember one of my sisters always had problems with her skin, several of my sisters did, but we never connected those dots.

(17:25):

You don't know what you don't know when you're growing up, so as children and even as young adults, we didn't know the impact of living with the steel mills so close, with the landfills so close, with the waste management so close. We just knew that that was a part of our environment. I had no idea that I was living on a wasteland. And even now as I learn more about that environment, it's mind-boggling that we didn't know. It's mind-boggling that our community was a dumping area.

(18:08):

I would've never thought that government authorities, the EPA, Chicago housing authorities would allow harm in that way. I would've never thought that private companies, the steel mill, Ford, Sherwin-Williams, some of the companies that surround Altgeld Gardens, would not have been held accountable for the harm that they were causing to the environment. Realizing that I was a part of that, it just hits home in a different kind of way. It is incredible what we have endured and what we continue to endure, and it is so impressive to me that someone as uniquely a mother really amplified the issue and really shined a light on what was happening at Altgeld Gardens because we had no clue.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (19:08):

I'm a gardener, so I love being in the soil.

Daniel Kisslinger (19:11):

That's Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington. In addition to being a phenomenal gardener, Sylvia is a highly accomplished and successful environmental epidemiologist, environmental engineer, and environmental historian and clinician with over 30 years of research experience working on the impact of industrial pollution on human health.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (19:30):

When you grow something, you don't just stick it outside in the ground. No, no, no. You actually select where you're going to put it outside. You protect it. They put chemicals into the environment and it came out in the bodies of the residents of Altgeld Gardens. I mean, it's not as if they went to the North Shore and the Gold Coast and created Altgeld Gardens. They put them in the Toxic Donut.

Daniel Kisslinger (19:52):

Here's creative cabinet member Juliana Pino from LVEJO.

Juliana Pino (19:56):

Initially the name was kind of like a misnomer. There was so much branding involved in public housing as a institutional project of the federal government, but in my mind it actually is a garden. It's actually become something where people were planted and have blossomed into a beautiful space. Out of that sort of construction of a community has evolved a community and practice where people are deeply invested in each other's lives, know each other for years, have stayed generationally, and despite the origins have built something really, really beautiful.

Cheryl Johnson (20:34):

I can afford to go buy property, buy me a home and do this work, but I love my neighborhood. I love Altgeld Gardens. I've been out here 59 years. There's nowhere in the city of Chicago that you can really go and find all the open space as we have out here. I love the assets of my community and I just wish people see us as people, not based on our class or our race or just stigmatized that we live in public housing. The President of the United States lived in public housing.

Daniel Kisslinger (21:17):

Cheryl shares more about how she sees people in public housing being perceived at a talk from a few years ago.

Cheryl Johnson (21:24):

The perception that people have on the outside about people in public housing needs to change. We work every day. We never just sitting on the porch eating watermelon, but the perception that people have that we depending on... No. We may need that assistance, but that's my neighborhood. My income support me to be able to pay for it. So people wants to work. People just want a better life, but it's the stereotypes and the racism that exists to say that people from low income community don't want anything. Everybody wants something. Nobody was born to think that they're going to be poor.

(22:06):

They should have never built a residential area in an industrialized zone. We always had to prove to our government that something existed in our community that they already knew. It seemed like they had the tendency to cover up. Government is the one that put us in a position that we are in today. Government is the one that allowed us to live on contaminated land. Government is the one that built on this contaminated land. We're not asking for government handout, but if there's things that we entitled to that we can apply for, God damn it, I'm asking for it.

(22:42):

But we ain't begging for nobody to help. Housing is a human rights and everybody should have equal access to it. Environmental justice address housing because if we live in a unhealthy community, what make you think our houses ain't going to be unhealthy? You know? It's the interconnection of environmental justice with all the other problems we have in our community.

Daniel Kisslinger (23:07):

Which brings us to our second definition. Before we can say what environmental justice is, I think it's important we say what it isn't, because it's a very commonly misused and misunderstood term and it's a term that I think, coming into this project, I didn't fully understand.

(23:24):

Okay, so there's kind of two umbrellas. One is a huge big golf umbrella and the one's like a little parasol. The big umbrella is environmentalism. When people think of environmental activism, this is usually what they have in mind. It's very focused on conservation, saving animals, and keeping green spaces green. And currently we see a lot of direct action around fossil fuels or pipelines or corporate disregard for our environment in attempt to slow the effects of climate change. This is super important work and something that we should all be paying attention to and contributing to, but it isn't inherently the same thing as environmental justice. Dr. Joy West speaks a little bit more to this distinction.

Dr. Joy West (24:12):

When I think about environmental injustice, preserving the environment, I think about recycling, I think about those sorts of things. I don't think about how marginalized and underserved Black communities can be the target of harm. I had not put the two together like that, so it's an eye-opening experience for me.

Daniel Kisslinger (24:39):

This misconception isn't an accident. As Professor David Pellow explains, it's largely the result and is reflected in where the money goes.

Professor David Pellow (24:50):

The foundation and the philanthropic community, gives a pittance of its money to the environmental justice movement compared to what it gives to the white middle class mainstream environmental movement. And I think by some metrics it's actually gotten worse, or certainly not better, which should be shocking, but maybe isn't.

Damon Williams (25:10):

So if we know what it isn't, how do we define what environmental justice is? Cheryl offers us a basic textbook definition.

Cheryl Johnson (25:19):

So what is environmental justice? It's the principle that all people and community are entitled to the same degree of protection from environmental health hazard and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy community where we live, work and play.

Damon Williams (25:35):

So what does that really look like? Juliana expands this definition by illuminating environmental racism and how it affects people's day-to-day lives.

Juliana Pino (25:43):

For everyday folks who don't think about this all the time, what does the system look like in your life? When was the last time you could get fresh groceries less than a mile from your house for a price you could afford? When was the last time you could pay your heating bill without stressing that you had to pick between that and formula for your kid? When was the last time you could breathe without having an asthma attack outside your house in your backyard, when you're trying to get your 30 minutes of leisure between your two jobs?

(26:07):

When was the last time you drank water from the tap instead of that bottled water that your abuela has to go 10 blocks to get and carry by herself? When was the last time you cooked with that water out of the tap? Oh, you did cook with that water out of the tap, but you notice that there's some problems coming from that. What does that mean for you? It becomes immediately apparent because people experience it every day, all day. People who are on the receiving end of structural violence experience it all the time and can recognize it in a second.

(26:35):

We have this toxic metamorphosis of the same problem of disposable Black and brown bodies for the material accumulation and comfort of people at the top who are largely white people, largely cis men and people who benefit from those identities. And that's still what we're contending with hundreds and hundreds of years later is this basic idea just warping itself over and over again at the deep and violent expense of Black and brown communities, of Indigenous people in the United States, in Chicago. What has to end is the idea that people can do that to other people. The idea that some people are more deserving, and then the lies and the institutions that hold that idea up in practice, even as they say that equality is real and that equity now is also real. That doesn't exist in people's lives. And so until it does, all of that is going to be a lie.

Cheryl Johnson (27:28):

Environmental justice is not a single source issue. It's a multitude of issues. It comes from living in safety homes or unhealthy homes. It comes from whether you got quality education or you got messed up education. If you got health issues in your community, but a lack of clinics to support those health issues. If you have air quality issues, water quality issues, land issues.

(27:54):

I call it like umbrella. Environmental justice is the umbrella. The spokes within that umbrella is the housing, education, health, jobs, good job, healthy jobs, emergency preparedness, emergency evacuation, all those things. Whatever spoke is broken, that umbrella is no good. So just think about all those spokes within this umbrella is broken, which make us have an unhealthy environment.

Daniel Kisslinger (28:25):

The spokes that Cheryl named aren't typically what people think of when they think of environmentalism. But the environmental justice movement says that they should be, that the harmful effects of environmental devastation are disproportionately placed on Black and brown communities.

Damon Williams (28:40):

Hazel and PCR were not alone in their resistance against environmental racism, and throughout the US there were efforts to demand accountability and repair for how policy and industry treated Black communities like wastelands. From fights in Houston in 1979 against the construction of landfills next to Black communities, to nonviolent sit-in protests in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982, opposing toxic dumping, to the founding of WE ACT in West Harlem to address the poor management of a sewage treatment plant.

(29:09):

And this resistance didn't come out of nowhere. It's important to note that the environmental justice movement sees itself as a continuation of civil rights and Black freedom struggles. In fact, Martin Luther King's last organizing effort in Memphis, Tennessee with striking sanitation workers for better pay and working conditions can and should be understood as an environmental justice campaign.

Daniel Kisslinger (29:30):

As the leaders of these early environmental justice campaigns started to come together and talk, it became clear that even though they were in different places, the harms they were experiencing were not separate. What was happening in Memphis and Warren County was connected to what was happening in Chicago. And for the response to these connected harms to be effective, the communities doing that work also needed to connect.

(29:54):

We'll tell the story of how it happened later, but this movement developed 17 principles of environmental justice that still shape and inform the work happening today.

Damon Williams (30:03):

All right, attention spans. We got to have a little check in here. So we wrestled with it and we made the choice. Y'all have to hear all of the principles, but there's 17 of them and I'm sure there were more. I'm sure this was the edited down version. We think it's really important that you hear all of them, but going through these 17 principles is going to take about four minutes.

Daniel Kisslinger (30:24):

I think you can handle it. In order to share them with you, we turn to our own community of change makers and environmental justice visionaries who took the time to each read one of these principles. Here we go.

Speaker 26 (30:38):

Environmental justice affirms the sacredness of mother earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction.

Speaker 27 (30:49):

Environmental justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias.

Speaker 28 (31:00):

Environmental justice mandates the right to ethical, balanced, and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet for humans and other living things.

Speaker 29 (31:12):

Environmental justice calls for the universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production, and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threatened the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food.

Speaker 30 (31:35):

Environmental justice affirms the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural, and environmental self-determination of all peoples.

Speaker 31 (31:46):

Environmental justice demands the secession of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and containment at the point of production.

Speaker 35 (32:04):

Environmental justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision making, including needs, assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement, and evaluation.

Speaker 36 (32:21):

Environmental justice affirms the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment. It also affirms the right of those who work at home to be free from environmental hazards.

Speaker 37 (32:39):

Environmental justice protects the rights of victims of environmental injustice to receive full compensation and reparations for damages as well as quality healthcare.

Speaker 38 (32:52):

Environmental justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and United Nation Convention on Genocide.

Speaker 39 (33:05):

Environmental justice must recognize a special legal and natural relationship of native peoples to the US government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants, affirming sovereignty and self-determination.

Speaker 40 (33:21):

Environmental justice affirms the need for urban and rural ecological policies to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities and providing fair access for all to the full range of resources.

Speaker 41 (33:38):

Environmental justice calls for the strict enforcement of principles of informed consent and the halt to the testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color.

Speaker 42 (33:54):

Environmental justice opposes the destructive operations of multinational corporations.

Speaker 43 (34:00):

Environmental justice opposes military occupation, repression, and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures and other life forms.

Speaker 44 (34:11):

Environmental justice calls for the education of present and future generations, which emphasizes social and environmental issues based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives.

Damon Williams (34:26):

Environmental justice requires that we as individuals make personal and consumer choices to consume as little of Mother Earth's resources and to produce as little waste as possible, and make the conscious decision to challenge and reprioritize our lifestyles to ensure the health of the natural world for present and future generations.

(34:45):

All right, you made it.

Daniel Kisslinger (34:46):

Whew.

Damon Williams (34:47):

That was worth it.

Daniel Kisslinger (34:48):

That's a quality set of principles right there.

Damon Williams (34:50):

Fire. Fire. Top-notch principles.

Daniel Kisslinger (34:52):

Try to keep those in mind because as we move through the rest of the story, you'll hear the way Hazel's work both shapes and is informed by those 17 commitments.

Damon Williams (35:01):

And in addition to using these principles as a guide to understand the story, this is one of the first lessons we want you to take along this journey. We encourage you to incorporate them into your life, into your work, and into your community.

Daniel Kisslinger (35:13):

The story we're about to tell focuses on Chicago, and on a particular corner of Chicago, but there is nowhere that is outside of the need for environmental justice.

Damon Williams (35:22):

We need you to recognize this is your fight too. Hazel's legacy isn't just confined to the Gardens. It is a garden itself.

Daniel Kisslinger (35:31):

A garden that we all have a responsibility to help grow.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (35:35):

She sowed a lot of seeds, so your job is to go out there and to see what she has planted and to reap. To reap that harvest and to grow it stronger and make it flourish. That is what we should be doing. She planted the seeds. She set it up for you.

Daniel Kisslinger (35:55):

Over the course of this show, you're going to receive so many of those seeds, so many of the tactics, strategies, and approaches to building relationship that Hazel sowed for us. And by the time you reach the end, we hope you'll know, one, how to help the legacy of Hazel's work in the Gardens continue, but also be ready and able to see the garden you live in and the ways in which environmental racism is poisoning your garden and endangering your people. And then we hope you'll take action. That above all else is what Hazel asked of herself and of the people around her.

Hazel Johnson (36:35):

When it's time to act and I look over my shoulder, it's only a hand few. So we don't have the right to criticize when we don't even try to fight the problem.

Daniel Kisslinger (36:46):

When Hazel stood in front of a microphone and made that call to action, she was in some ways right. There really were just a few, but in the decades that have followed as a result of her work, an ecosystem of people committed to the fight for environmental justice has bloomed around Chicago, across the country, and around the world.

Damon Williams (37:06):

Some of the people who have sprouted up in this abundant ecosystem will be our companions on this journey. And they share with us not only how they look to Hazel to inform their strategies and tactics, but also to know how to be. How to be fearless, how to relate to others, how to ask questions, how to care, and how to love.

Olga Bautista (37:27):

What I learned from Hazel and from Cheryl is that it is a very difficult thing to empower folks or for people to find that agency, to create that space so people feel like they could be a leader. It really takes a lot care. People think that a leader has to look a certain way and talk a certain way. Maybe I'm not the most polished. Maybe Hazel wasn't the most polished. Maybe we're not beloved in our community because people hold on to these ideas that women should suffer in silence.

(38:11):

You have to have a tough skin to be a woman in this situation because they're not used to taking orders or having a leader that is a woman of color. I can't tell you how many times people have shown up to meetings and told me, "What you should be doing, Olga, is..." I'm sure Hazel is getting it all the time. I'm sure. I'm sure of it, just as that I sit here doing this show with you, that that was happening to her because it happens to me almost daily. And if we hadn't had Hazel pave the way for everyday people to say that this is wrong and I deserve better and it's not my fault, it's probably like the hardest job I've ever had to do in my life, but it's also one of the most important jobs

Juliana Pino (39:05):

As a person who struggles with pessimism, I try and recenter my work in love as a way to resist that win on white supremacist's agenda of invading my mind and making me feel like there aren't possibilities by remembering that with love and care and community at your back, anything is really possible. That's definitely something that I take from her and from from Cheryl in the approach to this work every day. That's something I think about every day.

Professor David Pellow (39:34):

She just had this aura. She has this commanding presence and commanded respect. Hazel didn't take no lip, no guff off of anybody. I don't care who you were. Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, the head of the EPA. She told it like it is and like it was. She was just a great leader and someone who was really wonderful to observe and watch and learn from.

Juliana Pino (39:57):

This is resistance in real life, and this is happening right here, and the legacy of this work is still here.

Daniel Kisslinger (40:03):

Now that we've got you, us, Cheryl, the cabinet, and this ecosystem, we're equipped to go deeper.

Damon Williams (40:13):

In episode two, we uncover the history of the land Altgeld Garden sits on, how Hazel got there, and how she started her work.

Daniel Kisslinger (40:20):

On episode three, we dive into her early fights scrapping with state power.

Damon Williams (40:24):

In episode four, we see Hazel become a mother of the newly coalesced environmental justice movement and take EJ to the highest halls of power.

Daniel Kisslinger (40:33):

On episode five, Hazel passes the baton and we see PCR overcome attack, disrespect and blackballing.

Damon Williams (40:41):

And in episode six, we follow where her legacy lives in Chicago's EJ struggles today and how we're left with the mission to actualize the legacy Hazel envisioned.

Daniel Kisslinger (40:52):

All right, we're ready to go on this journey and we're going to leave you with a final piece of Johnsonian wisdom from Hazel and Cheryl.

Cheryl Johnson (41:04):

Living in your own shoebox is better than living in anybody else mansion, but you have to take care of your own shoebox so you could continue to live in. She said, "But I know I may not do it in my lifetime," but at least she setting the ground for it to continue. Oh, how she should say that? She used to say...

Hazel Johnson (41:26):

How can I fight something that I don't know what's going on? But if I'm here, I can fight the problem. I know what's going on. And that's the reason why I stay here, because I like to fight for my rights.

Damon Williams (41:44):

All right, now it's time for us to help this garden grow.

Daniel Kisslinger (42:04):

Help This garden grow is presented by Respair Production & Media, with Elevate and People for Community Recovery.

Damon Williams (42:11):

The show is hosted and created by us, Damon Williams and Daniel Kissinger. Our co-executive producers are Sylvia Ewing, Anne Evans, and Cheryl Johnson.

Daniel Kisslinger (42:19):

Our associate producer is Natalie Frazer. Our editor is Rocio Santos, and our consulting producers are Maurice and Judith from Juneteenth Productions.

Damon Williams (42:29):

Special thanks to our creative cabinet, Adella Bass, Olga Bautista, Tonyisha Harris, Juliana Pino, and Kyra Woods.

Daniel Kisslinger (42:37):

Our artwork is designed by Areanna Egleston, with additional multimedia support from Davon Clark.

Damon Williams (42:43):

Help This Garden Grow was recorded in the Malik Alim Studio at the Breathing Room Space, a movement-building center stewarded by the Let Us Breathe Collective.

Daniel Kisslinger (42:52):

You can find out more about the work of Respair Production & Media at respairmedia.com, get in tune with Elevate at elevatenp.org, and support the work of PCR at peopleforcommunityrecovery.org.

Damon Williams (43:06):

Much love to the people.

Daniel Kisslinger (43:06):

Peace.

Daniel (00:00):

If you were driving down the Bishop Ford and you passed Altgeld Gardens, you might not even know it. There's no sign, no plaque, no monument pointing you there. But what you may have noticed was the smell.

Kyra Woods (00:17):

So one of those things that I thought was normal was the smell on the expressway. I always knew as a kid where we were in the ride, even if I had fallen asleep based on the smell in the car.

Beria Hampton (00:29):

It smelled like almost a fart that just don't go. It is just in the air indefinitely. You know where you are because of that smell.

Orrin Williams (00:39):

Driving from the south, you knew you were back in Chicago because of the smell. But I could be sleeping the car as a little guy and go like, "We must be almost home."

Daniel (00:52):

Welcome to episode two.

Damon (00:54):

They should have never built this.

Joy West (00:59):

The experience comes back to me, even now when I drive south on the Bishop Ford. Every now and then I get the whiff of the putridness of the air and it brings back childhood memories actually, that trigger in me summertime when we would just smell a putrid smell, but we didn't know what it was. We thought that was just a part of our environment. There wasn't anyone saying, "Yeah, that smell is coming from a landfill." I didn't know where it was coming from. I had no clue.

Cheryl Johnson (01:41):

I didn't think about the smell. It just became... It was normal to have poor air.

Beria Hampton (01:44):

What I learned about from Hazel, what caused that smell is different industries that surrounded us were pumping out a lot of pollutants and using the areas for illegal dumping of different chemicals, carcinogens that lead to skin disease and things like that. As far as the smell coming, she would just point out that it's not right. Probably not having the scientific correct terms to use it in, but she did let us know that it was a problem even up till now. You can periodically, especially when it gets warm, that's when you really smell it. It's not as bad as it used to be, but it is still present.

Damon (02:25):

And this is true for me too. Growing up, I remember driving after school down the Bishop Ford every day, and it would be almost like a game in the backseat of the car of time to get our windows up, time to hold our nose, and who could hold their breath the longest. And that smell, understanding that this is something that is putrid and not right, but not having a lot of answers is really my starting point and going deeper into this story.

Daniel (02:50):

So how do we get here? We're the most obvious marker of an area of our city is the smell that makes your nose burn. Before we get to Hazel's arrival in our story, we got to go way back because to understand her story, we have to understand the land where the story takes place.

Cheryl Johnson (03:10):

All this beautiful space out here. Won't catch me out here to coyotes. I'm telling you, we got chanted forest at two o'clock in the morning.

(03:20):

There's document that we have beavers in this water too.

Daniel (03:23):

It's a warm, beautiful summer day in Chicago. And we're seeing the gardens and the talks of donut overall with a whole new perspective from the water. We're joining the environmental nonprofit, Open Lands and a whole bunch of other Chicagoans for a canoe ride on the little Calumet River. Learning both about the rich ecological diversity of the area, but just as importantly about the role this waterway played in the history of liberation.

Laura Barghusen of Openlands (03:51):

You're going to put in and you're going to start paddling west. Chicago itself, was a really strong haven for freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad. And there were people in Chicago and also along the little Calumet River right here that would offer assistance. They would offer food, they would offer a place to stay, and they would offer transportation to move freedom seekers, usually ultimately to Canada. So right on the banks of the little Calumet River where you see power lines is where the town farm was and the towns housed and helped to transport people. If it's not too windy, the last site you're going to see is the Indiana Street Bridge. Have you guys all heard of the town of Dalton, which is just right over there? Yeah. George Dalton and his son were abolitionists and they started a ferry that moved people across the little Calumet River where the Indiana Street Bridge is now hundreds of freedom seekers crossed the river there, even though there was no slavery here. At a certain point, there was a fugitive slave law that meant that you had to return freedom seekers to the South.

Damon (05:08):

Was there any documented enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act?

Laura Barghusen of Openlands (05:11):

I think that enforcement did happen because we do have stories. There was someone whose name was Kiper, who was some kind of officer in this area, but he was also part of the Underground Railroad Network. There's an old book called The Wonder of the Dunes, and it has stories from his descendants. So they were coming up looking for people. Definitely. So remember, notice the power lines and that's where the crossing was. Okay, thank you. And with that, we should probably get ready to pass.

Damon (05:48):

As a lifelong Chicagoan, a lifelong Black Chicagoan and somebody deeply connected to abolition, I had no idea that there were waterways or really any major passageways connected to the Underground Railroad here in Chicago.

Daniel (06:01):

So being the nerd that I am, I went to my local library and I tracked down Wonders of the Dunes.

Damon (06:06):

Oh, yeah.

Daniel (06:07):

And let me tell you...

Damon (06:08):

What a wonder?

Daniel (06:09):

Indeed. Before we even get to the Underground Railroad, of course there's a rich history of people who had lived here for thousands of years.

Cheryl Johnson (06:17):

Indigenous people used to live in this land before they even built all their towns.

Daniel (06:21):

Some of the sovereign nations that existed in the Calumet region were the Mascouten, the Miami, the Potawatomi, the Illinois, the Chippewa, and many more. By the early 1800s, as the European settler colonial project reached the Lake Michigan region, the Potawatomi and the Illinois Indians were drawn into conflict as their territories grew smaller and smaller. A huge battle took place on the banks of the Calumet River at the southeastern foot of Blue Island, near where the electric powerhouse now stands.

(06:50):

After that battle, the trail from Riverdale to Blue Island near the Southern Bank of the Calumet was called Bloody Trail by the Potawatomi. After the Treaty of Prairie Duchenne in 1829, the US claimed to own all the country on the east side of the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the Wisconsin River. After the Black Hawk War, which is a whole other podcast that we would love to make. But for the interest of time, we won't go as deep. A final treaty was made with the Potawatomi, Chippewas, and Ottawas in 1833. This final treaty legalized the theft of this land and brought it into the US Colonial project officially.

Damon (07:27):

And as a concession, and let's call it a symbolic concession, the Potawatomi were permitted access to hunt and fish along the waterway, which to me reads as insulting. So we also found some stuff about that. Constable Kiper, she mentioned, some real interesting stuff here. So many of us traced the origins of modern policing to the Fugitive Slave Act and the state sanctioned practice of tracking, chasing, and kidnapping people who had escaped bondage. And so we got a real interesting character here that we feel is not only historically significant, but could be a good lesson for maybe how we need to approach some institutional realities today. So let's talk about Constable Kiper.

Daniel (08:05):

Let's get into it.

Damon (08:06):

So from what we can tell, Constable Kiper had a real good reputation and folks would come looking for him when they were looking for their "Property". And the reason why Kiper was the man back then is because he would take folks on the most extensive searches.

(08:19):

So folks would come up to Illinois, they'd be like, "Yo, let's get with Kiper. We know we going to find him." He would take folks through Indiana for miles and miles on their wagon and no stone would go unturned. And then folks would be satisfied and exhausted by the search, go on their way, and continue looking. And then Kiper would come home and the very people he was supposedly tracking and helping search for would be stored away in his cellar. And he would be feeding them and taking them to their next stop on the Underground Railroad. So before we even get to the freedom making work of Hazel, this land already has this rich history of liberation and resistance.

Daniel (08:53):

It also has in between Kiper's time and Hazel's time, one of the most massive scale ups of heavy industry that the world has ever seen. And this is not by accident. As Chicago became a hub of the US' industrialization, the Calumet region was assigned that duty and that burden of being where the industrial infrastructure would be developed and housed.

Olga Bautista (09:16):

The southeast side of Chicago, which is along the Calumet River, is really built for industry.

Daniel (09:22):

That was Olga Bautista longtime Southeast side resident and environmental justice activist. Bob Ginsburg, another longtime EJ movement participant in the region agrees.

Bob Ginsburg (09:32):

The first steel mill was 18... Wisconsin Steel, 1871. A 105th and Terrance, somewhere around there. It wasn't even part of the city of Chicago. It didn't became part of the city of Chicago, 1888. It was rural. There were still farms there. In the 1880s, people had animals grazing in Lake Calumet. You had Coke ovens at a 109th and Stony. You had steel mills just west of Altgeld. You had all the trucks, you still had the Ford plant. So you have all this stuff down there, plus the landfills. It would make sense that there's a health impact you couldn't necessarily prove that was due to the pollution because that's where it always was. And for many people there, remember back in the early 80s, you still had 10, 12,000 people working at US Steel South Works. Those people are willing to put up with the pollution because their jobs depended on whatever was there. That's where they lived.

Damon (10:28):

So as public health expert, Dr. Linda Ray Murray describes this is the environment in the 1940s that the US government and the city of Chicago decides to build the public housing development, Altgeld Gardens.

Linda Rae Murray (10:39):

Altgeld Gardens sits in the middle of an industrial area that's over a century old. So again, remember when Hazel first started, we still had steel mills running. They're shut down now for economic reasons. So you not only had active industry actively polluting the air, and water, and soil like the steel industry and foundries, et cetera, but you had the wastes.

Daniel (11:01):

Here's Juliana Pinot of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization describing the how and why of the construction of Altgeld Gardens, which opened in 1947.

Juliana Pino (11:11):

I define Altgeld Gardens as a historically Black community that was placed there by the government because they, as the government, were building some of the first public housing in the United States and wanted a place to put Black war veterans. And that's the place that they chose, regardless of what was already around it.

Linda Rae Murray (11:31):

The government knew that this land was highly contaminated before they built the first housing on this unit. They knew it, but they decided to do it because it was a greater need. Veterans from World War II returning back to Chicago, didn't have a place to live.

Daniel (11:46):

In later episodes, we'll get to all of the modern pollution of the last 30, 40 years, but there was so much damage already on that land, air, and water before the first shovel ever broke ground to build Altgeld Gardens. Cheryl, Bob Ginsburg, and Deborah Shore, who is the director of region five of the EPA, breakdown some of the OG pollution that was there before the gardens were even constructed.

Cheryl Johnson (12:12):

George [inaudible 00:12:14] used to operate his sewage farm in this area. Think about it wasn't no regulation to whatever the discharges that he was putting in the sewer and into the little Calumet river.

Deborah Shore (12:24):

The treatment plant was there long before the public housing development was there. The treatment plant was built in the late 1920s because it was remote. When we think about environmental justice, it was really the Chicago Housing Authority that decided a public housing development should be built right across the street from a wastewater treatment plant.

Bob Ginsburg (12:53):

And that's where they built public housing for returning Black soldiers, which tells you an awful lot about this country.

Damon (13:01):

In learning how Altgeld Gardens was built on pollution and contamination. It actually teaches us so much about how the United States was built on racism. This all-black community didn't end up in this dangerous environment by accident. Throughout this nation's history, we see how so many of our structures and spaces are shaped by the real impulse to subordinate, separate, and dehumanize Black people and other marginalized communities. And so what we see is the same people and institutions responsible for the harm and environmental degradation are also the entities who chose to place a Black community in this space. And so as we take this look at how segregation operates, we learn that it's not just about distance or senses of superiority, it's about serving the needs of institutional power. And we see the harmful impact of these intentional choices as described by Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington.

Sylvia Hood Washington (13:54):

It was still legal to segregate Black people. So it was built to get African-Americans to support the war industry and to get them away from integration of predominantly White working class. And so they were supposed to basically live in that area, and work in those industries in that area, and go home, and be self-contained. Come on, Chicago is considered one of the most racially segregated, if not the most racially segregated community in the United States.

Damon (14:27):

And Olga breaks down what this reality really means for the southeast side.

Olga Bautista (14:32):

We live in a city that treated one neighborhood one way, another neighborhood another way. In [inaudible 00:14:38] Indiana, it's literally poor White people. I remember Confederate flags still being flown on porches. And in South Chicago, generations of Mexican-American families and Altgeld Gardens, Black folks. But what do we all have in common? One, we're all working class. And two, we're all trying to have a job that's going to be able to keep our families fed, keep a mortgage paid, keep the rent paid, send the kids to college. We all had the same goals in life. We're all being treated differently, but we've all been led to believe that we were each other's enemy, that we were supposed to be competing with each other. That way of structuring the Calumet region really did benefit the industry, really kept us separate. And I'm just glad that we've gotten to a place where we're able to recognize those divisions that were created so that we didn't organize together.

Damon (15:45):

Wow.

Daniel (15:45):

Yeah, that's such a great point.

Damon (15:47):

Yeah, really profound. I think we move past that of, yes, oppression, segregation, these harmful systems. It's not only the initial harm that is of great impact, but the conditions that they create actually reduce our ability to connect with each other, to organize, and resist. And so this is how these cycles are able to perpetuate themselves and continue on.

Daniel (16:10):

So that's the foundation and the soil that the gardens was built in.

Damon (16:13):

But the truth is, for many people, particularly in the mid 20th century, a space like Altgeld Gardens was seen as moving up, a nice place to be, almost like suburban in its imagination.

Daniel (16:25):

Joy West and her family moved in a little over a decade after the gardens was built. And she talks about how in some ways the gardens was a bit of an ideal place to live.

Joy West (16:34):

I am told that my mother originally moved to Altgeld Gardens in 1960. I'm told that our family that was living in Bronzeville at the time, my grandmother and our family home, which we visited every Sunday, even when we lived in Altgeld Gardens, they learned that there was a housing project. A beautiful housing project on the far south side of Chicago that they thought my mom might be able to secure a unit in the area and raise her family there. It was just a good space for us. There was a school nearby. Our family had recently become Catholic. My grandmother lived near Holy Angels, which is now our Lady of Africa. At the time it was said to be very safe. I remember hearing that the Black Panthers had just started a breakfast program in the gym at Our Lady of the Gardens. There was some social services.

(17:40):

And so I think we were rooted in that community, even though it was a isolated and still is a very isolated community, I don't know that there was any desire to move from that community because we thought we had everything we needed. When you hear people talking about I didn't know I was poor, I think I've started to sense that I was poor when the bus for Elizabeth Seaton High School picked me up in the gardens. And some of the students on the bus would make comments about the small backyards, or the clothes that were hanging out on the lines, or the incinerator.

(18:26):

There were little incinerators. And so I think that's when I realized that this was a poor environment because we had so much love in our home. And then my second recognition of being poor was I had taken a trip to Europe, European quarter in Augustan College and I had a sociology course. And in that sociology course, our professor talked about public housing and the way the houses were designed. Like there were not closet doors or the light fixtures did not have coverings over them, just some of the scaled back designs in public housing. And I remember sitting in that lecture thinking, "Oh my God, I grew up in public housing." I had no idea.

Damon (19:11):

So when we started this project and really learning about environmental justice at large, we expected to hear people talking about soil, and air quality, and a bunch of chemicals. And that is also part of this conversation. But with Cheryl, and really what Hazel teaches us is that environmental justice is about people and at the center of people's lives is housing, shelter, and where they live.

Daniel (19:34):

And especially in this case we're talking about public housing. And not just the physical realities in public housing, but the political realities and the social perceptions that people both in and outside of those communities have about what it means to live in public housing.

Cheryl Johnson (19:50):

The stigmas that associated with Altgeld is the bias perceptions that they had about people that live in public housing. For an example, we government dependent, we don't want to work. That's the biggest myth that I ever heard in my life, that people in public houses don't want to work. Communities like mine have been redlined to not have those equal opportunities. And I can say during this housing crisis we are experiencing today, people in subsidizing public housing are the only population in this country that is really paying 30% of their income for housing needs. Many other families and people are paying more than 50% of their income just to have housing. And that ain't right. That's just not right.

Daniel (20:43):

So the next time you hear that conflation of public housing equals free housing, that almost always is not the reality. All right, back to Cheryl breaking down how this affects folks who live within public housing.

Cheryl Johnson (20:55):

Anytime there was a valuable structure in the Black community, our government played a significant role in the destruction of it. And I remember our management company telling my mother that any of her sons over 18 years old can no longer be on the lease. Then it went to any of your children. And that practice is still distinctly as being practiced today that people don't even challenge. Force removal. And that was the same way to even move in public housing in the sixties, is that you had to be a female headed household.

(21:33):

So if you was married, guess what? Your husband couldn't move in public housing. So when you look at these systemic and institutional discrimination, and here in Chicago there's a tendency of us just accepting what they give us. And not even knowing your basic tenant rights related issue for an example. Environmental rights that you should have equal environmental protection like any other community in this country or if you want to talk about it globally. So when you don't know those things, people are just scared to fight back because they fear the repercussion that may be negative towards them. But if you understood your rights, that limits your fear.

Damon (22:21):

So now that we know a little bit more about Altgeld Gardens and the context of the environmental realities there, let's get back to our hero. And so we're going to learn so much about the organizing efforts and all of the fights that Hazel brought to this space. But first, Cheryl's going to tell us a little bit more about her mother's story and where it all started.

Cheryl Johnson (22:45):

My mother was born January 25th, 1935 in New Orleans at Cherokee Hospital. And she lived there up to, she got 13 years old. My mother come from a family of five, but she became an orphan at the age of 12. My grandmother contracted tuberculosis from working in one of those industrialized laundry facility for hospitals. And back then there was no cure for TB. My uncle got bit by rat and he passed away like three or four months old. Her auntie was stillborn. And another uncle, he died six months later after my grandmother. They didn't want my mother to get TB, so they had to declare her a bad girl to put her in one of the bad girl Catholic schools. She lived there one year after and she moved to California. Then when she was 16, she dropped out and went back to New Orleans.

Daniel (23:53):

When and how did she find her way to Chicago?

Cheryl Johnson (23:55):

Well, she was working at one of those large produce companies and that's where she met my father, John Johnson. She had her first two kids there and she moved to Chicago in 1956.

Daniel (24:13):

What brought them to Chicago?

Cheryl Johnson (24:15):

Because my uncles and auntie had relocated from Mississippi to Chicago.

Damon (24:20):

I want to go back to your grandmother a little bit. So you named it now that her passing from tuberculosis was directly related to her work environment and an industrial workspace. Was that something your mother knew as a child, or did the work later inform that and she recognized it? Do you get what I'm saying?

Cheryl Johnson (24:44):

No. My mother always knew that she worked at a laundry facility and that's what caused her to have tuberculosis. And when epidemic of TB, they didn't think about wearing respirators and stuff like that, or protecting their workers. They had to work and wash those sheets, and materials, and send it back to the hospital. And also my mother made the connection because where she lived in New Orleans, it wasn't not too far from Cancer Alley where all the petroleum companies was located in New Orleans. So she was able to make that distinction later on in this work. To say, wow, she been around environmental problems probably all her life and didn't recognize it.

Daniel (25:36):

So just quickly, you heard Cheryl mention Cancer Alley. Cancer Alley is an 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. About a quarter of all of the country's total petrochemical production as well as several pipelines, oil refineries, and other gas and oil operations exist in this 85 mile stretch. ProPublica reported in 2021 that in parts of Cancer Alley, the estimated lifetime cancer risk is up to 47 times what the EPA deems acceptable.

Damon (26:04):

That's not great.

Daniel (26:06):

No, not great. Okay, back to the timeline. Hazel's made it to Chicago. How did she end up in Altgeld Gardens?

Cheryl Johnson (26:13):

See, the only reason why you could move in Altgeld at that particular time, you had to come from a family that had veteran status. My uncle had veteran status and my mom used to come out here in apartment that you rented rooms. Tenement. She used to live in that. So she used to always come out here, just thought this place was one of the most beautiful places that she ever seen and that she would love to raise her kids out here. So March 18th, 1962, she moved in Altgeld Gardens. And my brothers and them was very ecstatic because they never had their own bedroom. And not to be living with another family because she said I was one year old and one week old when she moved in Altgeld Gardens. That's why I know the date so well.

Linda Rae Murray (27:00):

I'm not sure if you guys know this, but Altgeld Gardens was famous when it was created. It was touted at. The first lady of the United States came in to Illinois. So when Hazel and her husband moved in there, they thought they were moving into a model environment.

Daniel (27:18):

The whole family moved into a unit. Hazel, John, and all the kids, including Cheryl. Many of Cheryl's early memories in the gardens are about her father.

Cheryl Johnson (27:28):

My father was a laborer. Matter of fact, my father built one of the schools out here. So I could remember when I used to be in our annual parade and my father used to sit on the curb close to the parade route. And when I got in front of him, boy, I tried to do my best. I tried, "Hey, daddy, look at me." And I also remember when my father, I never told anybody this, but I went out and pick a fight with a girl because my daddy never seen me fight. And I went out there and fought the girl and she beat me up. And I went back and said, "Daddy, daddy, did you see me fight?" He was like, "Yeah, baby. I see you get your ass whooped."

(28:11):

I started crying. I was a daddy's baby. So I started crying, felt all broken up because he told me that. But I was just happy. He ain't never seen me fight. Ain't that terrible? Because my father died when I was eight. Then she started making a connection that my father, he died of lung cancer and he was diagnosed March of 1969. And he passed away June 24th, 1969.

Hazel Johnson (28:44):

Then I looked around and seen where so many people were dying of cancer, plus my husband.

Cheryl Johnson (28:52):

Well, my mother just started talking to our neighbors and finding out that kids as young as two years old, three girls that really got my mother in this movement, they didn't have one cancer, they had multiple cancer. And each one of them didn't live past the age of five years old. I know she always talked about, one was two years old and she was so little she could still fit in a shoebox. My mother just said, "There's just too many people in her neighborhood that is suffering with cancer. Something wrong."

Hazel Johnson (29:25):

And I was looking around and I'm hearing this person had cancer, that person had cancer. I want to know why so many people was having cancer.

Cheryl Johnson (29:33):

And she did her own personal research and that's when she discovered that we was living on the land that was once a landfill of industrial chemicals. The government knew, but the people didn't know. No, the people didn't know. She founded PCR June of 1979. She started the organization to deal with a lot of infrastructure deterioration that was happening Altgeld. At that particular time we had a resident council called the Altgeld Local Advisory Council, and they had failed to really address those critical issues. So she decided to break away from the residential council and form PCR.

Damon (30:17):

So she just mentioned the LAC. The Local Advisory Council is made up of residents of the gardens who are elected to be a decision making body connected to the Chicago Housing Authority. They're going to come up a lot. Just put a pin in that. We'll get back to them.

Daniel (30:31):

So when Cheryl says that Hazel founded the organization, that doesn't necessarily mean that all of a sudden it was like a big fancy nonprofit with offices downtown overlooking the lake, and a big staff, and all that. What that really meant was that Hazel started asking a series of very important questions, what's causing all these health effects and who's responsible? These are the same questions that she demanded answers to for the rest of her life.

Sylvia Hood Washington (30:59):

She was the salt of the earth. She's an everyday person, not with all these credentials.

Daniel (31:05):

That's Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington.

Sylvia Hood Washington (31:07):

But she's smart enough to understand that the issues that they were having at Atlgeld Gardens were not the issues that they had in Louisiana on a farm. They came up north knowing already what a clean environment was like. It may have been racist. They may have been running for people trying to lynch them, and rape them, and stuff, and castrate them. But they had a food source that was good. They had clean air, they didn't have asthma, they didn't have cancer, didn't have any of that stuff. They came up north and all of a sudden people are getting cancer. But Hazel was smart enough to know there's something wrong with this environment.

Cheryl Johnson (31:41):

She went to the library a lot. And she also talked to a lot of people who provided her books and research papers. Our living room became her office and she had papers and books. We used to always complain like, "You got all this around the house, Mama. Get this out the house."

Damon (32:08):

This is an environmental hazard.

Cheryl Johnson (32:09):

Yeah.

Damon (32:10):

You're cluttering my environment with this research.

Cheryl Johnson (32:14):

Our house was cluttered with papers and information that people sent to her.

Daniel (32:21):

So it seems like the work from home situation was not exactly tenable.

Damon (32:25):

And for young people out there, you got to remember, this is before internet, home wifi, there was no Zooms. Work from home was a different reality in this time.

Daniel (32:34):

Also, I love you said young people like we were alive then.

Damon (32:37):

On the fence. On the fence.

Daniel (32:39):

Walking that line.

Damon (32:40):

So for the young people out there, there's just a bunch of papers lying around her living room that she xeroxed and photocopied from the library.

Daniel (32:48):

As wild as that sounds, we also went to the library. The PCR archives are housed at the Woodson Regional branch on 95th and Halstead. In the stacks, we found this letter that Hazel wrote in 1986.

Damon (33:02):

"Dear Mr. Williams..."

Daniel (33:04):

Not you?

Damon (33:05):

No, not me, Mr. Williams. This is a historical Mr. Williams from back in the day. "Dear Mr. Williams, we, the people for community recovery are requesting office space at the address of 916 East 131st Street to carry on our much needed work with our health and environmental project. Since the project requires health and environmental monitoring that has to be done, as well as a lot of research, it is impossible to do that work from our home. Also, the granting foundation requires that we have an office space. Therefore, we hope you will consider our request as soon as possible. Sincerely, Hazel M. Johnson."

Daniel (33:41):

We don't know exactly what letter she got back, but we do know is that less than a year later, a letter was sent from a lawyer named Leslie Ann Jones to James Thomas, who is a lawyer for the Chicago Housing Authority. The tone has changed a little bit.

(33:54):

"Dear Mr. Thomas, that's my lawyer voice. As you may know, I represent Hazel Johnson and people for community recovery. PCR is a community group comprised almost exclusively of community residents, and Johnson is one of PCRs leaders. PCR has been in the forefront of the active citizens' effort to clean up the air, ground and water pollution, which plagues the area. Mayor Washington himself has commended Hazel Johnson and PCR for the crucial fight they're waging. Since October 1986, PCR has been trying to obtain office space at Altgeld Gardens. Unfortunately, PCR has been met with bureaucratic stonewalling and harassment mostly from the local advisory council, but also from CHA itself.

(34:38):

More troubling is that there is some indication that the LAC is against PCRs activities because the LAC receives contributions from Waste Management Incorporated, which as you may know, operates one of the nation's few PCB burners within a good ball throw of Altgeld Gardens. PCBs are one of the greatest health hazards known to man. And waste Management has been a target of PCRs demonstrations and complaints. Of course, it would be decidedly improper for CHA property funded as it is by federal dollars to not be leased to community groups on the basis of the content of that group's speech. I ask you to look into this matter and contact me as soon as possible. Thank you. Leslie Anne Jones, Attorney at law."

(35:22):

Just a few months later, our third and final letter in the series is addressed to Commissioner Artensa Randolph of the Chicago Housing Authority.

Damon (35:31):

"Dear Ms. Randolph, enclosed are the petition signed by the residents of Altgeld Gardens for the removal of the Altgeld Gardens local advisory council executive board members. The residents feel that the LAC are not representing the community as they should. For further information, please contact Hazel Johnson at 468-1645." She said, call me if you got questions. Hit my line.

Daniel (35:55):

That phone number is not valid, by the way. So things escalated a little quickly. The LAC was not removed in that moment, but Hazel was able to get access to an office in Uptop. Their office isn't in Uptop anymore. That's actually the result of a win, believe it or not, one of the biggest fights that PCR had, which we'll get into in depth next episode. But the PCR office today is back in an apartment in Altgeld Gardens. It's not the same apartment that Cheryl or any of the other staff people live. But yet again, there's piles of papers in the corner of a bedroom, and one bathroom being shared by the staff, and a reception desk in the dining room.

Damon (36:34):

Whether historically, whether right now for PCR, or for other organizers in environmental justice and other justice based movements, one of the most valuable things we can do is make and offer space for people to do the work.

Daniel (36:48):

Just a few blocks from that space was where we put boats in the water at the beginning of this episode. Before we got in the water, participants circled up to learn more about the area and Cheryl jumped in.

Cheryl Johnson (37:00):

Right in front of my old office in a yard that, you know where that little tree was? All right up in there. They had to clean that up from DDE and DDT.

Beria Hampton (37:10):

Wow.

Cheryl Johnson (37:11):

So when you think about chemicals, y'all, there's a comedian that talk about baba kids. They don't die, they multiply. I use that analogy for chemicals because they don't die. They multiply. And they have a half life of maybe 500 years or more. And who the main people that plays in the ground, in the yards, and everything is our babies. It's just a soup of environmental contaminants in this area that we need to study. And they didn't know what to do.

Beria Hampton (37:44):

Is Altgeld Gardens doing anything? You know what I mean?

Cheryl Johnson (37:44):

We've been doing it for 40 years trying to get to clean up. But when you public housing, when you federal government, it's a bureaucracy that you go through. The authority would deny that it exists. So you always have to prove that something already exists that they already know. They know it was there. They knew they should have never built it, but now it's an open lab. We just need to test it and learn from it because we have to learn from the mistakes we made in the past. So we won't do it again in the future.

Daniel (38:15):

While I was busy paddling, soaking up the sun, and pointing out herons and egrets to everybody, "Oh, there it is. There's the heron. Look right ahead. Cutting right across the water."

Speaker 19 (38:24):

Yep.

Orrin Williams (38:29):

There's a blue herring, y'all. Look. Blue herring.

Speaker 19 (38:30):

Oh yeah, there's an egret.

Daniel (38:31):

Damon stay behind to talk a little more with Cheryl and her friend Freddy.

Damon (38:36):

Did you?

Cheryl Johnson (38:38):

Oh, yeah. That's what come down here. Those are barges. But see, I wouldn't be kayaking out there or be in a canoe, when there's big boat that carry garbage. That's why it's not fit for human consumption and recreation really. Ain't no telling what's in there, what that river's growing. This is 19 miles of waterway that surround the [inaudible 00:39:01].

Speaker 19 (39:01):

In some kind of way.

Cheryl Johnson (39:01):

The Army Corps for Engineers are supposed to be dredging and cleaning it up.

Speaker 19 (39:09):

That's what I thought.

Cheryl Johnson (39:09):

How could you do that when you still letting barges come on. And these barges are still using diesel fuel and all that stuff. They're not using biofuels or nothing like that. This water will never be healthy, so why not produce some energy from it?

Damon (39:22):

Yeah.

Cheryl Johnson (39:22):

We'll never drink that water. We'll never... That water's going to always be contaminated.

Damon (39:28):

Speaking of that water, were people fishing out that water, the people eat that fish?

Cheryl Johnson (39:31):

Yes. You see them down there right now, don't you?

Damon (39:33):

Yeah, I did.

Cheryl Johnson (39:34):

You can't stop what historically was a feeder for our community.

Damon (39:38):

But ain't that dangerous? Ain't that water contaminated?

Cheryl Johnson (39:40):

Well, you know what? Yeah, but people think they can cut out the tumors and all that stuff. It's a judgment call. That's why you don't see no advisories out here to let people know that they fishing at their own risk.

Damon (39:53):

Shouldn't it be?

Cheryl Johnson (39:53):

It should be.

Damon (39:54):

Yeah.

Cheryl Johnson (39:57):

It should be. But it's so many battles.

Damon (39:57):

Yeah.

Cheryl Johnson (39:57):

This is a food source for people. We in a food desert.

Damon (40:02):

Yeah. And the concern over the quality of the water, the health of the fish, and the health of the people eating the fish is not new. Hazel wrestled with those same contradictions.

Hazel Johnson (40:12):

I have told people some years ago, do not go over to that river and fish because it's a little of everything is in that water.

Cheryl Johnson (40:26):

I don't want to advocate for poison fish.

Hazel Johnson (40:29):

Yeah.

Cheryl Johnson (40:32):

But people been eating that poison fish for a long, long, long, long time. So just like I said, I've been living in this community all my life.

Damon (40:40):

For me, change and transformation comes from reconciling contradiction. And that's what's happening in this story and in this place. As we learn about Altgeld Gardens, it both was idyllic and toxic. A collective safe haven and an isolated community. The coexistence of oppressive disregard and a commitment to liberation. In sitting there with Cheryl, I was clearly seeing those contradictions play out as she was naming the damage to the air and to the waterways. We were also experiencing the regeneration and repair.

Daniel (41:14):

We were seeing birds that haven't been at the little Calumet River in decades returning and making new homes. We were seeing vibrant plant growth on the tops of landfills. And we were seeing fish swim around the drainage pipes that run into the river.

Damon (41:29):

And I would say most significantly, as we sat there on this warm, beautiful summer day, what was notably absent was the smell. The smell that my grandmother smelled, that my mother and her friends smelled, that was a notable part of my childhood on this day was not there.

Daniel (41:48):

And so we're pushed to reconcile the contradictions that people who live in the gardens have to every day. What does it mean to live in a community on stolen and poisoned land? And how do you fight to make it healthier for you and the people you love? Not just to be able to survive a little longer, but to grow towards freedom.

Damon (42:07):

The lessons from that freedom making are literally in the air we breathe. And because of Hazel, her community, and her movement, on that day, the air smelled sweet.

Daniel (42:35):

Help This Garden Grow is presented by Respair Production and Media with Elevate and People for Community Recovery.

Damon (42:42):

The show is hosted and created by us, Damon Williams and Daniel Kisler. Our co-executive producers are Sylvia Ewing, Anne Evans, and Cheryl Johnson.

Daniel (42:50):

Our associate producer is Natalie Frazier. Our editor is Rocio Santos. And our consulting producers are Maurice and Judith from Juneteenth Productions.

Damon (43:00):

Special thanks to our creative cabinet, Adella Bass, Olga Bautista, Tonyisha Harris, Juliana Pino, and Kyra Woods.

Daniel (43:08):

Our artwork is designed by Areanna Egleston with additional multimedia support from Davon Clark.

Damon (43:14):

Help This Garden Grow was recorded in the Malik Alim Studio at the breathing room space. A movement building center stewarded by the Let Us Breathe Collective.

Daniel (43:23):

You can find out more about the work of Respair Production and Media at respairmedia.com. Get in tune with Elevate and elevatenp.org and support the work of PCR at peopleforcommunityrecovery.org.

Damon (43:37):

Much love to the people.

Daniel (43:38):

Peace.

Newscaster (00:00):

Welcome to Matter of Fact from Chicago, the latest stop on our listening tour where our special correspondent learned the forgotten history of the environmental justice movement and about the woman who made it all happen.

Damon Williams (00:16):

This is one of the countless times Hazel, Cheryl, and PCR went on the news to advocate for their work and to make it understandable to a wider audience. And as a way to break it down, Hazel came up with the perfect term.

Speaker 1 (00:29):

The toxic donut.

Hazel Johnson (00:31):

I'm used to calling this area a toxic doughnut. We sit in the center of it, and we're all surrounded by all types of pollution.

Damon Williams (00:45):

Welcome to Episode Three.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:48):

From the Center of the Donut.

Bob Ginsburg (00:51):

Hazel was the one who owned that term. Just the same as the word thriller goes with Michael Jackson. You say thriller, I immediately think of Michael Jackson so, therefore, it's his term. It was a very good term for focusing on Altgeld Gardens.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:08):

Yeah, and we agree with Bob Ginsburg. The term is super apt. On the PCR website, there's actually a map of the area with Altgeld Gardens sitting right in the middle, and then it shows these concentric circles no more than a couple miles in diameter.

Damon Williams (01:23):

So sorry for all you visual learners out there.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:25):

It's a podcast. What can we do?

Damon Williams (01:26):

Audio format. If you look at this graphic, these concentric circles actually look like the most disgusting donut you could ever imagine.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:33):

Within those circles sits an almost absurd concentration of industry causing environmental devastation. Cheryl breaks down the harmful ingredients in that toxic donut.

Cheryl Johnson (01:44):

She did a personal research, and she was able to find out that we have 50 documented landfills in our area. We have 250 leaking underground storage tanks, still leaking today. We have over 300-something hazardous operation, whether it's processing chemicals, storing chemical, burning chemicals, and then you have chemical waste management who operate a PCB incinerator. And the reason why she learned about it because she called the Environmental Action organization that was located in Washington, DC, and it was very surprised to hear a widow of seven children, living in public housing, and Black talking about the environment, air quality issues, land issues, water issues for this area.

Daniel Kisslinger (02:37):

When we say Hazel asked questions, we don't just mean she asked them passively. Hazel demanded answers. And even having the answer wasn't enough. Once she started to get answers, she started asking new questions. How do we address the effects of this toxic donut? Who's responsible? And what could she and the people around her do from the center of that donut to try to address, remediate, and repair the harm? Those questions, so central to environmental justice around the world, emerged for Hazel as she started to try to understand the connections between the seemingly disparate harms that surrounded her community.

Juliana Pino (03:20):

Because their work was grounded in the real experiences of community members, they were able to draw all these different pieces like the manor homes not getting the proper water and sewer lines, all the way to asbestos in some of the buildings, all the way to "Oop, here's toxic incineration," and "Oh, over here, we have dumping." Many EJ struggles are really focused on one facility or one point of pollution. What I think is remarkable about Hazel's work is if you even look at the really early stuff, there's this constellation of things that are happening to community members, and Hazel and the folks organizing with Hazel were like, "No, we're fighting about all this. None of this is acceptable."

Daniel Kisslinger (04:02):

What Juliana Pino just said is such a big part of what makes Hazel's work so important. It's also part of what makes telling the story kind of hard. Usually, when people are telling stories about environmental justice, they're talking about one fight, one year, one campaign, one set of players, one side of harm. But Hazel's legacy is so much bigger than that.

Damon Williams (04:24):

And that is such a valuable lesson that we can all learn from Hazel, the importance of connecting the dots even when the connections are not clear or when there are forces telling you that those connections do not exist. Hazel embodied the commitment to understanding the whole of our environment.

Daniel Kisslinger (04:40):

In order to understand the whole, Hazel had to understand each of the parts. And so that's what we're going to do on this episode. We're going to go through a bunch of the different campaigns, struggles, fights that PCR led and participated in, many of which Juliana just mentioned, going all the way back to the beginning of their organizing work. Cheryl kind of serves as our guide on this one, breaking down each struggle and its importance to the work overall. Let's get started with Maryland Manor.

Cheryl Johnson (05:11):

It started when we had a community meeting at the Catholic gym, and couple of residents from Maryland Manor came to the meeting, and they explained to my mother that they were still drinking well water. And she was surprised to even hear that, within the city of Chicago, people were still drinking well water instead of filtered water from the city.

(05:38):

Robert Shaw was the alderman at that particular time. She started talking to him, telling to him about their story, and the fact that they was paying taxes on a water and a sewer line that they never had for 25 years. And she was able to get the ears of Harold Washington at that time. And he was stunned to know, just like when she was stunned to learn, so he got in contact with the state to get them to appropriate funding to be able to get the installation of a water system and a sewer line over there to Maryland Manor. That was our very first environmental victory. Their well water was highly contaminated.

Daniel Kisslinger (06:28):

So the two takeaways that I heard in there were, one, Hazel already connected to folks who were living outside the gardens. Maryland Manor is nearby, but it's not technically within the same development. And then also this taxation... forget about representation... without water access. People were paying into the infrastructure of the city without getting any of the benefits from it. It took going all the way to the mayor who himself had no idea that this was happening within his own city to make anything happen. Now, any Chicago history buff or, honestly, just anyone from Chicago knows that this mayor is not like all other mayors. This is a very particular mayor we're talking about.

Harold Washington (07:10):

I don't support the rights of people because I'm a politician. I support the rights of people because it's deep within me, a natural part of my own development. I am the result of 400 some odd years of struggle that when people cry for help, whether Chinese cooties, or South African Bantu, or serfs and Russian, or South African held in bondage or gay and lesbians pushed around, that I'll be there and defending them and supporting. That's just no big deal. That's what the fight is all about, and that's what we're all about. I will be your mayor for the next 20 years.

Damon Williams (07:53):

Harold Washington's legacy loomed so large over our city and country as one of the most historical political figures to ever come into office. And we learned that Hazel actually supported the organization of the campaign that got him into office.

Cheryl Johnson (08:08):

Well, my mother was actually a volunteer to help with the campaigning of Congressman Harold Washington to get him elected as the mayor of city of Chicago.

Daniel Kisslinger (08:19):

Now, that's actually not that surprising based on who Harold was and how he became the mayor.

Damon Williams (08:23):

Harold went up against an explicitly racist and, in many ways, corrupt, infamous political machine here in Chicago with a broad-based coalition rooted in grassroots organizing and building off the legacies of civil rights and other social movements of the '60s and '70s.

Daniel Kisslinger (08:39):

Him and Hazel were both kind of peers in that way, wouldn't you think?

Damon Williams (08:42):

Yeah. They both really came of consciousness in this transformative time where what does it mean to be Black, what does power mean, how do people respond to and/or accept or stop accepting oppressive systems, so it really makes sense to see them emerge or kind of ascend into their work in the same time.

Daniel Kisslinger (08:59):

Kind of simultaneously.

Damon Williams (09:00):

Yeah. And Harold was definitely significant in their next big fight.

Juliana Pino (09:06):

One of my favorites, because that's the kind of nerd I am, is the ban on landfills. That's huge. By itself, that prevented so much harm.

Cheryl Johnson (09:15):

My mom was able to demonstrate it that there was 50 documented landfills in that area.

Damon Williams (09:20):

Unlike a lot of the environmental hazards we listed previously that existed before the gardens, the process of opening and dumping into landfills continued after the gardens were constructed and after people, and families, and children had moved in.

Daniel Kisslinger (09:34):

And not just in the gardens. Longtime EJ activist Bob Ginsburg shares the story of an unlikely resident in the middle of one of these landfills.

Bob Ginsburg (09:42):

CID, the big landfill down there was only opened in the late '60s. And back then, you still had one person who had a house in the middle of CID who refused to sell, so you could actually drive into the middle of the landfill to get this guy's house. I think he eventually sold. There's something to be said for that. Even if you know you're going to lose eventually, you're going to hold out as long as possible.

Cheryl Johnson (10:06):

She felt that we bear the burden of enough landfills in our area, and there need to be a way to stop any new developmental or expansion of landfills. So it was a coalition of organizations that worked together. We had the Citizens for a Better Environment, the Southeast Environmental Task Force. There was a group in Jeffery Manor, I can't remember what that name was. It was Center for Neighborhood Technology. It was the city of Chicago Waste Disposal Coalition. They all crafted a ordinance to be submitted to Chicago to put this moratorium on any expansion or development of landfills on the southeast side of Chicago.

Damon Williams (10:53):

And so this chapter of Hazel's story teaches us a very important organizing lesson about how to build, engage, and contest power. It's an age-old tactic, very straightforward direct action and civil disobedience.

Hazel Johnson (11:06):

In fact, I went to jail. Me and Greenpeace group, was 17 of us, we chained ourself and we stopped 57 trucks that day from coming in. But after all the media and everybody left, them waste management had us arrested for trespassing.

Damon Williams (11:24):

This lesson is important because, in our representative government, unfortunately, every person or every group can't just write an ordinance and then enter the formal proceedings of our different legislative houses.

Daniel Kisslinger (11:36):

Yeah, if I just write an ordinance, city council doesn't have to talk about it the next day.

Damon Williams (11:40):

And so in this direct action of waste management, we learn its importance as it allowed them, one, to name, harm, and oppose the institution perpetuating it, but also to raise awareness and attention for the issue, and to put pressure on those who do have the power to pass legislation.

Daniel Kisslinger (11:58):

Ultimately, a moratorium on new landfills, not just on the southeast side but in Chicago overall, was passed by Harold Washington. This was a landmark policy, not just because of what it meant for landfills, but because it was an example of the city government of Chicago acknowledging, responding to, and setting policy around the needs of a grassroots environmental justice group. That's why, as Juliana said a couple minutes ago, this fight was so important.

Cheryl Johnson (12:26):

Under the Daley administration, he rescinded that ordinance, but because of community pressure from many of the environmental groups in the city of Chicago, and not just grassroots but the environmental community in Chicago was able to get that moratorium reinstituted. And to my understanding, this ordinance still is in effect today, where there's no landfill can be built in the city of Chicago or expanded.

Damon Williams (12:58):

This effort actually exposes to us the larger pattern of environmental racism and teaches us what environmental justice is.

Daniel Kisslinger (13:05):

Tell me more, Damon.

Damon Williams (13:06):

So across the country, whether it's efforts in Texas or North Carolina or New York, you'll see that the placement of landfills and waste disposal facilities were intentionally placed in Black, Brown, immigrant, and working class communities. This did not happen accidentally. For many people, when we dispose of waste, it becomes invisible. But those hazards don't disappear. They often are dumped near or in the communities of the peoples whose struggles are also invisibilized.

Daniel Kisslinger (13:34):

This type of zoning shows us how we think about disposability both for people and for material goods because of the work of Hazel and people like her, where those materials were disposed of had to shift. Hazel said, "My community is not at the margin. My community is in the center, the center of this toxic donut, and our lives are not to be thrown away. But the solution to that specific landfill, if, as an economy, we don't change our processes, just shifts where the garbage ends up."

(14:08):

Here's Olga Bautista from the southeast side who named this in a way that really changed our thinking.

Olga Bautista (14:14):

My friend, Elise Zelechowski, talks about people just throw things away. Like she says, "But where is away?" Away is in Third World countries that take waste like batteries and electronic wastes. And it's just a way for us, right? It's throwing it away, but for a lot of people, it's their neighborhoods. It's where Black and Brown people live, almost always, or poor people.

Daniel Kisslinger (14:43):

That concept of away is so important when we think about coalition. If Hazel was only focusing on Altgeld Gardens, the answer would be just put it in another part of the city. But because what was needed to get the moratorium passed was to work with people all over the city, the campaign was able to fundamentally transform how Chicago worked as a whole.

Damon Williams (15:05):

And so something else we can pull from this landfill moratorium is the tension and oftentimes conflict between the needs of community and the demands of capital.

Daniel Kisslinger (15:14):

Right. If you're going to have a steel plant or a processing plant, they're going to have to put their byproducts somewhere.

Damon Williams (15:20):

So we will continue to unpack this tension as we move through this story of the way in which we passively and sometimes actively support industry and its role in our society.

Daniel Kisslinger (15:30):

But the harm that Hazel was experiencing didn't only come from private industry. The very materials used to build the gardens had the potential to be just as damaging to her family as well as being dumped in the landfill across the street.

Cheryl Johnson (15:45):

We had a lot of peeling paint in Altgeld. And from our training that we received from the University of Illinois primary health initiative or something like that, discovering that lead-based paint and particularly peeling paint dust was harmful to kids. And we had a lot of kids in our community that tested positive. So, originally, it used to be a kid level have to be at 100 before you could get the city of Chicago to respond. Then it went down to 50. And we know that lead has no purpose in our body and our body shouldn't be having it. And we knew how detrimental at 50 was. That was a group that PCR was a member of. It's called the Lead Elimination Action Drive. So, we advocated for lead levels of the city of Chicago to be reduced down to 20.

(16:38):

At that particular time, we had the Chicago Legal Clinic who was representing us, and he wrote a lot of lead reforms for the city of Chicago Housing Authority to initiate because, if they did initiate it, then we was going to sue. So, CHA came up with a recommendation to eradicate lead out public housing. So they created a report card that shows where all the risk factors were, from window sills to doors, to peeling paint, and it also gave recommendation on how to protect your family and who to call in case you suspect your child is lead poisoned.

(17:19):

Then we learned that most of our hot water pipes that was exposed in our unit was wrapped in a casing that looked like a cast that was asbestos. So we started advocating to CHA again that, "You must remove the asbestos because, once it's exposed, it's airborne." So what we was able to do with CHA is to work with them. They relocated families into different units that were safe while they did the abatement in the unit. And once the tests come back clear, our families will move back into those units.

Damon Williams (18:00):

Just from my understanding, you just said that the water was running through lead pipes wrapped in asbestos.

Cheryl Johnson (18:07):

The heating pipes that was exposed in the ceiling was wrapped in asbestos.

Daniel Kisslinger (18:12):

But they were lead pipes that were wrapped in asbestos.

Cheryl Johnson (18:15):

Of course, they was lead pipes, yes.

Daniel Kisslinger (18:18):

Kyra Woods, who's part of the creative cabinet for the project and also works for the city of Chicago, speaks to the impact of that lead and asbestos abatement work.

Kyra Woods (18:25):

As a commonly used item and I guess material, rather, for buildings, it may have been phased out at some point and that was already kind of happening but to say, "No, this is a known carcinogen and harmful to our health, you've let it stay here. Knowing that you built this place with it, that's foul." And her ability to challenge that, get those things removed across the entire community, really important and I know catalyzed that work as we think about the work nationally for health of public housing as well, and understanding that that still needs to be quality housing even if it is more affordable.

Daniel Kisslinger (19:08):

Lead isn't only a problem of the past and, definitely, isn't only a problem in public housing though, of course, it is still present for many of those communities.

Damon Williams (19:16):

The Guardian reported Chicago has an estimated 80% of homes with water connections made of lead more than any other city in the nation. The awareness of that reality matched with a lack of political will to address it is a prime example of how environmental racism shows up in our world and destroys our communities.

Daniel Kisslinger (19:35):

It's come to the forefront of local politics in some ways. It was one of the central pieces of Lori Lightfoot's campaign in 2019 and, somewhat unsurprisingly, it didn't all get fixed. In fact, as of the end of 2022, the city had only switched out 280 of an estimated 390,000 lead lines that provide water to Chicagoans. So, if you're in Chicago, make sure you call 311, get a lead testing kit, and if you're based somewhere else, look for the resources that are available where you are to make sure that the water you're taking in is as safe as possible.

(20:11):

Lead in asbestos were the two biggest hazards within the actual construction of the gardens, but they weren't the only things Hazel had to fight to get removed from her house in order to make it safer.

Cheryl Johnson (20:22):

She fought against fiberglass that was used in the attics because, if you get exposed to it, like you try to dig those fibers out your skin, and it was, unfortunately, I was the one that my brothers then used to put in the attics to get [inaudible 00:20:39] and stuff down, and I used to come out itching for days. So when she fought to get that removed, I was so happy. And that's when she worked with Barack Obama.

Damon Williams (20:53):

All right, so we got a namedrop there.

Daniel Kisslinger (20:54):

Yeah, Barack Obama, you might have heard of him.

Damon Williams (20:57):

We're going to get a little bit deeper into the Obama story later, but for now, this is how he first showed up in the gardens and the southeast side.

Cheryl Johnson (21:04):

We had Our Lady of the Gardens Catholic Church. The Catholic priest organized an organization called DCP, Development Community Project, and he was hired to work with them. He came out into the community and wanted to do a community meeting with the leaders in the community. But at that particular time, the leaders was not receptive. When I say the other leadership, that's the leadership of the residential council that we have out here that are duly elected. People just couldn't walk in the gardens and say, "I'm going to do anything," without having the permission from the leadership in the community. So, it was one of those incidents that he came out and he was ridiculed by that leadership that they didn't want him around here. From the understanding of my mom, she said she stood up because she was so amazed to see... I think he was like 22 years old, a Black man that was standing up to talk about issues in our community at that particular time. From there, they developed a relationship. They started talking about the environmental conditions in the community.

Hazel Johnson (22:11):

We didn't have that many men, and to see him, really young man that come out to work with a bunch of women, I thought that was awesome.

Damon Williams (22:22):

When President Obama says he began his political career as a community organizer, this is what he's talking about. And when I get deeper into that story, it gets a little messy, y'all.

Daniel Kisslinger (22:31):

A lot's been written about that mess, and we will give it the time that it deserves, but the mess is that PCR was forced to clean up were way more important than the interpersonal conflict that emerged a couple decades later.

Damon Williams (22:44):

So we're going to keep going through the organizing struggles that Hazel, Cheryl and PCR led, but let's just take a moment. I want to check in with you, the listener. For me, for Daniel, hearing this story, telling this story has a weight.

Daniel Kisslinger (22:58):

Yeah, the air is heavy in the studio.

Damon Williams (23:00):

We don't want to rush past the real impact of the people most directly harmed, but also the impact of hearing and learning about the dangers and hazards in our environment. So I encourage you, just take a deep breath in, ground yourself wherever you are, release some of the tension if you find it in your body, and breathe in through your nose and calmly release.

(23:29):

So we thank you for taking that breath with us and grounding. We want to be intentional as we continue through the story because, now, we're going to learn about one of the most grueling fights that Hazel, Cheryl, and PCR led in response to one of the most significant acts of environmental racism documented on our planet, the dumping of PCBs in the middle of Altgeld Gardens.

Joy West (23:52):

I started to hear more about the impact of the environment from my sister when she started talking about the lawsuit that everybody was talking about and this levy money that some of the residents who had been exposed to toxins in the environment and had high rates of cancer, high rates of asthma, because of that exposure, they were going to get paid.

Damon Williams (24:18):

So the idea at this levy money that Joy West is referring to comes from the belief within the community that there was this imminent cash payout settlement on the horizon in response to the realization that PCBs were dumped in the community.

Daniel Kisslinger (24:31):

Before we get into that lawsuit and the complications of it, we got to break down what a PCB even is and how it became a problem in the gardens. According to a fact sheet from environmental group, the Clearwater, PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls are a group of 209 different chemicals which share a common structure. According to the EPA, PCBs are a probable human carcinogen, reasonably likely to cause cancer in humans. Studies of PCBs in humans have found increased rates of melanomas, liver cancer, gallbladder cancer, biliary tract cancer, gastrointestinal tract cancer, and may be linked to breast cancer.

(25:12):

In addition to cancer, people exposed directly to high levels of PCBs either through the skin, by consumption, or in the air, have experienced irritation of the nose and lungs, skin irritation such as severe acne and rashes, as well as eye problems. PCBs can also cause developmental effects. People exposed to PCBs before or during pregnancy can give birth to children with significant neurological and motor control problems, including lowered IQ and poor short-term memory. Exposed children are also found to have decreased birth weight and head size. PCBs can also disrupt hormone function. It can affect menstrual cycles and sperm counts, while also impacting people's immune systems and affecting their thyroids. In short, PCBs can cause significant damage to pretty much every system in the human body.

Damon Williams (26:06):

So how did the PCBs get there? Well, what had happened was... so the Chicago Housing Authority stored discarded electric transformers in a yard in the gardens from the mid 1970s until 1984.

Daniel Kisslinger (26:19):

What on earth is a transformer?

Damon Williams (26:21):

So this reminds me of that scene in the Departed. I don't know if you all saw the movie, but it's when they do like the big sting operation about the microprocessors, and Martin Sheen's character's like, "Microprocessors, we all heard of them. No one knows what they are, but in 20 odd years, we'll be at war with China over them."

Daniel Kisslinger (26:38):

Excellent, excellent, terrible Boston accent. Really great work, Damon.

Damon Williams (26:41):

So, yeah, electric transformers was kind of like that. We see them, we may have heard of them, but many of us don't know what they are. Just basic definition, a transformer is a passive component that transfers electric energy from one electrical circuit to another circuit. So, basically it's those boxes you see on the poles that connect the power lines.

Daniel Kisslinger (26:59):

CHA had a whole bunch of these transformers that were no longer in use.

Damon Williams (27:02):

But here's the kick, they contained copper components and copper is very valuable for resale. As CHA employees took copper from the transformers, they then dumped the PCB-filled oil from the transformers into the soil around them.

Daniel Kisslinger (27:15):

It was this process of breaking down these transformers for the materials for resale that released the PCBs into the environment in the gardens.

Damon Williams (27:23):

It's important to note that the CHA did make multiple attempts to clean the site between 1984 and the mid '90s but those efforts were incomplete.

Sylvia Hood Washington (27:32):

By the time they were dumping and continued to dump in there, they already knew the impact of PCBs on human health.

Daniel Kisslinger (27:38):

That's Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington.

Sylvia Hood Washington (27:41):

Even knowing that they allowed them to dump that waste inside of a community around schools. It's horrifying.

Cheryl Johnson (27:50):

It started in a little shed, then they spread it all the way across the street where it had two day cares. They went south, but they didn't go west or north to sea because it's all under the ground of that complex where our commercial strip, better known as Up Top is located. It's all under there. They didn't go under there. They didn't raise no buildings. Our goals was we wanted the PCB cleaned up, so there was no detection of PCBs, but that didn't happen.

Damon Williams (28:25):

So, are there still PCBs now? Is that what you're saying?

Cheryl Johnson (28:28):

I would say that it is. For an example, they was only going to go six feet into the soil for remediation. We said, "No, you need to go farther than that. You need to go where there's no detection." And we organize around and pressure them. They ran them, having to go 20 feet into the soil and they was hitting the bedrock. Once it hit the bedrocks, it's in the waterways. So only thing they could do was gravel it in, sealed it up with some cement and put new soil and grass. What about the expansion of it?

(29:01):

And I used to make the simple argument that this PCB grew up with me, and I'm the same size when I was born? No. I grew and expanded, so don't you think this chemical expanded. And this is why you have to expand to where there's no detection of it.

(29:28):

If we can go back and do soil sampling in that area right now today, it would test high for PCB contaminants.

(29:36):

I want everybody to be clear. That PCB cleanup and that lawsuit associated with it, we lost because we wasn't able to... the attorney was not able to connect with the type of health issues associated with polychlorinated biphenyls. We know it causes cancer, but he didn't make that connection good enough where we really lost that in court. And we lost it because we wasn't able to connect health issue to it. But because PCB is a highly regulated chemical compound and it required... once it has been identified in community, there's our procedures that the owner must do. CHA failed to do that grossly for decades. That's when the judge awarded a settlement to residents in the form of rent credit.

(30:37):

So the money that you won still went back to CHA, and it's just difficult to really tell someone who's probably having rent problem not to take this offer. So when the first person took the offer, that opened the schlow doors for them to say that this is the way that people going to accept this as settlement. It was said that we, PCR sold the community out. It was told that my mother received $1 million. It was told that we received a lot of money, which comes to be unfounded, untrue.

(31:18):

And when you talk about money in the poor community, that's a divisive strategy at itself. When you have elected bodies to represent the community either go against its own community residents and organization on the behalf of the establishment who caused the contamination to exist in my community, that's a problem within itself. I'm talking about the local advisory council. They fought against us. It brought us to the conclusion, after going through that experience that litigation for a class action lawsuit, we would never be involved with, but we will be involved in lawsuit that effect change in the community, not so much putting money in people pockets because people perception, negative perception that because you brought this colossal to the community, that you're entitled to a whole lot of money, which is not true. And that wasn't even our ulterior motive anyway because ulterior motive was to get this stuff cleaned and not our community. That's what we wanted.

(32:27):

There was a secret meeting, a teleconference I think at that time it was called... it was on the phone... that the government would give us anything we want if we get off the soil contamination in Altgeld. Who plays on the soil in our community all the time? Our babies. And we said no.

Daniel Kisslinger (32:43):

So even if there was $1 million, but the PCBs were still there, it still would've been a loss, you know.

Cheryl Johnson (32:49):

A loss, right. We're still at loss.

Damon Williams (32:51):

This also just sounds painful and heavy, and it sounds like a lot of manipulation at play. So, if you could just reflect on how that impacted you, how that impacted your mother at the time, and how that impacted community members and their relationship with each other. I can imagine there would be a lot of conflict or a lot of confusion navigating through all these players.

Cheryl Johnson (33:14):

Oh, that's such a understatement. The abuse that I see my mother had to go through getting this case litigated... a couple of times, I have seen my mother cry. I was able to have any witness the abuse that she went through from elected officials and other community leaders, but she stuck to her ground. Many times, she had me on her side, she just didn't know I was ready to box. You don't talk... You don't disrespect my mama." She used to grab my hand like, "You okay. Be okay." I was like, "No, this ain't okay." But I learned from her. She didn't let that even bother because she said she know the truth of what she does. She would tell you she don't give a F about what other folks think about her. She just care about what impact these things are doing to our community.

Damon Williams (34:14):

So let's just unpack some of what Cheryl walked us through. We came into this project and into that specific conversation with Cheryl, thinking about the efforts of PCB cleanups as this great win, as one of the major victories of PCR.

Daniel Kisslinger (34:28):

Yeah. It's like, on their website, listed as one of the great accomplishments, which there are aspects that are incredibly impressive that they managed to get some sort of restitution or response.

Damon Williams (34:38):

And us knowing about it at all-

Daniel Kisslinger (34:39):

Right, right.

Damon Williams (34:40):

... because there was no investment to even paying attention in the first place.

Daniel Kisslinger (34:43):

Right.

Damon Williams (34:43):

But for us, it was actually really impactful for her to name this as a loss from a very vulnerable place.

Daniel Kisslinger (34:50):

Yeah, I mean, I think Cheryl has this incredible humility around understanding what this fight led to and how the results were perceived by many people in the gardens. We heard from Joy that her sister was talking about this levy money coming. And for people who are living in precarious economic conditions, that levy money could take on all kinds of meetings. What is this going to make possible?

Damon Williams (35:14):

And so from there, the conclusion that Cheryl and PCR came to of how they will approach institutions and institutional resources is a really valuable but complex lesson of the role of money, of settlements, of cash payments in justice work because it lives in this conundrum. The people who are most likely to be harmed by institutional systems are those with the least resources, but the conditional access to those resources is intended to demobilize the necessary resistance work and for those in power to escape accountability. And that's something I've seen play out in different realms. So that's something that families who've lost loved ones to police violence wrestle with deeply, and there's not a consensus on how to approach it. But we have to question the way money and cash payouts can be used as a manipulative tactic.

Daniel Kisslinger (36:01):

That being said, they didn't even get any cash in this.

Damon Williams (36:04):

Y'all.

Daniel Kisslinger (36:04):

That's the other side of it.

Damon Williams (36:07):

As we tell people about this story working on this project, folks always ask like, "Well, did they get anything? Was there any repair? Was there any settlement?" The fact that the CHA, the Chicago Housing Authority that caused the problem that dumped the PCBs in the first place got the money. Did you all hear that? The money went to rent payments directly to CHA, so the people did not get a check, did not have autonomy, could not choose to spend on groceries, on education, on healthcare cost. It all went back to the harmful institution.

Daniel Kisslinger (36:35):

That's wild. A credit no more than $1,000 paid back to CHA for rent. Joy West puts it best.

Joy West (36:45):

It seems to me a small price to pay for all that was a part of the exposure to the toxins in the environment.

Damon Williams (36:55):

In many ways that is a tragedy.

Daniel Kisslinger (36:59):

And when you understand the human cost, it kind of challenges this idea of campaign wins and losses like that feels almost too small or limiting as a way to understand the impact of Hazel's work.

Damon Williams (37:11):

You're right. I get bothered a lot of times by the win-loss binary. This isn't a war simulation. This isn't a game. This isn't a season. There's no score of win-loss records. Hazel was not fighting some rival team. She was working for her people. She was working for answers.

Daniel Kisslinger (37:28):

Here's creative cabinet member Juliana Pino from LVEJO.

Juliana Pino (37:32):

I love a dogged woman, like a woman who puts up with nobody's problematic stuff and who's going to push the way in which they not only identified what was going down, but also they made connections and lateral links that, in the EJ movement, were also rare. So, they did like worker organizing. They started thinking about retraining. They started thinking about remediation. They started thinking about all these different aspects all at the same time. So it's also, Hazel was dogged and needed to know why, but the woman was brilliant.

Daniel Kisslinger (38:11):

And from that brilliance, there's so much we can learn, but in order to do so, we have to see the circle that Hazel saw. She was able to see each of these toxic chemicals, each of these corporations, each of these decisions that led to harm as components of a larger hole. These are the pieces that create the donut. And with that understanding, she was better equipped to address all of it. Here she is at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Justice convening in DC talking about what this cumulative understanding makes possible and how people and organizations in power don't approach it that way.

Hazel Johnson (38:51):

Our area has been the dumping ground for 163 years. When I went to Illinois EPA, they didn't have no intention for me to be in there, but I think that was an accident for them to put my name on the list. They was concerned about 201 chemicals that's being emitted in the air. The majority of these chemicals was causing cancer. It was causing some kind of nerve disorder. Now just think about it, all they concern is about what one chemical could do. But if they would put all these chemicals together and do a study, imagine they'll know what's going on, but they don't want to do that. All they do is just give tests one chemical at a time. But we are demanding for them to do a mixture of chemical. Even if they just mix up 10 of them is better enough, less known 201.

Damon Williams (39:54):

What Hazel is describing is a framework known as cumulative impact. And Kyra Woods breaks it down for us.

Kyra Woods (40:00):

There are scientific limits placed on the quantity of a particular material or ingredient that can be allowed in something. But what is frequently measured is that item or that chemical in isolation. And what becomes difficult is the burden of proof that is required with cumulative impacts. And that is where things get dizzying and deadly. It's not just about asbestos, it's not just about lead in the water. It is not just about the singular thing that the EPA threshold says is allowable, but it is the fact that, en masse, you are accumulating so many of these burdens that you actually make it impossible sometimes for the impacted community to actually place blame appropriately.

Daniel Kisslinger (41:04):

Bob Ginsburg.

Bob Ginsburg (41:05):

Keep in mind, back in the '80s, we're still trying to figure out how to measure cancer. 10 years before, the law was something called the Delaney Amendment, which came after about saccharine. It was this artificial sweetener, and it was caused [inaudible 00:41:18] cancer. And Delaney Amendment said no level of a known carcinogen is acceptable. And of course industry said, "Well, we now can measure really low amounts. What is the real risk?" The business will want to have a number. And they get below that they have legal protection. So when we looked at cancer levels, it was obvious people were exposed. But all this, every single study showed there wasn't a really big increase in cancer because the scientific tools weren't there. They were exposed to carcinogens, lots of them, but each one would may not have been at the right level. There were lots of metals in the air but all below the limits.

(41:58):

And so trying to see if you were exposed to 10 different metals that are toxic at some level, but you're not meeting that level, the science, the way of testing and evaluating says, "We can't evaluate that." By the late '80s, EPA set up a Southeast Chicago Project out of the regional office, and that was disbanded a few years later because they said there's a greater risk for people living north and close to the expressway than all the people living next to the landfills and the air pollution and everything else in the southeast side because we can measure that.

Dr. Murray (42:36):

It's bad science. Let me just say that it's bad science. And so being trained here at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, I spent hours and hours with workers, all workers, steel workers, and that's one of the things that they made clear and the environmental justice movement really stands as part of and on top of that struggle among organized labor to try to protect their workers. And so I think some of this goes right back into how we think about western science. And then on top of that, we set up a regulatory system that's designed to protect corporate profit. So you get into this notion, you have to show that this company is causing harm. This goes back through American history. In a typical industrial plant, you might have a hundred thousand different chemicals. It'd take 100 years to figure out which one of them. In all likelihood, it's more than one and it's probably some new chemicals that get made when they come together.

(43:27):

When you have a scientific problem, the question is what are you trying to do with the scientific question you're answering and what are you going to use to get to the answer? If you center human beings on your scientific endeavors, and I'll just say as a physician, that's got to be critical. If you're not centering living beings, human beings and other living creatures as a center for why you're asking the question and what harms you're trying to document, then you start off in a bad position. If you center efficiency and you center profitability so, right away, you're asking the wrong kind of question and you're going to get an answer that doesn't help people or plants or fish or animals with important biological questions. So once you center human health, then you have to be respectful of what we know and what we don't know.

(44:13):

There's so many things we don't know about the intricacies of human health, but when you have people having cancer or congestive heart failure or kidney failure or skin problems, these are broad signs and symptoms that something is going wrong. Again, you don't have to have the exact pathway that a disease is being caused. You can do something to stop the harm, to stop the exposure and see if in fact, that has an impact on the health outcomes you're trying to measure.

(44:40):

So you don't have to have a big debate about where the cancer-causing chemicals are. We know, around Altgeld Gardens, there are literally hundreds of cancer-causing material. It's not like we didn't have a suspect, but you don't have to prove which out of the hundred of industrial toxic waste that existed out there was causing a specific set of cancers in people. Hazel is a perfect example of a community leader that understood this and understood that the hoops we have to jump through with the EPA and this kind of stuff, this legalistic framework that you have to somehow show that chemicals are guilty doesn't make any sense. It is completely against what human beings ought to be concerned with.

Daniel Kisslinger (45:18):

So Dr. Murray names it as bad science, but it's also bad law. And what she says is that that legal structure, just like the science, is rooted in corporations avoiding responsibility. So with the PCBs for example, in order for PCR to "win" the lawsuit, they had to prove that it was PCBs specifically causing those health effects. And part of what made that not possible was not just because they didn't have the people or the studies, it was because out of the hundreds of cancer-causing chemicals in their air, land and water, they couldn't pinpoint specifically that it was only the PCBs causing that harm.

Damon Williams (45:57):

To simplify the institutional defense wasn't that, "It's not that bad out there." Their position was, "It is so bad, there are so many harms that it is not our responsibility and we are not accountable."

Daniel Kisslinger (46:09):

And like Dr. Murray says, that might be all well and true, but there are things we can do if we see the effects to try to mitigate that harm even without having to name which chemical is guilty.

Damon Williams (46:21):

This pattern of compounding is not something foreign to the corporate or capitalist space. This is the primary principle of how to approach profit to compound it upon itself for growth to stack on top of growth. En route of that compounding profit, harm, waste, hazards, violence, oppression is compounded upon the most vulnerable communities like Altgeld Gardens. But then, there's this dissonance when the impact is realized and surfaced in people's day-to-day lives. Now when we see sick children and people struggling with preventable disability, those same people, the corporate or capitalist space disconnect the dots. And we see at this bad science and this bad law that is geared towards protecting profit and powerful institutions demand that Hazel discount the impact on people's lives that she and her community know to be true. And how does she know this to be true? When the institutions we looked to validate information said it was impossible to know because.

Daniel Kisslinger (47:16):

For Tanisha Harris.

Damon Williams (47:18):

She had a different method.

Tonyisha Harris (47:20):

Well, I think she created her own methodology for how to inquire. I think she laid the framework for how to contact your local officials, whether that be government agencies or not. She left a framework for how to organize and build a sense of community and collaboration. She left a framework for how to pester someone until they give you answers. And so I think you could easily follow the steps that she took to get some of the answers.

Daniel Kisslinger (47:54):

And that's not only true for individuals or community groups, the same institutions that Hazel spent her life struggling to get accountability from and who claimed that a cumulative impact approach wasn't valid like the city government of Chicago and the EPA we're also taking notes and now, a generation later, are starting to bring an understanding of cumulative impact to the work they're doing today.

(48:17):

Here's Debra Shore from the EPA.

Debra Shore (48:20):

Right now, our staff at Region 5 is working collaboratively with the city of Chicago Department of Health, with the state of Illinois EPA to develop an approach as to how these cumulative impact health assessments could be conducted and what role people in communities can play. I think it's going to be a year long process that the city of Chicago is engaged in to conduct a citywide impact assessment, but that will help individual neighborhoods know and be able to compare themselves. It's in process now, but we hope we'll be able to establish something that's durable and that will last.

Dr. Murray (49:12):

Hazel is a representative, a symbol, an example of lots of Black women and men throughout our history that have looked at the world, made a rational diagnosis, and tried to make corrections to cure the problem. And that doesn't mean that you have to be unique. That just means that you have to be observant, you have to ask questions, you have to not be afraid to go where you are told you can't go. When I had a chance to talk and work with Hazel, I had an MD by the time I met her in specialized training, but she was clearly more knowledgeable about problems in Altgeld than I was, for example. And she wasn't afraid. She wasn't intimidated by these big shots coming from EPA or anywhere else with all their degrees and technical jargon because she saw through that and asked the appropriate questions.

(50:01):

That courage, the understanding that there's a difference between your technical knowledge and "expertise" on chemicals and her technical knowledge and expertise on the people that lived in her community, on what made people healthy... I mean, she was a mother, I think she had five kids... what you needed to have healthy kids, what you needed to have a healthy community, she was clear about that. And it was clear that what was going on around the toxic donut was interfering with that process.

Damon Williams (50:31):

Dr. Murray offers us this great nuance of, yes, Hazel is a remarkable historical figure, but at the same time, she does not stand alone.

Daniel Kisslinger (50:41):

Looking at this accumulation of Hazel's work over decades, we know that in other cities, other states, other contexts, there were other people asking similar questions, demanding similar answers, and the compounding growth of the environmental justice movement is the cumulative impact of all of this work. What do we take from her work? For Tanisha Harris, it's how Hazel asked those questions.

Tonyisha Harris (51:08):

I think Hazel Johnson saw a problem in her community and wanted an answer, and she talked to everyone she could to find that answer. I think that is the deepest form of curiosity that everyone is capable of. You don't need to know the scientific method. You don't need a degree or formal education. You just need to have a problem identified and talk to as many people as you want to until you get your answers. I think the way she went about it is a great framework for how someone else stepping into this type of space or any type of event inquiry could go about it. There are tactics and strategies, but what started off was very simple. She identified a problem, she wanted an answer. She talked to people to get answers. And I think if there's nothing else people take from this documentary, it's nurturing that sense of curiosity and not stopping until you get an answer.

Damon Williams (52:03):

For me, the lesson is how do we apply this approach of cumulative impact beyond just environmental biohazards to all of the factors that play a role in human health and relationships. So similarly, how environmental justice or organizers and activists are encouraged to separate the effect of PCB, and lead, and asbestos as different issues, we're expected to separate, to disconnect, to unravel redlining from school closures, from mass incarceration to gendered and sexual violence. But this liberatory history teaches us that we can get closer to growing new possibilities once we see those overlaps.

Daniel Kisslinger (52:42):

And the way to connect those dots is to demand that people's expertise that comes from their lived experiences be seen as the most important data of all. That same demand is echoed by Olga Batista and so many other people who work in Hazel's legacy today.

Olga Bautista (52:59):

I sometimes struggle to figure out what is the path forward, but I could tell you, just like Hazel could, that what we have right now is not working. And I will tell whoever I need to tell. I didn't go to college. I went for a couple of semesters. I didn't finish. I'm not an expert in urban planning. I'm not a scientist. I don't know dangerous levels of lead or particulate matter in the air, but I am an expert in my own lived experience. I'm a expert in what is around my family and my community when I'm outside playing with my kids. And I could tell you all day about that.

(53:49):

I could tell you how it smells, like something died sometimes outside. I can tell you that my chest gets tight and my bronchioles start to close when too many semi-trucks come back to back at Rowan Park when I'm playing with my kids. I could tell you that there are sometimes this black stuff that washes on the beach at Calumet Park when my daughter's training to be a lifeguard. Those are things that I see and observe with my own five senses every single day. And that is the experience that I bring that Cheryl and her mother, Hazel Johnson, have shared those powerful stories about the suffering of so many families who have lost loved ones to cancer in Altgeld Gardens like in my neighborhood, all these rare forms of cancer.

(54:47):

Everybody's like, "Doctors don't really know what the life expectancy would be. This is like a rare..." How many times do we have to hear that to know that something is not right here? The fact that I have to smell these smells and that I feel so sick when I should not be feeling sick like this just playing in the park with my kiddo is a huge problem. And like Hazel, I am going to raise the alarm. I'm going to sound that alarm. I'm going to raise these issues until justice is actually served here. Until I see the people who have caused this much amount of pain and pollution are actually found accountable, and we have justice, that we change these policies, that those people lose their jobs. That has to happen.

Damon Williams (55:44):

So just as Cheryl says about the chemicals, they don't die, they multiply. The same can be said about Hazel's legacy. As she fought for folks to understand how these harmful impacts accumulate and compound upon each other, she also left a model for how to compound love. As we hear from Olga, Tanisha, and so many others, the legacy of Hazel Johnson is continuing on through the people working for justice, the people striving to make healthy environments for those they love.

Daniel Kisslinger (56:43):

Help This Garden Grow is presented by Respair Production & Media, with Elevate, and People for Community Recovery.

Damon Williams (56:50):

The show is hosted and created by us, Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger. Our co-executive producers are Sylvia Ewing, Anne Evens, and Cheryl Johnson.

Daniel Kisslinger (56:58):

Our associate producer is Natalie Frazier. Our editor is Rocio Santos. And our consulting producers are Maurice and Judith from Juneteenth Productions.

Damon Williams (57:08):

Special thanks to our creative cabinet, Adella Bass, Olga Bautista, Tonyisha Harris, Juliana Pino and Kyra Woods.

Daniel Kisslinger (57:16):

Our artwork is designed by Areanna Egleston with additional multimedia support from Davon Clark.

Damon Williams (57:22):

Help This Garden Grow was recorded in the Malik Alim Studio at the Breathing Room Space, a movement building center stewarded by the Let Us Breathe Collective.

Daniel Kisslinger (57:31):

You can find out more about the work of Respair Production & Media at respairmedia.com. Get in tune with Elevate and elevatenp.org, and support the work of PCR at peopleforcommunityrecovery.org.

Damon Williams (57:42):

Much love to the people.

Daniel Kisslinger (57:42):

Peace!

Daniel Kisslinger (00:00:01):

Okay, you ready?

Damon Williams (00:00:02):

Yep.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:00:02):

All right, here we go.

Damon Williams (00:00:06):

"We, the people of color, gather together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby reestablish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our mother Earth, to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages, and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves, to ensure environmental justice, to promote economic alternatives, which will contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods, and to secure our political, economic, and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities in land and the genocide of our peoples, do affirm and adopt these principles of environmental justice."

Daniel Kisslinger (00:00:58):

This is episode four.

Damon Williams (00:01:00):

Mothering the Movement.

(00:01:07):

After nearly 10 years of fighting, Hazel Johnson learned she wasn't fighting alone.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:01:12):

By the early '90s, organizations like People for Community Recovery had sprung up all over the country. People were fighting to address the environmental harms in their space just like Hazel was in Altgeld Gardens.

Damon Williams (00:01:24):

And it was clear that this organizing work was not and could not happen in isolation. A movement was emerging.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:01:31):

And the leaders of that movement needed to know each other.

Teresa Córdova (00:01:39):

In October of 1991, various activists came together in Washington, DC for the first People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.

Jesse Jackson (00:01:54):

It's time to build an authentic coalition that represents the people affected. White, Black, urban, rural, poor, working class, for they may dump toxic ways on the poorest side of town today, but as sure as the wind blows.

Audience (00:02:13):

That's good.

(00:02:13):

That's right, that's right.

Jesse Jackson (00:02:16):

That's why there can be no elite environmental movement. It must be universal.

Damon Williams (00:02:22):

Yep, that's Jesse Jackson. It ain't a party if Jesse ain't there.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:02:26):

All right. Back Teresa Córdova, a professor who's also been deeply involved in grassroots EJ work, telling us about the convening,

Teresa Córdova (00:02:32):

What was most important, I think, about that gathering, there were a number of principles, 17 principles, that came out of the gathering.

Linda Rae Murray (00:02:40):

What impressed me most though is the debate around the principles because this forced all groups to broaden their thinking. So, for example, Native American, Mexican American, they had to consider and wrap their heads around the role of slavery in producing environmental injustice. And for African Americans, we had to understand that Native Americans are a sovereign people with treaty arrangement with this government, and so that their role and rights are often defined by those treaty rights. And then we had international folks from South America. We had some people from the Marshall Islands at this conference. So, we had to think about and talk about the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in terms of impacting people's health.

(00:03:23):

So, it required everybody to sort of leave their local struggle, whether it's at a local steel plant or a community organization, and think broadly and talk about other world.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:03:35):

What you heard at the top of this episode was the preamble to these principles, the principles that we already listed in episode one as the defacto definition of what environmental justice is. But, of course, those principles didn't just appear out of thin air. They came from this room of people from all over the world creating this language for their own work, but also for the generations to come.

Damon Williams (00:03:58):

And they were successful in that mission. The principles that came out of this conference became a rubric for future generations of environmental justice work that continues on till today.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:04:08):

The convening also modeled how the environmental justice movement can work. The way that the organizers in that room in 1991 worked together, connected their particular space to global dynamics and struggle, is the way that the environmental justice movement has located its power in the 30 years since. And in this room of leaders, Hazel's leadership was undeniable.

Hazel Johnson (00:04:34):

This is a dream. I told Ben a year ago that I would like to see some people of color. I've been fighting environmental for nine years on a daily base. Mostly everywhere I went, I was the only Black among 3, 4, 500 whites speaking on the environment. And I'm happy to see so many of my sister and brother are here today to fight for this struggle.

Linda Rae Murray (00:05:06):

I've seen her in that setting talk with Mexican Americans, talk with Puerto Ricans, talk with Indigenous people. I've seen her in the process of organizing... She was on the steering committee for that. She was a featured speaker. She played a very prominent role from the dais as a leader of this movement, and then that was critical.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:05:26):

Hazel had so much to give to this convening, but you can hear from her speech at the front of the room how much convening with her people gave back to her.

Damon Williams (00:05:36):

Hazel left this convening with more than just 17 principles and a new sense of community with her contemporaries. She left with a new position, a new honorary distinction, a new moniker, a new name: mother of the environmental justice movement.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:05:51):

Teresa:

Teresa Córdova (00:05:53):

I was there, actually, in that room when this happened. It was when they brought up all these women who might all have been like the co-founders, right? And in sort of Black woman tradition, they all kind of dressed up and they all wore hats, all the women leaders of the movement.

(00:06:08):

I remember the moment of these women parading up there, and I remember how beautiful it was and inspiring and all of that. It was not such a big event that I remember, "We're going to do this big celebration and we're going to name her the mother of environmental justice." I don't remember there being such a moment. As she was coming up, there was a reference made to her as such. It wasn't like there had been a meeting of all the activists and everybody decided they were going to give her this name. But I think if there was one person that everybody had said we all look up to and respect as our elder, it would've been Hazel.

(00:06:45):

Now, mind you, most of these women, at this point, are going to be probably in their forties and fifties, but Hazel would've been probably a generation older than the youngest of these activists. She could literally be their mother.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:06:58):

This honorific, the mother of the environmental justice movement, is what we saw that piqued our curiosity about who Hazel was. It signaled a great importance, a significance, but what does it really mean to be a mother of a movement?

Sylvia Hood Washington (00:07:14):

I'm a mom, and I have two daughters who are adults now.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:07:18):

That's scientist and historian, Sylvia Hood Washington.

Sylvia Hood Washington (00:07:21):

So, when you talk about motherhood, right? You could be a mother in many ways. I'm going to take this from natural birth.

(00:07:28):

So, when you think of a mother, you think about this person who, in a process of creation, co-creation and protecting and sustaining life. And so with Hazel, that's an appropriate title because she brought so many people into awareness. She nurtured them, she developed their understanding of what it was to suffer from environmental disparities, and she gave birth to the foundational frameworks of other environmental justice struggles in the United States and specifically in Illinois. She will be the mother of environmental justice movement because she gave voice and continued to give voice to inequitable responses to environmental health.

Linda Rae Murray (00:08:17):

The reality of what it means just to be a human being on the planet and to understand what your goal in life is, which is to make sure your children and grandchildren flourish and continue and move in the same direction that you're trying to move, I think that that sort of mother wit is why people called her. I mean, there are other women that were leaders at this time period. But I think the reason she got that title is because she basically demonstrated, in a concrete, real way, on a day-to-day basis, that basic, solid, hardcore mother wit that Black women historically have demonstrated.

Damon Williams (00:08:51):

So, this unofficial title brings us to a point of nuance or even a contradiction.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:08:56):

Oh? Is this mean it's time for our contradiction bell?

Damon Williams (00:08:59):

It is.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:09:00):

Yes!

Damon Williams (00:09:00):

So, on the one hand, this moniker really situates Hazel's historical significance and ensures that her legacy will not be forgotten. And that's especially important because we're talking about a Black woman, a Black woman who migrated from the South, a Black woman who migrated from the South and ended up in public housing, a person existing in many intersections that are often marginalized, undervalued, and erased.

(00:09:26):

But on the other hand, and this is true with most movements, the idea of highlighting a single figure may seem to be in conflict with the philosophy of collective power that makes these movements possible.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:09:38):

And so that's why it's super important to think about what does this word mother actually mean, because it's very easy for people to create their own meanings for that word.

(00:09:49):

We got into the nitty-gritty of this with Teresa.

Teresa Córdova (00:09:52):

I think the connotation of mother is founder. She gave birth to it, and she was one of many who gave birth to it. No one of these women are ever going to call themselves the mother, but yet they were all primary leaders in this force.

Damon Williams (00:10:08):

I'm almost curious if a shift in the article of the sentence, how that reconciles the tension between the mother and a mother of the modern environmental justice movement. As I hear you describing it, and you use the traditions of Black women, I think to the Black... you see even name the regalia and the hats. I think of the Black church and often there are mothers of the church, there's usually more than one. They're not expected to be the founder or the person that put the cornerstone down on the building, but it's how they show up in this collective nurturing and this presence that builds up and is almost, to use the metaphor, like gardening up humanity.

Teresa Córdova (00:10:48):

Actually, if I can comment on that, that's actually really helpful to me, too. That feels like that really honors her because I think people did look up to her in that way. She was sort of an elder in that way, right? Well, actually, I can't say it better than you just said it.

Damon Williams (00:11:03):

So, I appreciate Teresa's affirmation there, not only because I'm a sucker for validation-

Daniel Kisslinger (00:11:08):

Who isn't?

Damon Williams (00:11:09):

... but also because I think in that conversation, we're moving towards reconciling this contradiction of a central figure versus this ethic of nurturing, of care, of gardening up humanity that we see Hazel embodying. And I think it highlights the importance of motherhood in shaping our world and shaping our communities, not just in the biological sense or in the household. But mothering is our highest ideal of care and love. Nothing goes beyond a air quote, "mother's love." And I think that's something we all need to strive for, not just in our interpersonal relationships, but how our political structures are organized, how our economy is governed, should be filtered through this ethic of love.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:11:50):

Yeah. What if we built our social structures around this idea of mother wit, of how we take care of the people we love? What would that make possible? Now, of course, I mean if you're listening, you know us by now, this idea comes with its own set of contradictions.

Damon Williams (00:12:06):

If you reconcile one contradiction, you got another one coming.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:12:08):

Ring the bell.

(00:12:12):

Because when we talk about mothering, there is typically a gender position assigned to that role. Those responsibilities, both in a traditional family model but also within the environmental justice movement, have sat on the shoulders of women.

Damon Williams (00:12:26):

And so we have to be careful and conscious because in attempts to celebrate this beautiful, sacred practice of nurturing and care, we can actually be replicating systems of marginalization and exploitation of physical and emotional labor.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:12:41):

Yeah. The idea that care and love and fighting for your children is quote, "women's work" abdicates that responsibility from all of us and erases all of the ways that people across the gender spectrum have always been doing this type of care work.

Damon Williams (00:12:58):

And that assumption is not neutral. The idea of women being the caretakers comes from exclusion from the formal economy.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:13:05):

Juliana Pino speaks to some of these contradictions and also the history of how these roles were assigned and some of the implications on how we even see environmental justice work now.

Juliana Pino (00:13:15):

In raising the complexity here around mothering and womanhood, and especially the environmental justice movement, it is important to acknowledge, just by the numbers that women, predominantly women of color are the anchors of the EJ movement. I think something over half of all self-identifying EJ orgs are led by women. Significant early leadership of the movement, you have Karen Schroeder and Love Canal. You have Hazel Johnson. You have Margie Richard and Norco, that's also nicknamed Cancer Alley.

(00:13:45):

There is this origin of the EJ movement in everyday experiences, and that women, because they're more likely to be poor and because they're more likely to be in charge of the household, historically have been the first to reach awareness of environmental injustices in their daily lives, and the first to start to organize around them, seeing the impacts for themselves and their children. And so there is a way that because socialization has put women in roles of care, that women then are the route, in a sort of historical sense, to the origins of the movement, to organizing around the movement. And in many ways, that sort of household resistance, combined with data and transparency efforts coming from cis men, led to some of the earliest reports on the patterns of EJ injustices. So, that's true. That's very much true.

(00:14:36):

Now, as a queer person who recognizes that gender is a social construct and that people come to their identities around gender partly out of socialization and resistance to socialization, in my mind, I think about this as more about who holds the roles of care in community rather than just about somebody's gender. And so you also see spaces of resistance around transness and environmental justice. Especially, you see some street-based resistance, too, folks who would not identify as women, but who socially have assumed the roles of care and because of that, are experiencing environmental harm in a particular way that leads itself to organizing but I don't think is only about womanness, but it is about care.

(00:15:21):

I also think it's important to recognize, especially in Black communities, that severe levels of incarceration have also taken young boys and men out of community roles that they might otherwise be electing to play out of spaces of care and into the hands of the state. I think that's also about disrupting the ability of communities to organize. It's about the threats that people along the gender spectrum who are Black present to white supremacy.

(00:15:44):

Again, the most dangerous thing is community. And so to destabilize communities and to take young men and boys, but also young women and young people across the gender spectrum, out of community, to prevent their ability to transmit care and build where they're from, it is a way to sort of prevent movements from fomenting, is a way to enact violence upon people. Prisons are important parts of environmental racism. It's really important to understand. That definitely has to do with this, especially here.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:16:13):

All right, we got to zoom out for a second because Juliana just said something super important.

Damon Williams (00:16:18):

Not only did she unpack and bring the necessary complexity to how we talk about gender and this ethic of mothering that we hope to promote, but she also said something really significant that we can't move past.

(00:16:30):

We need to understand prisons and mass incarceration, not just as forms of bigotry or political disenfranchisement, but also as forms of environmental racism.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:16:40):

And the impact of that racism takes many forms. Juliana talked about the destabilization in people's communities, who was taken out, what they would otherwise be able to contribute. But this harm also looks like many other things.

(00:16:52):

A couple examples of that that are specific to Illinois and the Midwest. So, according to Truthout, at least 23 jails have either been proposed or constructed on toxic and contaminated lands, just since 2020, across the Midwest. Also, prisons and jails that are already standing are sites of environmental racism. In Illinois over the last year, the water in at least 12 state prisons has tested positive for Legionnaire's disease, a potentially fatal type of pneumonia. In the facilities that have tested positive, there are more than 9,000 people living exposed to this potentially life-threatening illness.

Damon Williams (00:17:30):

So the COVID-19 pandemic crystallized a reality that's been true for generations, that prisons and jails aren't just sites of torture and separation, but also sites of concentrated illness and disease that decimate the health and is death-making for the people experiencing incarceration.

(00:17:47):

But the harms of incarceration are not just confined behind those walls. They continue to impact our community as folks return home, as folks stay connected through visits, and through the circulation of staff and guards that come in and out of the facilities. So, Juliana makes a really clear statement that prisons are environmental racism.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:18:07):

And so to do environmental justice work, we need to be fighting to dismantle policing and incarceration. And to fight the harms of policing and incarceration, we need to understand the way that environmental racism is built into those systems.

(00:18:21):

All right, let's zoom back in to Juliana.

Juliana Pino (00:18:25):

I also think there is room in the movement for other kinds of leadership. It is rife with power struggles though. In the way that you also see that in the civil rights movement writ large, and in other movements like labor organizing, you still see the same dynamic where people, especially cis men, are not necessarily coming to it always from the same place of experience, but do tend to get more resources, for example, or do tend to take the mic, and do tend to get legibly understood as leaders in a way that women residents still have to fight for that. Queer and trans people still have to fight for that even legibility in the movement at all.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:19:05):

That observation Juliana makes is one, of course, that you and I have seen in our years as organizers, both on and off mic, and it's something that we keep in mind, also, in our role as the makers of this show.

Damon Williams (00:19:17):

We are two cishet men who fundraise to be on mic to tell this story and so it is our responsibility to do so while accounting for this inequity of power and legibility that Juliana is naming.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:19:28):

Yeah. We need everyone to participate, but we need everyone to participate with intention and an understanding of the power dynamics they bring to the table.

(00:19:36):

All right, so we pulled out these contradictions. We went super deep, but I think the main point that we're hearing is actually really straightforward.

Damon Williams (00:19:44):

That this mothering ethic that we're talking about is not some mystical, biological, innate genius. It's about a commitment to love to the full extent of your power.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:19:54):

Linda Rae Murray says this super clearly in a way that only someone who's been a mother and a grandmother can.

Linda Rae Murray (00:20:01):

I may get kicked out of the mother and grandmother union for this, I don't know. So, I think we have to step back from our romanticized notions of mother, what that means. So, those of us who are mothers and grandmothers know, you start off, you don't know what the hell you're doing. What happens is, you know that you love that child. It's not that you know everything, because unfortunately, now don't tell this to my grandkids, unfortunately, we're sometimes even wrong. T.

(00:20:29):

He point is that you love the children, the grandchildren, the nieces and nephews, and you are trying to do everything within your power to protect them, even though you know as a Black woman, you don't have a lot of power.

Damon Williams (00:20:44):

Hazel had limited access to structural power, but one of her movement children became the most powerful person in the world.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:20:51):

Their relationship, like so many of the other connections that Hazel built with young people, started in an organizing meeting.

Damon Williams (00:20:58):

Cheryl explains how Barack Obama entered the Gardens.

Cheryl Johnson (00:21:02):

And see, my mother was a confirmed Catholic, so we used to have a Catholic Church out here called Our Lady of the Gardens. We didn't have a 501(c)(3), so the church was our physical agent to allow us to get funding. And that's where she met Obama at, because she was with the Catholic Church.

Bob Ginsberg (00:21:19):

He was hired by the Developing Communities project.

Damon Williams (00:21:22):

That's Bob Ginsberg, long longtime organizer in the Calumet region, who was very active during this time.

Bob Ginsberg (00:21:28):

He was a young guy who was just with mostly older women who didn't necessarily relate to him or trust him. It takes a long time for a young man sort of get older women to sort of appreciate, to trust him. He was only there a few years, and before he went off to law school. I think it had a bigger impact on Obama than it did on Hazel.

Hazel Johnson (00:21:50):

Now, when I was working with him, I never had no idea... I know he was ambitious young man. He was nice, polite. I know he was wanted to go beyond what he was already, but I had no idea that he would go that far, and I'm very proud of him.

Cheryl Johnson (00:22:12):

My mother had a lot of aspirations for that man, she really... When, my mother called you her son, that's the highest regards that you could get from her is when she called you her son or daughter.

(00:22:28):

I was in college at that particular time. When I come home, I would see him sitting at the kitchen table, him and my mother, strategizing on what's going on in the community, particularly around CHA, and their lack a response of doing maintenance in Altgeld. What I remember is when he walked to my mother's house and my mother met him outside, and I was just listening, and I remember him saying, "Ms. Johnson, I got good news or bad news for you." He said, "Which one do you want to hear?" She said, "Well, give me the bad news." And he told her that he was leaving DCP, and she was like, "Oh, no, why are you leaving?" And then he said, "The good news, that I got accepted to Harvard Law School" because he wanted to become a lawyer to come back and represent groups like my mother who's trying to fight for their community. And they walked back to his car and he left. I think he spent like 20 minutes with my mother.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:23:24):

So, Obama leaves in '88 to go to Harvard Law School. And then, of course, to make a long story very short, 2008 becomes elected president. So, that's about 20 years between when he leaves the Gardens and when he steps into the Oval Office.

(00:23:40):

But Hazel actually had a much quicker track to the Oval Office than Obama did. By '91, when the convening we talked about at the top of this episode happened, she'd already encountered President Reagan and Bush and been recognized for her work in various ways. But it wasn't until after that summit, after she became this mother of environmental justice, that she and the rest of the EJ movement were able to push the White House to make any substantive steps toward addressing environmental racism.

(00:24:09):

One of the most formal commitments that the EJ movement pushed the White House to was Executive Order 12898 Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations, signed by Bill Clinton on February 16th, 1994.

(00:24:26):

Teresa:

Teresa Córdova (00:24:28):

So, the Clinton executive order, there were a couple of folks who were connected to the movement, Bob Bullard being one, and Ben Chavis, of course, being the other. They were on Clinton's transition team. But there were a slew of these networks and an EJ activists, they really pushed Bob and Ben to push from the inside while they pushed from the outside to get this Clinton executive order. So, that meant that all these other agencies within the federal government, would have to look at all of their work through an environmental justice lens.

Damon Williams (00:24:59):

If you Google Hazel Johnson, one of the first images that's going to come up is actually a really famous photo of this executive order signing, and you see how central and prominent she is in that tableau. You see her and everyone else smiling in the picture, but she in the movement was clear that a signature on a piece of paper or a day of ceremony would not in and of itself adequately repair the harm.

Linda Rae Murray (00:25:22):

Usually there's a little picture in the environmental justice histories where Clinton is signing that executive order. So, yeah, she was there, she was in the picture. But she understood it was a minor victory, and she wasn't like all aw by the fact that she's in the Oval Office. But she's saying like, "No, this is how far we've come now. Now what can we use out of this process to get us further along the road?"

Daniel Kisslinger (00:25:43):

So Dr. Murray's saying that Hazel's skepticism was rooted in her understanding of the limits of this political tool, the executive order. But for other EJ organizers, their skepticism was also rooted in who was signing the order. For Orrin Williams, who had the option to be in the photo, Bill Clinton and neoliberalism was something to be skeptical, if not outright distrustful of.

Orrin Williams (00:26:06):

They were trying to figure out who was going to be in the picture with Bill Clinton signing. "Don't you want to do it?" And I'm like, "Nope." And people were like, "Oh, this is a great opportunity." It's like, "No, I'm not feeling dude" and no, I don't want to be in a picture and something that lives in the perpetuity and something that somebody can interpret as me trusting Bill Clinton and like, "Oh my God." Like, "Nah," wasn't never feeling it.

Linda Rae Murray (00:26:35):

Again, I think she stood in the tradition of Black mothers. She was very clear that the executive order was a small, tiny, tiny step, and if you didn't keep your eye on those folks, it would go backwards. It wouldn't even be useful.

(00:26:48):

I think the contribution of the executive order, again, it's not to take away from forcing the President of the United States to write an executive order, that took a lot of organizing. But no one thought that that was anywhere close to a solution. I think it allowed a number of technocrats to begin to say, "Well, maybe we should be concerned about environmental justice." But again, I don't think that came from the executive order. I really think that came from the movement, but it helped codify it because people can sort of touch it and say, "Oh, at this point, every government agency had to explain impact on environmental justice." So, I don't want to say it was worthless, but it didn't accomplish what we needed it to accomplish.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:27:31):

Here's Creative Cabinet member Juliana Pino.

Juliana Pino (00:27:34):

When our friends, the government, as in the federal government, are involved in the framing, then you have to start asking some questions. Does it eclipse the completely irresponsible, intentional ways that the government contributed to environmental racism? Yes.

(00:27:49):

I also think that we should be really clear about why the government uses environmental justice and not environmental racism. And that's because there was a deep and early investment in making this about income and not about race. It became clear that poverty did have something to do with it, but the way that people were targeted, in particular, had to do with race. And the government was very much invested in making this a race-neutral idea. So they did agree, "Environmental justice is something that we care about. Now we're going to issue an important success of Hazel's in getting Executive Order 12898 passed."

(00:28:24):

But for years, staff at the Environmental Protection Agency, environmental entities for writ large at states, wanted to take the focus away from the fact that this was about race. Without addressing the underpinnings of white supremacy, you're never going to get environmental justice. Without understanding that is about environmental racism, you're never going to get to the solutions that people actually wanted in community.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:28:49):

So, in this executive order, we just heard was the mandate that every government agency, when they make decisions, take environmental justice into account. This executive order also led to the creation of a few government structures to help make that happen. One of the most prominent was the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council or NEJAC, which was built to provide independent advice and recommendations to the EPA around new policies and decisions. Hazel was a member. Professor David Pellow, a scholar of environmental justice who worked with PCR at the time, talks about the structure, pros and cons of this new formation.

David Pellow (00:29:29):

The NEJAC had, over the years, come under criticism, I think primarily under the radar. Not a lot of people spoke out about it in the media. But it was this entity that says, "Hey, look, we need representation from EJ communities advising the White House, advising the federal government on various policies." And I think that sounds great, that makes all the sense in the world, and in a very real way represents a real success.

(00:29:58):

But one of the things that we saw with NEJAC in particular, but with a lot of other entities that was you had groups like PCR and other groups all around the country who are so under-resourced, not just in terms of funding, but in terms of people. Like, "Damn, we got two or three staff members trying to keep an organization afloat. How are we going to keep this organization afloat if one-third of us is spending at least it feels like a halftime job flying back and forth to DC and doing all these meetings?" And basically that felt like a form of extraction, as well. And there were many folks who told me in many organizations that, "Damn, it was hard to meet the payroll or meet the mission of our organization when one or more of our staffers was busy doing all this work in DC, when we had problems back in Detroit or Atlanta or South Central or Chicago." And there was a similar dynamic with the Common Sense Initiative that the US EPA put together.

Orrin Williams (00:31:01):

You made me think about Hazel and Cheryl asking me to participate in, what do they call it, the Common Sense Initiative, which was the program that Clinton-Gore came up with different industrial sectors. There was mainstream environmental organizations, there were corporations, and then there was the environmental justice representative.

(00:31:27):

One incident in particular stands out. There was this guy who was a muckety-muck in the big steel, like US Steel. And one day he was transformed into the Incredible Hulk. When he thought that carbon-based manufacturing was going to be threatened, he ripped off his glasses, he transformed himself, and then says, "We're going to do this using fossil fuel, regardless." And also I learned a lot about government's role kind of in ensuring the safety and wellbeing of corporations and not communities.

David Pellow (00:32:07):

We were trying to make, I think it was six different major industry sectors, cheaper, smarter, and cleaner. And I was like, "Smarter, cheaper, cleaner. Where's equity? Where's justice in there?" But all I knew was, "Damn, I'm falling behind on the work I'm supposed to be doing for PCR because I'm doing all these damn meetings in DC." And what sort of credit is PCR given for that? At the end of the day, it was not clear.

(00:32:35):

And it was also not clear that it was, again, a good investment of our time and energy when ultimately it was frankly a neoliberal strategy to keep industry doing what it was doing, but to put lipstick on a pig, really to change the optics and not transform what was happening in iron, auto, steel, electronics, printing, you name it. PCR and other organizations in the grassroots, I think were being used by the EPA to say, "Hey, look, we're consulting with these folks.We're getting input from these communities."

(00:33:10):

And on another level, and I've talked to other folks who worked at PCR at the time, there was always this unsettling question of democratic and fair representation. And this is something I'll put on everybody, not just the US EPA, but on me, on PCR, and any grassroots groups, which was like, "Wait, little, old me, one dude from the city of Chicago representing all, I don't know, environmental justice activists and communities of color in the city of Chicago? Who put me in charge? Nobody elected me." And so that's a messy process that I always found curious, if not troublesome.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:33:50):

Between Orrin Williams' and David's respective experiences participating, I feel like we get a pretty good sense of what those NEHAC or Common Sense meetings were like. The burden of participation in these meetings is clear even in looking in the PCR archives.

(00:34:04):

At the Chicago Public Library Woodson branch where the PCR archives are held, of the roughly four dozen archival portfolio boxes, like a third of them are paperwork that has to do with NEJAC. In this whole history we're telling, all of the fights, all of the struggles, all of the communication, the technocratic burden of participating with the state takes up such a disproportionate amount of room.

Damon Williams (00:34:29):

So we're at a really significant moment in Hazel, Cheryl, PCR, and really the environmental justice movement's story.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:34:37):

One might say, perhaps, a contradiction?

Damon Williams (00:34:42):

This is a big contradiction, and I think this is a contradiction that has really existed in all iterations of Black struggle, and that's the relationship to the powerful institutions that have the resources to address harm and to create new policy, to create new structure, and to make new investments. Those same institutions are collaborating and benefiting from the degradation, from the oppression, from the harm.

(00:35:10):

And so in many ways, it can be named the EPA itself came out of social justice struggles, came out of the civil rights movement, which also held up this same tension of, "How do we participate and transform the structures that impact our lives, without obscuring government or other institutions' role in the violence and their need for accountability, while also maintaining a spirit of resistance that can easily be co-opted, reduced, or quelled by the demands and requirements of participation?

Daniel Kisslinger (00:35:42):

Yeah, I think Pellow really names that perfectly of what was the work that didn't happen because members of PCR had to spend all their time flying back and forth to DC. To do unpaid work, mind you, it wasn't like they were getting compensated for that time in labor. And at its core, what we're hearing is that the recognition and naming by the federal government of the concept of environmental justice became a tool to validate and perpetuate environmental injustice.

Damon Williams (00:36:09):

So, to be sitting down with a steel magnate in a space that's supposed to be addressing pollution and what they are bringing, is a commitment to maintaining, if not expanding the use of fossil fuels.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:36:20):

Yeah, that's not it.

Damon Williams (00:36:22):

To say the least.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:36:24):

So, what do we do with this contradiction? Does that mean that Hazel shouldn't have participated in these structures? Does that mean that the net outcome of the executive order is bad? I don't think that's true. I think there are all kinds of ways that the work of the executive order furthered the idea of environmental justice in the public imagination, and there were policy decisions that did take that into account. So, I'm not saying it wasn't useful or important.

Damon Williams (00:36:49):

It's much better for these federal agencies to have this mandate than to not. Also, I think from a historical standpoint, that representational participation, that picture and that journey all the way to the White House and the highest formal office of power, is part of why we're telling this story in the first place.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:37:06):

But it's clear after talking to the people who were actually participating that the type of power that came out of that convening in '91 is way more impactful for the environmental justice movement and for our collective future than what happened in the NEJAC meetings and the Common Sense meetings, and the near decade of federal initiatives that came out of the executive order.

Damon Williams (00:37:28):

And I think from here we can grab a really valuable lesson for folks doing organizing work or who want to see themselves as a changemaker in their community. Oftentimes, we have this false goal of, quote, "being in the room"-

Daniel Kisslinger (00:37:42):

A seat at the table.

Damon Williams (00:37:42):

... or a seat at the table. And although that can be enticing and attractive and have some benefit, Hazel's story and the lessons that Cheryl continues to teach us show that there's a different type of power that needs to be built to transform what actually happens in those rooms and at those tables.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:37:59):

Yeah, adjacency to state power doesn't work as a pathway toward liberation.

Damon Williams (00:38:05):

And actually, sometimes that adjacency is welcomed or invited as a tactic to quell resistance and actually maintain power.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:38:20):

Through all these contradictions, through all these back and forth fights to DC, throughout the nearly decade that followed, Hazel, and to a growing extent, Cheryl, continued to do what they always did...

Damon Williams (00:38:32):

Keep doing the work. At the same time that they're engaging with the Clinton-Gore administration and participating in these federal bodies, they're also engaging in that fight against PCBs that we named in the previous episode, as well as building countless programs and projects to build up the capacity and power of the people of the Gardens and meet folks' needs.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:38:53):

And these initiatives ranged from an asthma emergency mobile unit in '94 to building a low-income home energy assistance program for people in the Gardens between '92 and 2000, to co-hosting the Earth Day at Carver Elementary School in 1998 and connecting it to their work around lead abatement, to hosting youth basketball tournaments in 2001 and 2004. Even though PCR was stretched to capacity, they continued to be a fixture in the Gardens doing the work to tangibly transform people's lives.

Damon Williams (00:39:23):

So, as our movement mother was experimenting with engaging the highest halls of power from a outside position, one of her favorite children returned to Illinois and found his way to an inside elected position as a state senator.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:39:36):

Obama served in the state senate from '97 to 2005, but didn't return to the Gardens until 2004 as part of his campaign to become a US senator.

Cheryl Johnson (00:39:46):

Well, he came back with media.

Newscaster (00:39:50):

It was Obama's first real experience with urban politics and the problems of the inner city.

Barack Obama (00:39:55):

This is Altgeld Gardens, which is a public housing project.

Cheryl Johnson (00:39:59):

Well, he walked the community when the community was almost like 80% abandoned. There was Secret Service folks everywhere and they was telling us that we could continue to stand on our porch or go in the house. And people got a little irate about that because it's like, "I pay rent here. He don't live here. He just a politician." That was the discussion that we had after he left. You know what I mean? But people just watched because we wanted to know what was going on.

(00:40:30):

The next time he came out here with media and Secret Service, he went up to Our Lady of the Gardens church and Catholic school, and he met with some of those students that was there, and he promised them once he'd be elected president, he would come back to visit. That never happened.

Damon Williams (00:40:49):

The Obama legacy has expanded and now looms so large, it's easy to forget and many may not even know, that Barack Obama's rise to prominence on the national political stage was framed through the lens of him being a community organizer.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:41:02):

Wait, it wasn't for his sweet, left-handed jump shot?

Damon Williams (00:41:05):

Nah.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:41:07):

Was it his banging Spotify playlist?

Damon Williams (00:41:09):

Nope.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:41:10):

Oh, it must have been his podcast alongside Bruce Springsteen, Renegades: Born in the USA

Damon Williams (00:41:14):

No, that came much later.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:41:15):

Okay.

Damon Williams (00:41:15):

Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:41:16):

Thank you for clarifying.

Damon Williams (00:41:18):

His '08 presidential campaign heralded him as a champion of grassroots progressive politics.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:41:24):

And the experience that they pointed to make that claim was his time in the Gardens in the Calumet region.

Damon Williams (00:41:30):

And this label of community organizer actually became a major talking point and was weaponized at the Republican National Convention as a way to critique or invalidate his credibility.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:41:40):

Here are two of the great villains of the early 21st century, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin.

Rudy Giuliani (00:41:46):

He worked as a community organizer. He worked as a community organizer.

Sarah Palin (00:41:55):

I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.

Barack Obama (00:42:11):

This is very curious. So, they're talking about the three years of work that I did right out of college. Look, I would argue that doing work in the community to try to create jobs, to bring people together, to rejuvenate communities that had fallen on hard times, to set up job training programs in areas that had been hard hit when the steel plans closed, that that's relevant only in understanding where I'm coming from, who I believe in, who I'm fighting for and why I'm in this race.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:42:46):

But while Obama defended his organizer creds on a national scale, Cheryl had no delusions about what an Obama presidency would mean for PCR and the folks in the Gardens.

Cheryl Johnson (00:42:56):

I was telling my mama, he overrated, you overrating him. And she didn't vote for him, and that's where the negativity came out. Now, my mother was born in 1935 so she's seen where Black people got murdered for being activists and organizing. So, she really felt some kind of way that Barack Obama's going to get killed once he become elected president. So, she threw her support behind Hillary because she feared for his life, and she got ostracized as a result of that.

(00:43:31):

Wait a minute, how did Obama said it? Oh, he said she was not a community organizer, she was just an activist.

Damon Williams (00:43:39):

Obama said that?

Cheryl Johnson (00:43:40):

Yeah. Well, I can't say that Obama said that, but it came out of his camp. She feared for him and to learn just recently, maybe last year, when Michelle put in her book, she also feared for his life, she didn't want it to run. And I said, "Now, ain't that a bitch?" Because he ostracized my mother, but his wife was feeling the same way my mother was feeling.

Damon Williams (00:44:06):

So, that's significant. Obama left, went to law school, became a state senator, but did not return to Altgeld Gardens until he was running for higher office, and really used the community as a stage to frame his persona in the political arena.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:44:22):

Cheryl's framing of why Hazel didn't support Obama's presidential run makes sense, and we're going to take her at her word for it. We don't have Hazel here to ask her why she made the choice she made. But even if there was a less loving, caring reason, even if she was resentful of this person who said he was going to come back and then didn't until it served his political ambitions, that would make sense. That would be an understandable reason to back a different candidate, especially if you had spent the '90s working in relationship to the Clinton administration.

Damon Williams (00:44:56):

We'll get a little bit more into that relationship with the Clintons in the next episode, but what's actually more important for this story and for our learning is what did Barack Obama, this young man who came up in environmental justice movement organizing spaces, do with the power of the executive office as president? During the Obama administration, we saw the beginning of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, which is one of the most significant occurrences of environmental racism in American history.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:45:23):

We showed Cheryl a famous video that honestly, we were surprised you hadn't seen before.

Barack Obama (00:45:29):

Flint's recovery is everybody's responsibility, and I'm going to make sure that responsibility is met. That's why I'm here. And I hear you.

Audience (00:45:42):

Yeah!

Barack Obama (00:45:48):

Can I get some water? Come on up here. I want a glass of water.

Audience (00:45:57):

No!

(00:45:59):

Get a bottle! Bottled water.

Barack Obama (00:46:03):

I want a glass of water. Everybody settle down. This is a feisty crowd.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:46:09):

For those of you listening who haven't seen the clip, Obama's in a big auditorium in front of probably, what would you say, 500 people?

Damon Williams (00:46:15):

Minimum.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:46:16):

And an aide brings him a glass of water. He brings it to his lips, and if you're watching from the front, it looks like he takes a sip of the water. But if you look more closely and you look from the side angle, he doesn't even let the water enter his mouth. He just wets his lips a little bit.

Barack Obama (00:46:34):

I really did need a glass of water. This is not a stunt.

Damon Williams (00:46:37):

So, viewing it, this non-stunt-stunt, it's really disheartening. Actually, it's upsetting because it's making a mockery of people's pain and it's not the only time he did it. On that same trip after this public speech, he had a sit-down round table gathering with then Michigan governor Rick Snyder, who's the elected official most responsible for the poisoning of the people of Flint through this water crisis. So, at that round table, Obama is implicitly providing political cover for Snyder, and he pulls the same stunt. He says again, "This is not a stunt," asks for a glass of water, all to make the point that if you filter the water, it'll be fine.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:47:12):

And he doesn't drink it then, either. He does the exact same move, just lets it touch his lips and then puts it to the side. So, going back to the speech, right after the stunt, Obama looks a room of Flint residents in the eye and makes light of the harm that lead poisoning can cause for children.

Barack Obama (00:47:28):

If you know that your child may have been exposed and you go to a health clinic, a doctor, a provider, and are working with them, then your child will be fine. You got some lead in your system when you were growing up, you did. I am sure that somewhere, when I was two years old, I was taking a chip of paint, tasting it, and I got some lead. As long as kids are getting good healthcare and folks are paying attention and they're getting a good education and they have community support and they're getting some good home training and they are in a community that is loving and nurturing and thriving, these kids will be fun.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:48:28):

We asked Cheryl what her first reaction was in seeing the video.

Cheryl Johnson (00:48:32):

So, that he insulted the people intelligent and he minimized the harm that lead does to our children and to the mother. He wasn't for us. He wasn't for Flint. These people is drinking this water every day. These people are bathing in this water every day. And to come to their community and insult their intelligence and didn't declare that a disaster area, when the government in Flint knew that that water was contaminated and was telling their employees not to drink the water? Come on now, that's criminal. That just showed his apathy for that casualty of a war that government put on those people by killing their kids for a lifetime and killing the kid that is not even born yet.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:49:22):

So, Obama says that the way that the children of Flint will be okay is if they have communal support, as well as access to affordable healthcare, quality education.

Damon Williams (00:49:32):

And he threw in some home training in there, which is a dog whistle.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:49:35):

Absolutely. But the community that he's saying is the pathway to these children being okay was standing in front of him asking and demanding something very specific.

Damon Williams (00:49:45):

Nayyirah Shariff from Flint Rising names what they asked for, a disaster declaration, and how that is different from the state of emergency.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:49:54):

Which is what he did declare. What an emergency declaration does is free up federal funds to support the efforts of the state government of Michigan in addressing the crisis, the same government actors who caused the crisis in the first place.

Damon Williams (00:50:08):

The disaster declaration would've put the response in the hands of the federal government and taken that response leadership out of the state's control and therefore made Barack Obama more responsible.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:50:19):

This is just one example of how community organizers like Nayyirah and Cheryl interacted with and see the legacy of the Obama presidency.

Damon Williams (00:50:31):

So, I'm going to be real with y'all. Even in trying to cut up these clips and tell this part of this story, it's really activating for me.

(00:50:39):

Barack Obama holds a unique space of reverence for Black people. And that reverence is based off the legacy of freedom fighters and movement workers before him, such as Hazel or even Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and so many who have sacrificed their life or livelihood to make more freedom for Black people in this land.

(00:51:02):

So, sometimes when I go in barbershops or family members' houses, I may see images of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama together. And for me, hearing how he impacted Hazel and Cheryl and seeing how he showed up in this moment, it really is a disgrace to that legacy. It actually has served as a way to move people away from striving for this type of freedom, this type of liberatory justice.

(00:51:28):

If he was truly in that legacy and was honoring Hazel's lineage in the way that I think he should have, that certainly would not have been his response in that moment, and the people of Flint would have clean water by now. And so there's a harm that's been done that needs to be addressed and ideally repaired, materially, but also at a level of consciousness for our people. To be real, I don't know what that looks like. We asked Cheryl what she thinks.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:51:57):

I want to do a simple hypothetical and then I promise we'll move on. So, let's say he's a big listener of podcasts, he listens to this, he has a humbling moment, he realizes you're absolutely right, he comes to you hat in hand and he goes, "What can I do to repair this harm?" What would you say?

Cheryl Johnson (00:52:18):

He can't do it, my mother's dead. It's not to me, it's her. You had her feeling some kind of way as a result. Ain't nothing he could rectify that because my mother's deceased. He hurt her heart. He just made my heart harder.

(00:52:31):

Ain't shit he could say to me now because I was that child that was always very protective of my mother and her feelings, and I didn't like nobody disrespecting or I felt that they was using her. But to bring you in her house, to sit at her table, to advocate in her community about you, and then fear for you, your safety, and you let all your camp to say negative things about my mother and only because my mother was feeling the same way as your wife? I don't see what he done for my community. My community is still the same way, matter of fact, even worse, under his leadership. He didn't do anything, just like he didn't do anything for those people in Flint. He was just another politician. I'm just going to leave it like that.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:53:12):

There is no happy ending to this part of the story. On the personal level and on a national level, the impact of the decisions that Obama made still reverberate in our impacted communities like the Gardens and like Flint and countless others.

Damon Williams (00:53:27):

Beyond the sadness, there is a valuable lesson to be learned here. Before the Obama presidency, his journey was thought of as the goal. You gradually climb the ladder of power to the highest position available and make changes from within the state. In many ways, that's one of the central premises of the civil rights movement and being able to participate in the American institutional landscape.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:53:49):

Yeah, that's part of why EJ organizers like Hazel went through the headache of participating in things like NEJAC, Common Sense Initiative, executive order. The assumption was if you had access to state power, you'd be able to move the needle and address the needs of your people.

(00:54:08):

I think in this episode we've shown the nuance and contradictions of that approach. Yes, you can create policy that addresses need, but often this approach can lead to both personal heartache and destructive co-optation of movement.

Damon Williams (00:54:24):

So, with that reality, it's been difficult to measure the wins and losses on a federal level. In the last episode, it was complicated on a local level, as well. But what is unquestionable is the example that Hazel set within the environmental justice movement and the impact her unwavering love and care had on the people she mothered, both in the movement and those closest to her in her community.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:54:46):

Beria Hampton works at PCR, but before she was formally involved, she was a neighbor of Hazel and Cheryl, and she talks about the way that Hazel helped her grow.

Beria Hampton (00:54:57):

My interactions and memories with Hazel, you would look at Hazel like a big mama, smiling but stern, very stern grandma, like somebody who you would like to really be under and embrace, always have good conversations and checking in on you, "How you doing today?," family-orientated.

(00:55:16):

Our community went beyond just being neighbors. We became a community of family. We were very much in tune. And at the time I was a child and she were doing a lot of campaigns and stuff around environmental justice then, I didn't know what environmental justice actually was. I just really enjoyed being around Hazel because she always had movies going on for the kids, different activities. And in her campaign and things that she was doing, she actually made us a direct involvement. We were the kids who passed out the flyers. I mean, we did it for fun, on our behalf, but we were actually fulfilling a mission to get people involved. These are the days when groups of buses used to go to City Hall and we would do candlelights, not knowing what was going on, just wanting to be outside because we couldn't come outside a lot. So, when you're doing positive stuff, that gets you outside. And working with Ms. Johnson and being around her was like one of the most positive impacts that all the children around had. Because to us, she had everything.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:56:20):

Adella, another PCR staffer who grew up in the Gardens, also remembers the profound impact of Hazel's mothering.

Adella Bass-Lawson (00:56:28):

When I met Hazel Johnson, she was a little older. Just being around, her presence in general was powerful. Especially coming from the same community that I came from, it was an honor just to be in her presence.

Damon Williams (00:56:42):

So, the impact of the mother of environmental justice resonated around the world.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:56:47):

But the type of care, nurturing, challenging, and acceptance can be seen most clearly in her relationship with Cheryl as they started to work more closely together overseeing PCR.

Cheryl Johnson (00:56:58):

My mother picked me and I asked her, oof, why did she pick me? My kids was maybe teenagers when I asked her that. And she told me I was her worsest child and she had to keep me by her side, so she made me be with her.

(00:57:19):

It's like, for an example, I used to love to go out and dance and knowing I wasn't old enough to go out and dance, and this one day she told me I couldn't go. So, I snuck and went. But we two stories, we got an upstairs and a downstairs. We had four-bedroom apartments. So, I unlocked every window in the house, climbed out the window onto the roof and jumped down, went over my girlfriend's house to get dressed. When I came back home, I test the window downstairs by the door, it was locked. I said, "Oh, she locked it." So that's when I climbed on the roof and fixing to go in my bedroom window, who was sitting there?

Daniel Kisslinger (00:58:07):

Just arms crossed, ready for you.

Cheryl Johnson (00:58:09):

Yeah. She said, "Climb your ass right back down." And she told me that day, she said, "You know what, Cheryl? Seem like I can't stop you." Now, mind you, I'm 15 years old. "I can't stop you, but I'll let you go out anytime you want to, long as you go to school every day." I said, "For real?" That wasn't hard at all. I went to school every day. I was one of her most problematic kid that was always doing something, getting in trouble. So, she had to keep me close by.

Damon Williams (00:58:41):

How did you receive that when she named it as that?

Cheryl Johnson (00:58:48):

She wasn't lying. She wasn't lying. I always got in trouble. Look, I went to school off a suspension and go back on a suspension when I went back. So, yeah, I agree with it. I was like, "Oh."

Daniel Kisslinger (00:59:02):

The first time we talked, you shared a couple of these things that your mom would say that you've been carrying with you, and I'm curious, are there any other quotables, sentences, phrases from your mom that you just keep in the back of your mind that you think would also be helpful for people in our audience to hear?

Cheryl Johnson (00:59:17):

No. Y'all going to like what I keep in the back of my mind. Okay, I'll tell y'all this. When my mother used to get mad at me, she called me a sack of bitches and I was like, "A sack? So you ain't calling me one. You ain't calling me two. You ain't calling me three. She calling me a sack of bitches! Boy." I think about that. When I'm out of my element sometimes, I was like, "Okay, Cheryl, you being a sack of bitches."

Daniel Kisslinger (00:59:58):

Like Dr. Murray said, Hazel is singular, but she isn't unique. There are so many mothers of environmental justice, so many women, femmes, other caregivers who have poured their energy, their brilliance, their expertise, all they have to give, into the struggle for repair. There are also many mothers of the Gardens and communities like it, people who, in their own way, model this ethic of care that can make healing possible.

Damon Williams (01:00:27):

And as we're putting this story together, that is the lesson we hope listeners get the most. We're not going through how to run an organizing meeting or how to power map the branches of government. And what we can learn from Hazel, Cheryl, and all of these mothers is it is the intentional politic of nurturing that will repair the damage and create healthy environments for people to live in. Dr. Joy West, another daughter of the Gardens, celebrates this legacy of care and the sacrifice it requires.

Joy West (01:00:53):

It just happened to be Mother's Day. When I was reflecting on all of this yesterday, I was at Roseland Hospital and I was just looking up environmental racism, and I was thinking about my mom, and I was thinking about my upbringing, and I was thinking about all of the things that she wanted for us in our home.

(01:01:13):

I am particularly grateful for the women of the Movement, the Hazel Johnsons of the movement, that took the time away from her own children, her own family, to uplift the community so that we can continue to point out the wrongs in our communities and we can grow.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:01:35):

Help This Garden Grow is presented by Respair Production & Media, with Elevate and People for Community Recovery.

Damon Williams (01:02:06):

The show was hosted and created by us, Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger. Our co-executive producers are Sylvia Ewing, Anne Evens, and Cheryl Johnson.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:02:15):

Our associate producer is Natalie Frazier, our editor is Rocío Santos, and our consulting producers are Maurice and Judith from Juneteenth Productions.

Damon Williams (01:02:24):

Special thanks to our creative cabinet: Adella Bass, Olga Bautista, Tonyisha Harris, Juliana Pino, and Kyra Woods.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:02:33):

Our artwork is designed by Areanna Egleston with additional multimedia support from Davon Clark.

Damon Williams (01:02:39):

Help This Garden Grow was recorded in the Malik Alim Studio at The Breathing Room Space, a movement-building center stewarded by the Let Us Breathe Collective.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:02:47):

You can find out more about the work of Respair Production & Media at respairmedia.com, get in tune with Elevate at elevatenp.org, and support the work of PCR at peopleforcommunityrecovery.org.

Damon Williams (01:02:58):

Much love to the people.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:02:58):

Peace!

Cheryl Johnson (00:00:00):

I'm going to read a paragraph from the Echo Magazine, 20 Womens Who Are Transforming the World, and my mother was center page and she said in her last paragraph, she said, "I plan to stay in Altgeld Gardens until I die, because I want to continue to fight. If I move, I wouldn't know what's going on, so I couldn't help. My wish for my community is for them to learn to stand up, to fight for their rights. What makes me feel good is that my daughter Cheryl, will make sure people for community recovery keeps going," and that's my charge.

Damon Williams (00:00:40):

This is episode five.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:00:42):

Inheriting the Shoebox.

Beria Hampton (00:00:48):

When you speak of Cheryl Johnson, the daughter of the Mother of Environmental Justice and how similar her work is to her mother's, I would say it's spot on. Cheryl had to kind of pick up those extra added duties and responsibilities once her mother started getting sick.

Damon Williams (00:01:10):

Usually when you tell a story, the narrative starts to fade or recede when the hero retreats from view. But this story is not just about a hero. This story is about a legacy.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:01:21):

It's the fight for environmental justice in the gardens, and the fight for justice and repair across the globe.

Damon Williams (00:01:28):

In embarking on this project, it was obvious immediately that Cheryl's not simply a successor who took on the title Director of PCR. Cheryl is more than just Hazel's daughter. She herself is a mother of the movement.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:01:43):

Over the course of the episode, we're going to trace Cheryl's rise into responsibility at PCR and in the EJ Movement overall, working with, around, and in opposition to academia as she works to address the violence that exists in the gardens while getting to the root causes, and lays out how the EJ Movement builds pathways toward repair. As PCR's Baria Hampton said a minute ago, Cheryl learned how to serve that role proudly working alongside her mom. Here's David Pellow talking about working with the two of them together.

Professor David Pellow (00:02:15):

I mean, it was clear that Hazel was in charge, but it was also very clear that the two of them, they collaborated at every step of the way. And Cheryl was Hazel's right hand. When Hazel couldn't travel or couldn't make it to a meeting, Cheryl was always there making speeches, making public appearances, doing much of the day-to-day kind of gritty work. But Cheryl was really her right hand and soon became, even as Hazel was still executive director, soon became I think in her own right, a real public figure.

(00:02:54):

I would also just say on a personal note, both of them have wonderful sense of humor, but Cheryl... And I mean Hazel was the boss, so I had to show deference and total respect at all times. But Cheryl could really cut up and put folks at ease, and she's just great at cracking jokes and just a brilliant art and science of just kind of mixing serious business with informality and putting people at ease while at the same time saying, "Hey, let's get this serious work done," and also find some time for some levity and some humor. So I always appreciate that about Cheryl. Even in the darkest moment, she can find humor and just crack you up. So she's super charismatic in her own way. No question about it.

Damon Williams (00:03:46):

Pellow put it perfectly. That's true to our experience. Throughout this process of getting to know Cheryl, she has had no fear of cutting up.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:03:52):

As you may recall from our previous episode, here's a reminder.

Cheryl Johnson (00:03:57):

When I'm out of my element sometimes, I was like, "Okay, sure. You being a sack of bitches."

Damon Williams (00:04:09):

Her laugh is infectious.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:04:12):

When we talked with Professor David Pellow, a professor of environmental studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California Santa Barbara, we were surprised and delighted at how excited he was to talk about his memories and how introspective he was about his time working with PCR.

Professor David Pellow (00:04:31):

I was taking a class first week of grad school at Northwestern University, and my professor, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, was teaching a class on field research and she said, "Look, I need y'all to get out there, find a neighborhood, find a community, find a person who you can talk to, who you can observe, who's willing to let you take notes on their life and write up a brilliant and beautiful paper." I'm like, "What does that mean?"

(00:04:58):

Well, I was listening to the WBEZ Chicago, NPR Radio and they said, "This weekend there's going to be a mini Earth summit down at DePaul to talk about what local folks are doing to make the earth more sustainable and equitable." So I decided, let me just go down there and see what's happening. First room I walked into first panel at the conference that I witnessed was Cheryl Johnson and Kevin Green, who at the time was working for the Center for Neighborhood Technology and who later on worked for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. They were both giving a presentation on environmental racism. I was blown away.

(00:05:34):

I walked up to them and said, "Hey, Kevin Green, nice to meet you. Cheryl Johnson, I need to talk to you. I would love to study your organization. I've got this class project." And she said, "So you're taking notes?" "Uh-huh." "You're doing observations?" "Yes." "You're writing a paper?" "Yes." She goes, "Okay, we need somebody to take minutes in our meetings. We need somebody to take notes from meetings, where we're going to with people around the city and we need a little bit of help proofreading and helping draft up memos and grant proposals and whatnot." And I'm like, "Oh, Jesus. I didn't sign up for this. I'm just trying to do a class project." But it was a lesson in reciprocity, right, that I couldn't just take without giving. And she made that very clear in the first 60 seconds of me meeting her.

Damon Williams (00:06:18):

Wow. That was a really apt and sophisticated response by Cheryl in real time to a young academic asking for access.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:06:25):

But why would Cheryl have felt the need to start with this demand for reciprocity before even really getting to know the person, their name and what they were working on?

Damon Williams (00:06:34):

As the Environmental Justice Movement began to formally define itself, have global conferences, interact with the White House, we start to see academia take notes on the work that was being developed by grassroots organizations.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:06:46):

There had always been scholars involved in the environmental justice movement, but over time, there was much more of a clamor for students and professors alike to get in the rooms where this world-changing work was happening. Pellow breaks down some of the complications of that dynamic.

Professor David Pellow (00:07:03):

PCR, like a lot of environmental justice organizations, like a lot of community-based organizations, particularly in BIPOC communities, has always had partners in universities and foundations and various government agencies, but there've always been that struggle and question as to whether PCR is actually getting its due, right, benefiting sufficiently and equitably from those partnerships.

(00:07:32):

I mean, certainly as somebody in academia, there's always that risk, that fear, and often that reality that what academics are doing, for example, is just extracting knowledge and information and expertise for our own careers. And if somebody wanted to call me out on that, I think there would be some basis for making that claim. I mean, I've built my career off of working with community organizations. I think I've given back, but have I given back enough? Could I have done more of? Those are absolutely legitimate questions.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:08:03):

The type of contribution that David Pellow talks about is evident in the work that he did coming out of his time with PCR. His book Garbage Wars, which covers the fight in the '80s around the landfill moratorium in Chicago was an important source for us as we built this show.

(00:08:18):

Pellow isn't alone. There have been so many students who have been welcomed into PCR over the years. It's something that Hazel always prioritized.

Damon Williams (00:08:27):

And Cheryl explains how creating space for young minds to grow can be a path towards transformative power.

Cheryl Johnson (00:08:33):

My mother always wanted to make sure that the young generations and educated kids get this stuff. That's why we still do the toxic tours in our community with college students and stuff, because we need them tear for tray industry and corporation to recycle their minds and souls.

Damon Williams (00:08:55):

So poetic. As you may have noticed, Cheryl does more than just cut up. She also be dropping these bars and these gems and right there, she's so eloquently describing the intention and this investment into future generations of institutional power. And it is clear that that in investment exists with an attention. That tension is not specific to PCR, we see it play out throughout the EJ Movement.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:09:17):

Teresa Córdova, a professor who's also been deeply involved in grassroots EJ work, sheds some light on how this tension plays out.

Teresa Córdova (00:09:25):

As someone who has spent one's life with organizations outside the university, I observe the problematic assumptions maybe that academics, including students, make. And also I know from a lot of organizations that it's a lot of work to take the time to interview and they'll often say, "Oh, you interviewed us, but then we never heard back from you." There are a lot of issues that organizations have had and do have when academics come rolling around, right? Simultaneously, there are other academics that have forged really important partnerships with environmental justice organizations.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:09:58):

Nobody spoke to this dynamic with more experience and vigor than Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington. We've heard her already a couple times through the series, but we think it's really important that y'all get a sense of who she is and what she's done. Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington is an environmental epidemiologist, engineer and historian who was the first African American scholar to publish a formal history of environmental injustice in the United States.

(00:10:24):

She's the author of Packing Them In: An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago 1865 to 1954, and is the editor of Echoes From the Poison Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustices. She served as the co-chair of the Illinois EPA Environmental Justice Advisory Board and has been a professor at DePaul, University of Maryland, UIC, and throughout the University of Illinois system. She's also just done like a bunch of other amazing stuff like work for NASA, apparently. She was the first Black woman to become a journeyman engineer there where she worked on the public and environmental health risks after the Challenger disaster. So she's been in the mix doing amazing work for a very long time.

Damon Williams (00:11:05):

Dr. Hood Washington gracefully navigated institutional spaces and really got a behind the curtains look at the racist, sexist, elitist ways the academic institution viewed Hazel, Cheryl and PCR.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:11:18):

It's like driving while Black, right? You could be driving at the limit and still get pulled over because it's assumed that you are being a deviant, right? Something must be wrong with you. You're doing something bad. And I think Hazel Johnson was being an environmentalist ball being a Black woman, okay? That was just, she had two strikes against her. She was a woman and she was Black, and she was not highly educated.

Damon Williams (00:11:46):

These intersecting so-called strikes did not stop academic institutions from seeing Hazel and Cheryl's work and home as a site of study.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:11:55):

A lot of universities flowed through Altgeld Garden. A lot of them had graduate students, undergraduate students come in there, do their projects, and she was saying... a lot of environmental justice community activists were saying that they didn't want to be exploited. They didn't want people coming in and writing about and researching about their pain and their efforts to get whatever they were going to get and leave them behind.

(00:12:19):

And it's still happening today. You still have colleges. They need students to have projects, and so Altgeld Gardens is like, that's like a project site that they run them through there to check the box and, yeah, I got this exposure to environmental health, environmental justice, and they walk out. But my students asked me, and I asked Hazel and Cheryl, but what has it eventually done for that community? When I was in the institutions here, two in particular, there was a lot of demonization of Hazel on Cheryl, and this is the racist part.

(00:12:55):

They're hustlers. They're always trying to get money. Well, I said, "Are the problems that they're bringing to your attention real problems or imaginary?" Right? I have not heard other environmental activists being discussed that way, because at one point in time I was told not to work with them. I was told by academics not to work with them. I was told by environmental groups not to work with them. And again, the accusation was that they were hustlers, and there was some people who became their enemies, so to speak. I would say frenemy because they still wanted to go in there and have their students do work on them. They were talking on both sides of their mouth, right? If that Altgeld Gardens was good enough for them to come in there and run in all these PhDs, then why couldn't you have created an institute for them?

(00:13:43):

At one point in time, some of the grants that were out there in the 2000 was to have a pipeline to create environmental scientists and scholars out of a place like Altgeld Gardens. There was money there for that. And I tell you now, being in a room, there are peoples, like, they'll never be scientists. I remember writing a National Science Foundation grant, and the part of the grant was to create formal education efforts for the community. And National Science Foundation loved the concept. I got the money, and there was two parts, the academic intellectual part, nobody had a problem with. When it came to implementing the community support part, Hazel Johnson was dead on the money.

(00:14:25):

These academic institutions said they did not want the community to be empowered. I remember one person at UIC, School of Public Health, he literally said in the meeting, "I don't want her to implement that part of the grant. I don't want the community to be riled up by letting them know what's happening to them." Because they were committed to the concept that basically a place like Altgeld Gardens were basically like their lab studies. It's a form of slavery because it's like, so we are going to send our students in, study you, get their PhDs, get their master's degrees, get good jobs, but we're not going to do anything institutionally and infrastructurally to lift you up.

(00:15:07):

She was a woman and she was Black, and she was not highly educated, and that limited her power. That to me is why it was difficult for her and Cheryl to create permanent institutional relationships that was able to benefit the community.

Damon Williams (00:15:26):

So I asked Cheryl how this dynamic resonated with her. Did she recognize this distrust coming from academic institutions?

(00:15:34):

Did you see that lack of trust or that dehumanization as Black women living in public housing? Can you talk about some of the ways that you observed or experienced that?

Cheryl Johnson (00:15:44):

Oh, yeah, yes. I went to a meeting at DC and Vice President Al Gore was present. They started this Community University Partnership grant. It was called CUP but the lead would always be the university, and the university wasn't doing what they supposed to do in that type of partnership. They made us substandard and I said that he need to revisit the CUP program because it ain't working for community groups like ours. And I said that publicly. And ever since I said that publicly, things just went spiraling down for us as a organization.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:16:22):

Soon after the CUP meeting in DC, Cheryl had a meeting with a woman named Margaret Millard.

Cheryl Johnson (00:16:28):

May she rest in peace. She was an EJ coordinator for the United States Environment Protection Agency. She asked me to meet her for lunch, and we met at Burger King. She told me, she said, "Look, Cheryl, I just have to be blunt honest with you, and I don't supposed to do this because I can lose my job. Whatever grants that you apply for at USEPA, you will never be funded. PCR been blackballed."

(00:16:52):

We was the first community group in the country to get training, technical training down to the community base, and it was lead-based planning abatement training for workers. We was the first in the country to ever prove that this type of technical training can be done in the community. Well, we trained over 300 folks. After the first two years of training, that third year during that period when she told us they wouldn't fund it. Everybody just distanced themself from us in a way, like we was toxing our damn self.

Damon Williams (00:17:26):

So maybe I'm connecting dots that ain't there, but after hearing Sylvia's experience in the academy and Cheryl's story, I have a takeaway.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:17:34):

Let's hear it.

Damon Williams (00:17:34):

And it starts from that training program that she just named. As we focus more on Cheryl and her distinctions from Hazel, one of her major focuses has always been workforce development and building up the technical capacity of the people of the gardens to address this environmental damage. And what we hear Sylvia say is that many of her peers in the academy don't think people from the gardens or communities like it are capable or smart enough to do this type of scientific work.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:18:01):

Yeah, you kind of hear it two ways, like one, quote, "They wouldn't be capable," and two, if they did have access to the information, it would cause unrest that people in power don't want to see.

Damon Williams (00:18:13):

And so we see these tags of difficult or hustling being thrown around, and yeah, a Black woman from the projects that stands up to the Vice President of the United States in a meeting and say, "One of your flagship programs is failing in its design," one, would get you the label of being difficult or speaking out of turn. But two, what I'm really taking away from this is academia sees this investment into everyday people being in training programs, learning to become scientists as a misappropriation, as beyond what is to be expected or accepted.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:18:47):

And look, we don't know exactly how the EPA justified not renewing that grant, just like we don't know what happened on every budget sheet for every proposal that PCR ever sent in. But what we do know, like Sylvia said, is that the claims that PCR made about the environmental injustices that had happened to their community were real, and that the ideas for how to address that harm were valid. If 300 people can be trained in two grant cycles on how to clean up lead in their own communities, imagine what would happen if you followed that lead across the country.

Damon Williams (00:19:20):

It's important to highlight that this is an innovative departure. According to Cheryl, this training was the first of its kind

Daniel Kisslinger (00:19:27):

A while back in the episode, Teresa made this point that yes, there are individual academics who have been extractive, but there are of course other academics who have built meaningful relationships.

Damon Williams (00:19:38):

And have participated with integrity and have really been in true solidarity with the struggle.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:19:43):

We talked to some of them. However, the problem is not individual intention. The problem is about a relationship to power.

Damon Williams (00:19:51):

And if we're going to get to the root of this, the structure from which these moral aspersions came needs to be examined with an even higher scrutiny than we saw from those institutions looking at Hazel and Cheryl.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:20:03):

At one point in time, I remember being in the hallway and they were like, "Oh, they misspent money." Institutions misspend money all the time. I'm sorry. And universities are, talk about hustling. Universities are bandits, man. You get a research grant, they're going to take like 30%, 40% off your research funding. And they up here calling Hazer and Cheryl hustling. Even if they were hustling, they weren't going to get as much money as these academics, right?

(00:20:31):

But that's the stereotype, welfare queen, like defrauding the government, taking money from people and doing something else with it. Thinking back on it, I mean, I knew then it was racist and sexist, but it was like, wow, here's a scientist to me, but is there a real scientific and health issue over there? And they would tell you behind closed doors, yes.

Professor David Pellow (00:20:54):

I've always been, since the moment I met Cheryl and Hazel, I guess a representative of, an employee of universities, there are so many wonderful things that universities do and can do, but they're also into a lot of horrific things. I mean, I just got a memo the other day from some students here at my own university just laying out in chapter and verse the depths to which my university is embed with and propping up the military industrial complex. I mean, I'm talking about the major manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction and dealers of death. We're talking about full on ecocidal, genocidal, mass atrocities being committed by the US military. And my organization, my employer is deeply involved in that. Professors doing research, getting funding from these organizations.

(00:21:45):

So I often question my role as somebody who's working in an institution that can have, shall we say, mixed outcomes and impacts and troubling motivations and entanglements with systems of power. And then of course, there's the fact being a person of color in a white supremacist society, trying to get some resolutions, trying to move forward with some measure, some modicum of justice by pushing, by demanding, by calling out, and maybe occasionally calling in those power structures that fundamentally I don't think are willing to change. So I'm constantly grappling with that, and I have no answers, no easy solutions. But again, Hazel and Cheryl really showed me that there are ways to manage those tensions to live with, to hold those tensions and still keep your dignity.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:22:43):

This exploitative relationship with academia wasn't just a problem for PCR. A couple years after Cheryl got blackballed and 11 years after the first people of color convening, many of the same organizers reconvened in DC. Sylvia names how in that space, one of the loudest cries from the EJ Movement was that same tenuous relationship with academia.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:23:05):

They were saying that for the Environmental Justice Movement to really be true to its foundational objective and roots, the activist communities had to have equal partnership. That had not happened. What they had observed as community activists was an exploitation by people outside the EJ community.

Damon Williams (00:23:24):

We see that there's a spectrum of institutional access and accreditation across the movement. Many of the prominent figures had PhDs, became professors, had fellowships or worked in departments within universities and other institutions.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:23:39):

This exploitative relationship to academia was detrimental for everybody in the EJ Movement. But for Cheryl, this inequitable power dynamic resulted in a greater precarity, both for her ability to do the work and to pay her bills.

Cheryl Johnson (00:23:54):

Work in this industry, doing community work is truly charity work. And it's personal decision that I had made to continue doing this type of work where I had to go and rely on public assistance to feed my family, to pay my rent. But I sacrificed that and did that. We was blackballed for 10 years, and that's when I'm telling you I had to go get on public aid and all that old stuff. And let me tell you something, I'll never forget this. I took a aptitude test. I missed one on delivery just to get a 98. You know what I mean?

Damon Williams (00:24:32):

You ain't embarrassed about that?

Cheryl Johnson (00:24:33):

I'm telling you the truth. And then when I told them, they was trying to tell me that I have to get a job. I said, I got a job. I just don't get paid for it. Why I can't do what I do every day.

(00:24:47):

At People For Community Recovery, we are registered. We are 501(c)(3). We're the whole bit. They was talking, "No, it's not a job if you don't get paid." I said, "Yes, it is. I work for my community every day. Why do I have to get compensate in money?" And I said, "This is an entitlement that I'm entitled to when I need it and I need y'all." Then one time they told me, I'll never forget the Academy Community Center on 126 in Nashville, they told me that I have to go to for job training. I said, "Okay, I'm going to go." I went there at 9:00. They said, I have to be on time, 9:00. I got there at 9:00. The lady met me. "Oh, you here from 119th?" I forgot to say for public aid. I was like, "Yeah." She said, "Okay, well, let me show you where you put your coat."

(00:25:31):

I'm putting my coat where they keep all their janitor stuff at. And she said, "Here go the mop, here go the broom, and we want you to sweep and clean up." I said, "Hold up clean. I'm here for training not to do any domestic services." I said, "Y'all got me mixed up." I said, "Here got the paper right here. It says training, not to do any services." I documented all that. I kept all that stuff.

(00:25:52):

When I walked in the door to apply for public aid, something just hit me, said, "Document your experience." I came up with 24 pages of how I was mistreated at the public aid office. And see, I believe go to the head because the body would follow. I wrote to President Clinton, I wrote to his wife. I wrote to Al Gore, and I sent the whole 24 pages.

(00:26:18):

Well, anyway, I didn't find out that I got some resolutions. I didn't think nothing of it, but when I was doing the deposition for the PCB, the lawyer came and asked me, "Did you know that Hillary Clinton responded to your letters that you sent?" I was like, "What you talking about?" He said, "Didn't you write all of them? She got in contact with our state hub gate department, and that's why you seen all them changes." And that's how I found out that Hillary has something to do with those changes coming with our Illinois Department of Public Aid.

Damon Williams (00:26:49):

So you're saying the whole Illinois Department changed as a result of this?

Cheryl Johnson (00:26:53):

The policy. See, you didn't know what you are supposed to do when you're going to the public aid office.

Damon Williams (00:26:59):

This is an important story. I think we need to take some time and unpack what Cheryl just said to us, because I think this is really significant to the bigger story.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:27:08):

All right, let's do it.

Damon Williams (00:27:09):

So we are in the era of Cheryl taking more prominence and leadership as Hazel is aging. And during this time, one is interacting with the federal government.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:27:20):

This is when all that knee jack and common sense initiative work is happening.

Damon Williams (00:27:23):

Right. So at this meeting at the CUP Program where the Vice President of the United States, Al Gore is present and she stands up and names that this large federal initiative is not living up to its claims. In that same time, let's not forget on a local level, they are in struggle around the PCB fights. There's a lot of local political power that she's in direct struggle with.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:27:45):

Yes. CHA, the mayor's office, local EPA even.

Damon Williams (00:27:49):

And some of our other conversations, that trickled down to their local alderman and to the state senator, and at the same time they're being called hustlers.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:27:56):

Right.

Damon Williams (00:27:58):

Right. So the idea is that they're taking money, but the reality, as Cheryl names, is that she's actually having to sacrifice her salary for the organization to continue on, which forces her to go to the public aid office.

(00:28:08):

So she goes to the public aid office, and so she has to take a aptitude test and then she has to come back for training. And in that training, it is the state government extracting free janitorial services, treating this Black woman like a maid. But Cheryl is brilliant, experienced and connected. So she doesn't just go through this experience passively. From there, she sends letters off to the entire federal administration, it seems, and the result of that is the then First lady, Hillary Clinton, changing the policy of how public aid works in the state of Illinois.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:28:40):

Yeah. In case you didn't catch the explanation of what changed, as a result of Cheryl's letter now, when people go into the public aid office, they're provided with resources about exactly what steps they're supposed to take and what to expect. Because beforehand, if you missed a step that you didn't know you were supposed to do, you lost your entitlement to that support and that aid.

Damon Williams (00:29:01):

And then this last part is just conjecture, but I think it's of significance. In the last episode, we talked about the conflict with Barack Obama and his campaign and Hazel's choice to support Hillary Clinton. We'll give you a quick peek behind the curtain. We're no Hillary Clinton fans here. But in hearing that story, it would make sense the difference between the young organizer who was connected to our space who never came back, versus the woman who received a letter from my daughter and changed the way public aid worked in my state in addition to the longstanding interaction the EJ Movement had with the Clinton administration.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:29:36):

Again, Hazel's not here for us to ask her decision making process, but that would make sense. All right, let's get back to the story.

Damon Williams (00:29:44):

Wait, wait, wait. We can't move on yet.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:29:47):

Okay.

Damon Williams (00:29:48):

I'm actually, we're burying the lead of the whole significance of this, and there's a deeper irony to this whole thing. All right.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:29:55):

Damon's got one of those things on the wall where the strings are all connecting right now, but it's true.

Damon Williams (00:29:59):

But this is obvious. So we can hypothesize that Hillary Clinton showing up in this difficult time could have had significant impact, but that's smoothing past the fact that Bill Clinton is why Cheryl had to go through this in the first place.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:30:13):

What do you mean?

Damon Williams (00:30:14):

So one of the major legislative accomplishments, put the big air quotes on this, "Of the Clinton administration" is the 1996 Personal responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. So Bill Clinton, as he was running for president, promised that he would end welfare as we know it. So he worked with Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:30:33):

Which what an onomatopoeia name, like the fact we don't talk about that he's the only person named Newt that we know of.

Damon Williams (00:30:41):

So Newtness squad.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:30:43):

The Salamander, the Salamander Squad.

Damon Williams (00:30:46):

So Newt, the salamanders, had been striving for a really long time basically to end welfare. And so in 1996 with this Act, it was the end of the AFDC, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the shift to TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:31:03):

What does that mean? What's the difference between those?

Damon Williams (00:31:06):

The biggest difference of what this legislation brought was it granted states greater latitude in administering social welfare programs, implemented new requirements on welfare recipients, including a five-year lifetime limit on benefits. And one of its major additions was bringing about a work fair requirement for people to receive aid. And the effect of this law is that after its passage, the number of people receiving federal welfare dramatically declined. The law was actually celebrated as a reassertion... This is terrible. The law was celebrated as a reassertion of America's work ethic by the then Chamber of Commerce.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:31:39):

So basically what you're saying is by Clinton passing this bill, the control over how welfare ran was moved to the states in many ways?

Damon Williams (00:31:47):

And it can easily be interpreted to make the process more difficult and abrasive.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:31:52):

Which is what Cheryl then encountered and what then she had to reach back to the highest halls of power on a wing and a prayer to try to get addressed. So this great accomplishment of then reforming the, quote, "Welfare reform" to meet the needs of people that she made possible with this letter to Hillary Clinton, wouldn't have been needed in the first place if the Clintons themselves hadn't made this problem exist.

Damon Williams (00:32:15):

You see why I wanted to break that down? This is madness.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:32:17):

Yeah, that's not great.

Damon Williams (00:32:19):

Not good at all.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:32:21):

So yeah, overall, to make a long story short, as Cheryl says...

Cheryl Johnson (00:32:26):

I went through a whole lot just being a resident out here, you know.

Damon Williams (00:32:31):

If we remember, Altgeld Gardens was not always associated with economic precarity. When it was first built, for many, it was actually seen as a well-resourced community and a space for upward mobility. And through Cheryl's experience, we can see this shift from what the Mother of Environmental Justice experienced to what her daughter and her daughter's generation had to endure.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:32:52):

By the time Cheryl was coming of age, the social supports and structures that had made the gardens a space of stability had disappeared. And that wasn't just true in the gardens. This is the era of the rise of neoliberalism.

(00:33:10):

You probably heard that word before. Depending on who's using it and when, it can mean a lot of different things.

Damon Williams (00:33:16):

But a way to put it simply is a prioritization of profit-driven markets and corporate power to meet the needs of people, coupled with a divestment and deprioritization of social services and public institutions.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:33:28):

So rather than people's needs being met by the public or the state, the premise is if we move that money to the private sphere, the market will serve those needs. In reality, that has created decades of divestment and devastation in the gardens, across Chicago, and really around the world.

Damon Williams (00:33:50):

So we don't have time to do the full neoliberalism podcast, even though this story is pretty much a narrative about neoliberalism.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:33:57):

Yeah, this kind of is the neoliberalism podcast.

Damon Williams (00:34:00):

But to keep it simple in the impact of the gardens, what we see is a decrease in social services and elimination of the social safety net, while also in the name of increasing corporate power and profits, the reduction in disappearance of labor markets and jobs vanishing from the community.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:34:16):

Right. The entire economic worker base in the area that had brought people to the southeast side, that was part of why the gardens was even built there in the first place, was the steel industry that existed along Lake Michigan on the southern end of the city into Indiana. In this time of privatization and corporate profits, that production went overseas and those jobs disappeared. There was no plan in place to address the needs of those former workers. Dr. Bob Ginsburg gives us a little history

Dr. Bob Ginsburg (00:34:42):

In the '50s, early '60s, what were your big steel making areas around the world? There was sort of south of Chicago, northern Indiana, northwest Ohio, that whole big area along there. You had the Midlands in Britain, you had the Ruhr Valley in Germany, and you had around Yokohama in Japan. As the steel industry shrank around the world, all those other countries had national, "And how do we deal with this? How do we deal with the populations? How do you deal with those communities?" In this country, we did nothing. Reagan said "It's a market force."

Damon Williams (00:35:14):

And in that void, a lot of space was made for despair and traumatic conflict. And Cheryl names how this radical destruction of the local economy informed a generation of violence that Altgeld Gardens suffered through.

Cheryl Johnson (00:35:29):

All this disinvestment in our community. Disinvestment equals to violence. That's just it. When you took away all those things back in the '50s, '60s and '70s because most of the people I remember in my community owned businesses, the teachers lived in the community, the truant officers, as we called them back then, lived in the community. When you took all those supportive systems that help a person, a student to be a thriving community, when you took all that out and you expect for the end result to be pleasant, that's why we see violence in our streets today.

Damon Williams (00:36:07):

Cheryl's right. But disinvestment doesn't only bring violence, disinvestment is violence. And for me, there is a universal truth. Violence begets violence. The violence that occurs in Chicago has become a political character that is shaped by a discourse that for me is really triggering and is angering as it gets filtered through these statistic-based conversations as if it's a sports season and it's dehumanizing. One, because it erases the structural violence that makes chaos inevitable, but more importantly, it de-centers, if not erases, the real human impact. The complexity of compounding grief, grief of lost loved ones, grief of lost spaces, grief of the loss of home, grief of a loss of community. And the erasure of that reality becomes an obstacle to making space for healing. Joy West tells us more of the complex ways violence impacts a family.

Dr. Joy West (00:37:08):

It started to change after I left the gardens as the gangs started to rise up. And we know that gang violence is a direct result of poverty, a lack of money, lack of jobs, lack of resources. So many young men resort to violence. And my brother, Jeffrey, was a part of that community and was killed in Altgeld Gardens. My brother Jeffrey lived a life of trying his very best to do better. He went to Carver, and like so many other young men, just could not find his way out. And so he became part of what he saw out there. And as a result, he was killed. As a family, I think we were kind of all holding our breath for so long, hoping that one of our family members wouldn't be a part of what we saw all around us. And so for our family, when my brother was killed, I think that was kind of the final straw for us as it was for many families.

(00:38:24):

Even if we can't find a way to get out, we've got to protect the small amount of dignity that we have as a family, the desire to protect the family members that we have. And so I think losing my brother to gang violence in the gardens kind of was, "We have got to get out of this community."

(00:38:47):

And so it is something that I know a lot of families still struggle with, wanting to protect their families from the violence in the community, but just not seeing a way to do that. And it's unfortunate because on top of living in a toxic environment, you're also living in an environment where your life is more directly put in harm's way by gun violence. So I'm still unpacking that.

(00:39:21):

I'm a part of the Black Women's Health Initiative, and I had to do a questionnaire when I first joined this public health movement about 20 years ago. And in the questionnaire, they asked me if in my upbringing I had been affected by gun violence in any way. And I thought about that and I thought about a close family member that lost their dad to gun violence. And I thought about so many other folks in the gardens who had been directly impacted. And then I thought about my brother.

(00:39:49):

And when I think about witnessing trauma directly, it was just a part of growing up. And even though I can say I grew up in a loving home and environment, I think that so many of us Black folks that grow up in communities like Altgeld Gardens, we take the good with the bad and it's a survival mechanism. It's "Yep. I might go outside my house and hear about somebody getting shot or seeing the aftermath of a shooting and we just roll with it." That's just a part of growing up. The toxins, the heavy air, it was just a part of growing up. And you just assume that the adults in the community, those that know better, are doing their best for you. But what I'm learning is the folks that knew better were not doing better.

Damon Williams (00:40:46):

We thank Dr. Joy West for sharing that story with us, and we send love and condolences to the Prowl family.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:40:52):

So we know that this divestment, this economic structural violence beget interpersonal violence. But as we've heard throughout the whole story, the effects of the decisions of industry are so deeply interwoven with environmental injustice. The violence isn't just happening to people's blocks and their bank accounts, it's happening to their bodies. Cheryl explains just one of the many ways the corrosive effects of a toxic environment can deteriorate social relationships, especially for young people.

Cheryl Johnson (00:41:25):

We don't know if some of these kids that out here that's doing the things that they're doing has been previously exposed to lead hazards, which gives them learning disability. And you know how people act when they have a learning disability, because they act disruptive, to take away from you discovering that they have a learning disability. Violence got to play a role in there somewhere to relieve that frustration. I'm talking about in the school setting, for an example.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:41:58):

Cheryl shares a known connection here between lead exposure and learning disabilities, for students going to schools with inadequate resources to address their needs. Dr. Sylvia, who over her lifetime as an epidemiologist, has studied lead, talks more about how this particular toxin connects to violence, especially between young people.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:42:20):

So we all know as environmental epidemiologist that the violence is tied to their exposure to mercury and lead in the womb. Okay, these chemicals are changing our bodies and creating these issues.

(00:42:32):

When I specifically did my MPH in epidemiology, I was like, "Whoa, mercury, lead what it does to the brain, in utero." They know that about a third of all incarcerated individuals, when they go back and do a health history of them, they were exposed to lead in their homes, whether it was water, whether it was lead on the walls. They have known for decades. I don't mean 10, 20, I mean 75 years. They have known what lead can do to the human brain. They have known for decades what it does to children in utero. They know it's tied to low IQ. They know it's tied to violence. It's the most immoral and unethical thing you can imagine.

(00:43:14):

Yeah, you come in, you can assume that they're violent, they're aggressive, they're angry. It's like, but you have put them in an environment from conception to death, which biologically make them more susceptible to either being changed or being the victims of individuals who have been changed from this pollution in their environment. That's disgusting.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:43:36):

What Dr. Hood Washington just shared is known as the lead crime hypothesis. And scientists, scholars, and epidemiologists are not all in agreement that, that direct causation between lead exposure and violent behavior is conclusive. We know that exposure to lead doesn't automatically make someone violent. What we can say is that the level of lead exposure that young people in Altgeld Gardens had was destructive to their brains and bodies.

Damon Williams (00:44:06):

In this conversation, we're only talking about one chemical. And Hazel gifted us with the lens of accumulative impact. And we understand that in the gardens, there are dozens if not hundreds of chemicals that are dangerous to human health.

(00:44:19):

So we don't have to get caught in the stickiness of causation versus correlation. And so if we zoom out from just lead, or really even just Altgeld Gardens as one community, this point allows us to have a truer conversation and really get to the root of violence in our society.

(00:44:37):

In doing this project, it is clear to me that the discourse is incomplete. There are narratives that I thoroughly reject around bad parents or needing more police or more punitive laws. And there are narratives that are true and compounding such as inadequate resources for education, health and mental health care and inadequate economy and dried up labor market. But what has been missing from the conversation and the discourse and led us ill-equipped to address the violence in all of our cities, for me, particularly amongst Black people that has been mythologized through this false framing of Black on Black crime, is the erasure of the fact that people have been placed in toxic environments. And there's a violence embedded in that hazardousness and in the erasure of its impact on people's bodies and lives. Where we live is toxic, and toxicity begets toxicity.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:45:32):

This is the context that Cheryl does her work in, and these are the challenges that she's trying to address. In this episode, and really in the whole show, we've documented a lot of the harms that people in the gardens have experienced, and many of the ways that they've pushed back and raised awareness. But all of that work is ultimately in service of working toward repair. And Cheryl has stewarded the organization through this shift, from Hazel fighting to find out what was happening and raise awareness, to now trying to figure out what do we do about it and how do we move toward healing. But how do we begin this process of repair? We asked Juliana, one of the members of our creative cabinet and an environmental justice visionary in her own right, how to begin to reach toward repair.

Juliana Pino (00:46:21):

Repair in and Altgeld Gardens has to do with centering the priorities of the people who live there now and what they need in their daily lives. So real environmental justice, I think, has to come down to what residents want, what the people who live in the place that's impacted define it to be. It has to come down to that.

Damon Williams (00:46:41):

Juliana's right. The path to repair has to center the most impacted. And the most impacted people are the people living in the gardens. So once again, we hopped on the Bishop Ford, microphones in hand, and headed back to the gardens.

Adella Bass (00:46:53):

If we have any issues with that jumping house, we will shut it down. Safety first. Have fun and enjoy.

Crowd member (00:46:56):

Yeah.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:47:05):

All right, Damon, what are we doing?

Damon Williams (00:47:08):

We are here on location in the gardens gathering and celebrating with the community. This is 43 year anniversary of PCR. It's in conjunction with the elongated Juneteenth weekend, so Black liberation kind of as the center and community work at the forefront. It's just been a pleasure to, one, be present with the community, but also to have the opportunity to talk some folks and get deeper into some of their perspectives.

(00:47:36):

This is my favorite social, cultural, political tactic, this type of gathering. Just the aesthetic of the grill going, the bouncy house and music playing in the background with the combination of resources being offered. So clothes being redistributed. Blood pressure and other health screenings is really important. The churches are here. Seeing kids walk around with the candy, the chips, and the snow cone. But knowing that that is something that people, and particularly black people, have a muscle around and know how to do, but know how to do it many times in many spaces. But when it's deployed for these larger community building efforts with this political underground, you can feel the power and you can feel the challenging of despair with act of hope. And so that feels really present here. There's an interconnectedness that feels like it is apt towards developing community here that I really appreciate.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:48:36):

And we're in this beautiful little birch tree grove under the trees giving us some shade on this hot day.

Mina Jefferson (00:48:42):

My name is Mina Jefferson. I am a resident in Altgeld Garden and I do work for PCR.

Damon Williams (00:48:50):

What does repair or recovery look like to you now that you're learning this, not only as somebody working with the organization, but as a resident?

Mina Jefferson (00:48:58):

What do that look like for me? I guess what it looked like, feel like is us.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:49:04):

What's your name? How old are you? Where do you stay?

LaMonte (00:49:09):

My name LaMonte. I'm 17. I stay right here in Altgeld Garden, in this block, Block Six. I hear a lot of stories about when my parents knows growing up, it wasn't a lot of shootings out here, like how it is now. Kids aren't out here playing with guns and nothing like that.

(00:49:24):

And then once we started getting older, next thing you know, you look up all the young kids playing with guns. Like events like this, it got to be a lot of people in order to have a event. And one certain block that they know that ain't no shootings or nothing going to happen here. Because every time they throw an event in this block, it never been a shooting in this block. If we start speaking up for ourself and going to other blocks and doing the same things that we doing in this block, I bet you we can start changing everything around back to how the way it used to be, when we can be able to walk outside and do the things that our parents used to do back then when they was able to go outside and enjoy their life. Everybody should be able to live that one life that they got. And I pray for everybody else in there, and the rest of the blocks too.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:50:15):

So just real quick, you heard LaMonte talk about the different blocks. That's the way the gardens is laid out and the way residents talk about one area in relation to the other. Now, the block he's talking about and where we were is the block where the PCR office is. As you might remember, PCR is currently working out of one of the residential units in the gardens. It's a two-bedroom apartment that they've repurposed into the office for the organization.

Damon Williams (00:50:40):

And LaMonte offers us a really significant perspective. For him, the presence PCR brings to his block, brings safety throughout the year, but especially on days like the day we met him, where PCR does more than just gather resources and information. They gather people.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:50:58):

One of the people present was Craig Hardaway. Craig lives near the gardens and works with young people in the gardens as well as the whole Roseland area overall.

Damon Williams (00:51:05):

And so for you as somebody who does work addressing violence and particularly youth violence, but you also just mentioned this environmental impact, whether it's from your organization or just from your own perspective and experience, how do you see that environmental impact intersecting with or shaping the way that violence happens in our communities? Does that connection made for you or for anybody you work with?

Craig Hardaway (00:51:29):

I think you can always draw, you know what I mean, intersectionality, once you get to talking about toxic dump and toxic waste where people injecting into they body, it changes the chemical makeup. You know what I mean? Once your chemical makeup gets changed, the way of thinking changes. You know what I mean? I think that when you come out in the community and the community don't see green grass, flowers, green trees, that takes away hope. That makes people feel, you know what I mean, man, indifferent. They feel despair when they go to other communities and see beauty. And then when they revert back to their own, it's like, man. And I think that once people see that day in and day out, the same way like with the news reports, day in and day out, you become desensitized. You stop caring. You know what I mean?

Damon Williams (00:52:11):

Craig went on to share thoughts that are important as we ask this question, what does repair look like, particularly for people not from the gardens.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:52:18):

You mean like maybe two guys, late twenties, early thirties with microphones sitting at a table?

Damon Williams (00:52:23):

Definitely. But especially people coming with privileged institutional access.

Craig Hardaway (00:52:28):

I think that a lot of people go in with a colonizing mentality only from the standpoint of, I feel I know what's best for you. Give people agency, but how do you teach it? That's what it boils down to. You could be advocates or you could give people agencies, but you can't do both. And in my experience, we find more advocacy work than we find agency promotion.

Damon Williams (00:52:52):

Can you specify a little bit how that shows up here in the gardens? That's really powerful.

Craig Hardaway (00:52:56):

You know what I mean, man? People will look in from afar, they'll come up with their scientific theories, you know what I mean, and/or you know what I mean, they thesises, what they went to college for and they did their dissertations on, and then they come in, you know what I mean, with this ideology of I know what's best for you.

(00:53:13):

So when they come in with that, what they already did is prejudge a whole community of people without once hearing from that community. You know what I mean? And like I say, I think that that's the advocacy part. The agency part will be to come in and teach people what's being done to you. This is what we see. Now, what do you see? I think that promoting a agency, promoting awareness informing the community, you know what I mean, then sitting back and giving over the keys and resources to that community to allow them. Because again, it's not a one size fit all model when it comes to justice. Justice for different people look different ways.

Damon Williams (00:53:55):

Craig leaves us with a powerful framework, that building justice and healing has to be a collaborative, participatory process that places agency in the hands of those most impacted.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:54:06):

So often the plans for transformation in Chicago don't do this. And the results can be disastrous. The steps taken are so often to move people, especially people in public housing, out of their homes, disperse them all over the city and into the suburbs. Cheryl has seen those effects firsthand, and she draws a hard line, that can't happen to the gardens.

Cheryl Johnson (00:54:33):

We can't just lift up a community of maybe 3000 units and move them where? They demonstrated what they did with Robert Taylors and the rest of them, and they scattered people because they was more concerned about bricks and mortar than human health or human development.

(00:54:53):

Today, that same land, Robert Taylors and Ida B. Wells and ABNA, CHA is trying to sell them to a developer, but they're supposed to be replacement of affordable housing for folks to live at. So I have to bring these things up because that's what we always fight about. It's the intersectionality of what affects us economically, what affects us, our health, what affect our education, and most importantly, what affect our housing.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:55:20):

How do you build the type of partnership that's needed with an institution as big and nefarious as the city government of Chicago? You look for the people inside the beast who are aligned with you.

Tonyisha Harris (00:55:32):

And there are some great people. I think Kyra Woods is a great example of a city official trying to do both, repairing the damage that has already been done, while building something better that is inclusive and acknowledges the history that exists. I don't know if the city as a whole is there.

Kyra Woods (00:55:52):

Lives cannot be reclaimed. Remediation in some respects at this point is very, very expensive, given some of the allowed practices for so many years. While some things may not be returned, like life and the cost that may be required to remediate an entire neighborhood, could be a lot.

(00:56:15):

I mean, honestly, the participants in that need to be many. And it likely needs a very skilled set of facilitators to identify the path forward. Not only from community members, but also government officials elected and other community leaders, those who aren't elected but holds power in other ways. And then of course, the neighboring industries are those who will be asked to make changes too, I think need to be there.

(00:56:41):

It's important to acknowledge harm. I think it is important to have a shared understanding of history, and that may not feel good for everybody, but being clear about what happened and what is happening, and then we have the opportunity to fix some things that we know have not been carried out well.

(00:56:59):

And I think one of those actions would be to stop causing harm. I think the first thing when you're harming someone is you stop doing the thing. And the other element is the idea of equity and particularly racial equity. But if we take it just for the word that speaks to that imbalance and the need to overcompensate in other areas that have been deficient in order to restore balance, we're talking about equitably repairing systems and moving forward.

(00:57:32):

I think frequently institutions say, "We'll do better," and then they do better for the future thing and don't seek to repair. So I think that's why I'm saying stop doing the thing. Reflect on what's on the table, and make investments that help to remediate and even the playing field, I think it would be a well-funded, well-supported commitment to enact the choices that are decided out of that working series.

Damon Williams (00:58:03):

Dr. Hood Washington gets to the heart of it.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:58:07):

It's not popular for some people, but I would call it environmental justice reparations. Okay?

Daniel Kisslinger (00:58:13):

Okay.

Damon Williams (00:58:14):

She's making an important linguistic connection that often gets overlooked. The word reparations has become a political buzzword or a contested term, but it really just means a process of repair. And it's an important politic that many liberation movements have built to map how we address injustice. And this is one of the main things we hope listeners to this series take away. To truly oppose and resist environmental racism means to organize for environmental justice reparations.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:58:42):

What comes out of this reparative process is going to be wide-ranging because it has to address the wide range of harms that have been enacted on people in the gardens and beyond. Olga Bautista, from our creative cabinet, share some of what could and should be included in this reparative process.

Olga Bautista (00:59:00):

Because of the past harms, we want to see something that is also restorative. It's going to look like more oversight by community advisory boards. It's going to be more participatory planning in zoning and land use decisions, budgeting. We can't do any of these things without dollars. We need dollars. So we want to be part of defunding the police and channeling some of that funding over here so that we can have a community oversight board that is compensated to do that hard work of digging in and figuring out what should be going where.

(00:59:44):

We need to have more clinics, more hospitals in our communities. So to literally repair the physical harm, we need to protect our parks and our green spaces so that we have places that we can go and just disconnect and help heal all the trauma, help with our mental health, and we need universal healthcare. Everybody in the Calumet Region who has been exposed to these polluters, who has lived on toxic land, we should be able to go to any doctor at any moment and any time to get help and get healthy. That's how they can repair harm. That's how they can restore our communities and admit that these bad policies actually cost us in actual lives.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:00:37):

Olga names those components of repair with such clarity, and that clarity comes in part from her work directly with Cheryl.

Olga Bautista (01:00:45):

Cheryl was bringing up, like how are we going to repair harm when we think about what does actual sustainable development look like? I don't think they would've been as rich if we hadn't had this history of this long fight that Hazel Johnson was a part of.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:01:05):

And we had the same experience. Every time we sat down with Cheryl, we heard new examples, very specific visionary examples of what repair could look like, in regard to jobs.

Cheryl Johnson (01:01:17):

There's a possibility of us learning from the mistakes that we had made in the past and creating an environmental remediation workforce, to be able to learn how to do these samplings and cleaning up our community because we don't have a lot of land that is not contaminated.

(01:01:34):

We could get solar up in there. We could do some thermo stuff, because this water never be healthy, so why not produce some energy from it?

Daniel Kisslinger (01:01:45):

Housing.

Cheryl Johnson (01:01:46):

We don't want to be labeled as public housing. We want to be cooperative housing. Give me some equity. I got my equity. I don't like that after 60 years. CHA owe me a equity check from the dividends of paying rent, living out here. That's a mortgage payment. That's a mortgage payment.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:02:08):

And safety.

Cheryl Johnson (01:02:10):

Allow things to be accessible for everyone, not just limit to certain categories. I should be able to go out the police funding just like they fund policemen, to do violence prevention or to do community post... Community policing should never be managed by the police department. That's not community police. That's snitching. And in our community, say snitches get stitches.

Damon Williams (01:02:34):

So imagine if you were able to hold the town hall, here are the resources the police department used to so-called police our community. If we had these same resources, could we not get better outcomes?

Cheryl Johnson (01:02:45):

I can, and it should be open. It should just not be limited just to police.

Damon Williams (01:02:50):

Yes.

(01:02:52):

That last clip comes from the conversation with me and Cheryl sitting down right next to the Calumet River, and I learned so much in that conversation. For nearly a decade now, on and off mic, I've been having conversations and organizing in response to the harms of police violence, particularly on Black people in the United States. A central thrust of that organizing has been a framework of how we transfer power away from this harmful system into communal needs. And we've used the language of divest-invest. How do we reallocate resources that are dedicated to militarism, policing, prisons into the needs of healthcare, education and community sustainability?

(01:03:31):

And to be honest, there's been a feeling of responsibility, but actually more of like a pressure to offer solutions and answers of what we should be investing into in really detailed concrete terms. And the movement that I'm a part of has brought forth really visionary proposals.

(01:03:48):

But what is clear to me now is that the Environmental Justice Movement, Hazel and really Cheryl for the last 20 to 25 years have been giving detailed answers to that very question. So a few times in this show, we've made the point that a true investment in environmental justice also requires a resistance to militarism and policing. But what's actually more important for me to learn is that if you're interested in liberating ourselves from carceral oppression in the forms of police and prisons, we actually need to center up environmental justice and the visionary mothering that has provided real answers to the question of how do we actively allocate resources in a way that effectively prioritize the needs of people rather than prop up death making institutions. The true power of Cheryl's visions expands beyond her programmatic or project proposals. Just like Hazel, it lives in the people she's mothered.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:04:41):

We've heard from Baria Hampton a couple times. If you remember, she talked about growing up in the gardens, hanging around Hazel because she always had the good snacks and activities and it felt like a place with some energy and some opportunities to be in the world, to be where the action was. Now, Baria sits at the center of PCR's office. She and Adella are two of the key figures tasked with keeping Hazel's legacy alive by taking on the leadership of PCR. As Cheryl passes some of the load of leadership to the next generation. Here's Baria's Vision of what this repair can grow in the gardens,

Beria Hampton (01:05:20):

I want us to feel what normal or freedom, what it feels like to have resources available to you, opportunity, that the only people who will miss it is those who don't want it, not because it's not available to you. I see community again. I see the real greenery. I want to see the clean, green version of this. I want to see the environment or the people where we were once a community turn back into that community, turn back into that resourcefulness, turn back into that family that we used to be before the environment broke us up with violence, before the environment broke us up with pollution. I just want to see Altgeld become that family that we once had.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:06:06):

Baria's vision becomes more and more possible every day. But like Kyra said earlier, there's some harms that can't be repaired, some damage that can't be undone. There's a covered walkway in Up-Top, the former commercial center where PCRs offices used to be. The walls are painted yellow and one of those walls is covered with handwritten names, the names of people from the gardens who aren't here anymore, whose lives have been lost to violence and pollution-related illnesses. It's a continuous and ever evolving memorial.

Olga Bautista (01:06:43):

Bad policies actually cost us in actual lives, people that we needed in our community. These are valuable lives. People in our community who could have been teachers, who could have been doctors, who could have been musicians and artists, those were important people who are listed on the walls in Altgeld Gardens that died of cancer. It's just a shame that they had to lose their life and that we still have these policies that are just not meant to repair any of this harm. We needed those people in our neighborhoods.

Damon Williams (01:07:21):

And this wall serves as a consistent reminder, creates space for grief, and it uplifts a spiritual connection to those who have transitioned, demonstrating how their memory and legacies are still with us, which is exactly why Hazel started PCR in the first place. It is important to remember that all of this work was birthed out of the grief of losing John Johnson, Hazel's husband and Cheryl's father.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:07:48):

That intimate family grief and the grief Hazel felt losing these community members around her, the three little girls who lived nearby and passed away from cancer.

Damon Williams (01:07:58):

So in this episode, we've been talking about Cheryl taking on a greater responsibility, navigating bureaucratic institutional politics, economic precarity, envisioning new possibilities for repair, but also shepherding and stewarding a lot of collective grief. In this period where we're seeing Cheryl step into leadership, Hazel had to take a step back. As her health waned with age, she remained present and connected to the work of PCR and remained as a guide for Cheryl as she was navigating these challenges. And on January 12th, 2011, at the age of 75, Hazel Johnson passed away.

Cheryl Johnson (01:08:36):

She started to deteriorate after the death of my brother, Michael. That was her first child that passed away before anybody. And that's because he had a congenital heart problem. The aorta busted in his heart.

(01:08:52):

Every parent feel that they should not be burying their child. And that hurted my mom, because my brother got up that morning, cooked my mother breakfast. After he cooked her breakfast, he took a shower. Then he came and sat in the kitchen with her and said, "Mama, call the ambulance." The Ambulance got here before they even took him out, the guy, my brother was dead.

(01:09:13):

So just think about that impact, that he got up and cooked her breakfast that morning, never knowing that that was the last time she's going to see her son.

(01:09:24):

So I see my mother health started declining. She started not to want to do anything. She stopped speaking. She stopped being in the office. So I used to always try to take her places, take her grocery shop. That's something she loved to do, go to the grocery store and go out to eat afterwards. That was a ritual.

(01:09:42):

So she took sick on January the 7th, something like that. She went into the hospital. I was out of town. I was in DC. I came straight from DC and went to the hospital and she was in intensive care. Then she passed January the 12th.

Crowd member (01:09:57):

So I think that's when Cheryl fully just took on the entire role what her mother had laid out. I really applaud her because sometimes it's hard to step in someone else's shoes. It's hard. Even with me transitioning, sometimes I have my doubts and sometimes I feel really strong about it. I kind of understand the pressures that Cheryl felt just taking on that role.

Cheryl Johnson (01:10:22):

Yeah, my mom, she was a spiritual person, just like she said that she wasn't trained to do this type of work. It was something that God called her to do. And she answered to that. To say, right here, see this chain, this is hers. It has Mary on it and Jesus on the other side. And she gave that to me a year before she passed. She said, "Never take it off your neck." And she said, "And don't let your son wear it," but nothing to work. Because my son had a habit of getting it from her and she had to chase him down to get it back. And every time she got it back, it was broke. So I don't even let him wear it. He'll tell you right now today. I said, "No, your granny said that it never to come off my neck." I never took it off out of, what's this? 11, 12 years? So I'm saying this, that when I have trouble, when I feel sad, when I need her guidance, this is what I do, because that same thing she used to do, just hold it.

Beria Hampton (01:11:27):

A lot of that light that Cheryl works in is her mother's life. That's how she knows she's doing the right thing. She has a lot of pictures that sit right behind her. And her mother is part of those memories that sit behind. So when we were working on a grant project, and Cheryl, I forgot what it was, she said, she looked back at that picture like her mother had seen or heard her say something and she got back in line like, "You know what? My mother would not like this. Let me do it this way."

(01:11:57):

So it's like she still presently feels her mother. It's that thing that you can't see, but you know it's present. So a lot of that Cheryl still works out of. It is weird. She sit behind me too. Cheryl makes that rub off on me, the tradition of the way that her mom brought her into the organization, the decisions that her mother would've made. So everything Cheryl does, she acts as if her mother is still presently watching her. This is what my mother would want to do.

Cheryl Johnson (01:12:29):

Surprisingly, I still say good morning to her. When I'm troubled, I asked for her guidance, and I ask for the rest of my angels up there to help a sister out. Me and my mother was very, very... I'm six out of seven children, but me and her was the closest. I just tell her my youngest sister, I said, "You the youngest in the family, but I'm her baby," that type of stuff. So me and my mother was real close.

(01:12:56):

I come from a family of nine. It's just two of us left, me and my baby sister. Never thought I would be just me and my baby sister because my family, we got along. We had fun together. Don't nobody mess with the Johnsons. And we had every problem just like every other family did. But that was my brothers and sisters and I miss them dearly today, and my mother. My mother enjoyed her kids.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:13:39):

Help This Garden Grow is presented by Respair Production & Media, with Elevate, and People for Community Recovery.

Damon Williams (01:13:46):

The show is hosted and created by us, Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger. Our co-executive producers are Sylvia Ewing, Ann Evens and Cheryl Johnson.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:13:54):

Our associate producer is Natalie Frazier. Our editor is Rocio Santos. And our consulting producers are Maurice and Judith from Juneteenth Productions.

Damon Williams (01:14:03):

Special thanks to our creative cabinet, Adella Bass, Olga Bautista, Tonyisha Harris, Juliana Pino and Kyra Woods.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:14:12):

Our artwork is designed by Areanna Egleston with additional multimedia support from Davon Clark.

Damon Williams (01:14:18):

Help This Garden Grow was recorded in the Malik Alim Studio at the Breathing Room Space, a movement building center stewarded by the Let Us Breathe Collective.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:14:26):

You can find out more about the work of Respair Production & media at respairmedia.com. Get in tune with Elevate in elevatenp.org and support the work of PCR at peopleforcommunityrecovery.org.

Damon Williams (01:14:40):

Much love to the people.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:14:42):

Peace.

Damon Williams (00:00:03):

On September 15, 2016, Hazel Johnson's extended family and community gathered at the entryway of Altgeld Gardens to celebrate her legacy.

Jason Johnson (00:00:14):

Good morning, everybody.

Audience (00:00:15):

Good morning. Good morning.

Jason Johnson (00:00:18):

This microphone's kind of loud. I'm Jason Johnson, the oldest grandson of Hazel Johnson, and I just wanted to first thank everybody for coming out to celebrate her life and her accomplishments this morning, so give yourself a round of applause.

(00:00:36):

Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my aunt and the executive director of People for Community Recovery, Cheryl Johnson.

Cheryl Johnson (00:00:42):

Wow. I thank you, guys. I really appreciate you really coming out here to support us in this very special occasion. My mother worked for many years in this community, so we should be here today to salute, to say that we are having these conversations about environmental issues. We're talking about climate justice. We're talking about economic justice. We're talking about social justice.

(00:01:12):

But now we need to get a little further than the discussions and the conversation. We need to start implementing these opportunities in our community. So I want to just say to thank you for everybody that's coming out, my friends and everybody, because this is important. This is only the beginning of a future that we all equally should be proud of.

Jason Johnson (00:01:32):

A round applause for the woman we celebrating today.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:01:36):

By the end of the event, there was a new sign unveiled on 130th Street. You see it now when you get off the highway and head toward the Gardens. It names 130th Street, Hazel Johnson EJ Way. This sign is the most visible acknowledgment and celebration of Hazel's legacy on the Gardens and on environmental justice, but unless you got off the highway at 130th, you would never see it.

Damon Williams (00:02:01):

So far, we've cataloged Hazel's amazing story and all the phenomenal work her and Cheryl have done in helping to build the environmental justice movement. Now, this episode, we talk about her legacy and our collective responsibility to keep her garden growing.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:02:16):

This is episode six.

Damon Williams (00:02:19):

The Center of the Gardens.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:02:23):

When Cheryl looks at this garden that is Hazel's legacy, she sees a garden full flourishing and full of new life.

Cheryl Johnson (00:02:31):

We saved our community and now our community historic. Now we're looking at doing economic development in our community. We're getting the Red Line extension. So we're going to make sure that there are some community benefit as a result of these development that's happening in my community, and it never happened in this area.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:02:49):

Cheryl's naming these new investments, and she's right. There's never been this scale of investment in meeting the needs of the people who live in the Gardens. We've seen, through this series, billions and billions of dollars invested in the area, but it's always been in service of industry. Now, in a new way, there's an opportunity for investments, like that Red Line extension, to be in the service of people.

Damon Williams (00:03:12):

So I want to break down the Red Line a little bit for folks who may be unfamiliar with Chicago.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:03:17):

Wow, Dame, you're the first person who's ever wanted the Red Line to be broken down.

Damon Williams (00:03:22):

We have a pretty historic train system, and each of the lines are designated by color. Arguably, the most prominent line of the system runs from the top of the North Side down to 95th Street about four and a half miles north of Altgeld Gardens, and it's called the Red Line. In many ways, this railway is like a central vein or a lifeline for the South Side and is one of the most prominent ways Black folks in Chicago access public transportation.

(00:03:49):

So part of the alienation that Altgeld Gardens has experienced as a community is not just because of the environmental hazards, but the way in which our public infrastructure, and lack thereof, disconnects Altgeld Gardens from public transportation, leaving this community unnecessarily remote.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:04:05):

The proposed extension that Cheryl talks about, already fully funded and set to go into operation by the end of 2029, will make 130th, right near the Gardens, the last stop on the Red Line. This has the potential to transform how the Gardens relates to the rest of the city. All right, back to Cheryl.

Cheryl Johnson (00:04:24):

So our goal is to revitalize our community. We had to find a way to remediate the contaminants in our community, but that's education. That's training. That is jobs. We know how to dirty up America, but we don't have a remediation workforce to clean it up. So why not train the residents on how to remediate some of these contaminants in the community?

(00:04:50):

We have enough information. We have enough technology. We have a lot of tools that we didn't have 30 or 40 years ago, when we started, to monitor and to learn how to clean up, and that's why we call our community an open environmental lab. We just need the experts in the science and the technicians to help us to identify and remediate those contaminants.

Damon Williams (00:05:13):

When we sat outside in the open air lab, Cheryl names how her value to this study can come from more than her as a spokesperson or a leader of the organization, but a subject to understand the long-term effects of living in Altgeld Gardens.

Cheryl Johnson (00:05:26):

Just like I said, I've been living in this community all my life. I'm the great candidate for learning about see what I've been exposed to. I've been out here 60 years.

Damon Williams (00:05:38):

Are people still getting screened or tested in any type of intentional way?

Cheryl Johnson (00:05:44):

That's never done.

Damon Williams (00:05:45):

That's never been done?

Cheryl Johnson (00:05:47):

Triaging for environmental health exposures? No, that ain't happening.

Damon Williams (00:05:52):

So who's going to do that work? Cheryl names a need for future studies for implementation for the development of community-facing science. In many ways, Cheryl exists as a generational avatar for the environmental justice movement. Her mother and her mother's peers birthed the modern movement. Her generation stewarded and continued that legacy, and now it is being turned over to folks who are the age of her children and grandchildren.

(00:06:18):

Throughout our time learning from Cheryl, one of her primary focuses right now is how we have generational turnover for current and future generations to continue tending to this garden.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:06:28):

Throughout the series, you've heard from members of our creative cabinet. These are the environmental justice workers who helped shape the show alongside us and Cheryl. The members of this cohort are some of the strongest environmental justice leaders in Chicago. They've led the fight that halted the construction of environmentally damaging industry. They've gotten the city to commit to 100% renewable energy, and they've built a meaningful, lasting, multiracial coalition that is sustained in ways Hazel could only have dreamed of.

(00:06:57):

For this cohort of environmental justice leaders, Cheryl's been a connector between the seeds her mother sowed and the work that this generation is leading today, and they all point to how significant Cheryl and the lineage she stewards has been to them. Cabinet member, Kyra Woods, explains.

Kyra Woods (00:07:15):

I love my relationship with Cheryl because there aren't many people a generation above me that I have in Chicago that are as into this stuff as I am or who are leading this work. I love that intergenerational conversation of, "And then when this person was in office," or, "Girl, let me tell you about this neighbor." It's just rich in terms of being two Black women from Chicago growing up in totally different times in many ways but, at the same time, being united in this work. It brings me great pride, and it's such honor to carry on Hazel Johnson's legacy with Cheryl.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:07:56):

Adella, another PCR staffer who grew up in the Gardens.

Adella Bass (00:07:58):

I think Cheryl saw me, in a way. She didn't speak on it, like a sit-you-down conversation type thing, but she did speak life into me. She did give me hope as far as what I can do and just reminded me of who I am as a Black woman and the determination and the hunger that I had to be something and be different from the people that I surrounded myself with. It's deeper than just, well, work-based.

(00:08:28):

Growing up in a, like I said, in a project community and a low-income area, there's a lot of disparities, and there's a lot of disconnect with families and things like that. My mom being a mother of seven children, she worked a lot. So we didn't have that close connection, and I feel like Cheryl was like a mother-ish figure, teaching me how to speak up for myself in a working environment, making sure I receive the appropriate things that are entitled to me because of where I come from.

(00:09:09):

When you speak of where you come from, you're labeled and you're sometimes held back or not given equally what the next person may get from a different community. So I feel like she gave me that foundation to stand on to be who I am and give me the things that I need in order to maneuver through this world.

(00:09:31):

Being a Black woman in a community, I have to continue to carry the torch that's being passed on from how Hazel Johnson passed it to Cheryl and how Cheryl Johnson passing it, continuing molding the clay for my daughters, just continuing to pass the torch from Black woman to Black woman, not letting the fire die that was set and lit and contributed to by so many people.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:09:57):

Juliana Pino.

Juliana Pino (00:10:00):

One of my favorite things about Cheryl is her swagger. The first time that I was meeting her, she rolls up to our office in Little Village. It's deep in a residential part of the neighborhood, and she just cruises up the stairs in these super stomp-y, very high-fashion boots and a purple-on-purple outfit with her handbag and is like, "This is the meeting on the second floor, right?" And I was like, "Yes, come on in." She's like, "Girl, it's so nice to meet you. I am Cheryl and, whew, it is hot outside. Let's sit down."

(00:10:35):

We just start chatting right away. She happened to be early, which is a miracle because, for our network meetings, we're coming from all over the South Side, and so meeting start time's touch and go. We ate tamales, and she just starts telling me about her dogs and starts telling me about this other meeting she was in and that she was just shocked at the language from some of the facilitators who just still didn't seem to understand that there were actual people trying to just get basic answers and that those people just wanted to be listened to and, instead, they were being talked over. They were being ignored. She's like, "That ain't right, and I'm not going to take it."

(00:11:10):

I was like, "The first five minutes of meeting you." She's like, "I love myself, and I love my neighbors too much to tolerate that." That basic statement is at the core of it. If other people don't value you or see your life as expendable, that's actually irrelevant because if you love yourself and you love your own people, you know that you deserve more. Yeah, that's a through line.

(00:11:32):

Despite the inordinate, massive pile of structural violence that's been dumped on Altgeld, Cheryl still brings love and positivity and optimism, and it's honestly remarkable. It's like a deep belief that is so reassuring on those days that are heavy and hard and that you feel like, "Wow." You reflect on the side of nothing has changed even though that's not actually true in practice, but it feels like that in the moment.

(00:11:58):

Her love just brings you back to the why and is super different as a basis of organizing and is very much about care, caring for other people materially, physically, emotionally, or otherwise, as the grounding of resistance as opposed to just thinking we're fighting injustice because it's not fair. It's that, too, but it's because we love ourselves too much to let this go on.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:12:22):

Olga Bautista.

Olga Bautista (00:12:23):

I started to organize around the issue of petroleum petcoke piles that were being stored on the Calumet River. I was working with Peggy Salazar, who was the executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force at the time, and she actually connected me to Cheryl Johnson. I was just in awe of the amount of history that her and her mother were bringing to the table was also benefiting neighborhoods like mine. I'm just glad that we've gotten to a place where we're able to recognize those divisions that were created so that we didn't organize together.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:13:10):

And they have been organizing together. At the street renaming ceremony that we started this episode with, on a day intended to honor Hazel, after a whole bunch of people had been talking and people were getting ready to leave, Cheryl stopped everyone in their tracks and was like, "Wait. You need to know who these two women are."

Cheryl Johnson (00:13:27):

Before they leave, we are the three amigos.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:13:31):

Peggy Salazar from the Southeast Environmental Task Force and Kim Wasserman from The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization or LVEJO.

Cheryl Johnson (00:13:39):

We are the partners in crime for environmental justice. We fight hard.

Jason Johnson (00:13:43):

That's right.

Cheryl Johnson (00:13:43):

Kim fight hard. Peggy fight hard. If y'all heard about the petcoke situation, if you heard about the Crawford Coal Plant fire incinerator over in Little Village, we're trying to make our environment healthy.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:14:01):

These friends run three of the five organizations that make up the Chicago Environmental Justice Network. Led mostly by women of color, the orgs serve communities that face severe environmental and health disparities due to their close proximity to near sources of pollution. In function, this network is a way of groups that are doing important environmental justice work in Chicago to be in closer relationship and support each other in the work they do.

(00:14:27):

For an organization like PCR that's so grounded in the Gardens, someone could question what's the value of being part of this network that takes it outside of the boundaries of their neighborhood and focuses on the entire city. But for Cheryl, this coalition is what makes the work possible.

Cheryl Johnson (00:14:42):

It wasn't just Altgeld. It probably was other ones that have not done the intensive research that we was able to bring out about Altgeld. It happened in other neighborhoods in the city of Chicago, even in ... What they call it? In the back of the yards area where it was all the dead animal carcasses, Bubbly Creek. Look at all those houses that they built over there. They didn't care about the people living over there, and it was seeking out in their soil and everything like that. So I'm just saying. It's just we such a capitalist society at the expense of harming public health.

Damon Williams (00:15:21):

This capitalist society is destroying public health. It's not just through toxic chemicals that we're eating, breathing, and drinking, but as Olga says, it's through these systems that disorganize communities that should see themselves in solidarity with each other. That solidarity has its greatest impact in people's day-to-day lives, not just at the leadership level and not just as a point of PR or messaging. These coalition spaces actually create new opportunities for people to take care of each other that may not have been possible otherwise.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:15:50):

Here's Cheryl with an example.

Cheryl Johnson (00:15:52):

I'm going to tell you one unique story with our training. There was a Hispanic guy that lived in [inaudible 00:15:58]. We did not know he was walking to class from 127 and Western all the way to the Gardens every day and would be on time. When those trainees learned that he was walking every day, these young people opened up their doors and allowed Franklin to live with him so he could finish the class.

(00:16:20):

Guess what? Franklin brought his girlfriend and his baby, and he lived there till he graduated. Those three people are still friends today. Now I'm talking about maybe 20 years ago.

Damon Williams (00:16:32):

For me growing up, both colloquially and in my own experience, there's this looming cloud of this air quote, "Black/brown tension." I don't want to flatten it because there is a truth to those complexities in the community at large. But what we see in this story is, within organized communities, the work of the last 20 years made it so folks are not just now learning about their interconnectedness, but already know it as a truth and a source of strength.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:16:56):

This type of coalition takes time to build. 20-odd years after Franklin graduated from that program, one of the most significant environmental justice struggles in the history of Chicago was happening right next door to Altgeld Gardens on the Southeast Side, and that same coalition was leading the way.

(00:17:15):

A company called General Iron, for decades, operated a metal-shredding recycling plant on the North Side of Chicago, right along the north branch of the Chicago River. Then several years ago, a huge real estate developer bought up that land with a bunch of city government subsidies to develop it into what amounts to a privately owned new neighborhood for Chicago called Lincoln Yards. That's a whole other podcast. We'll link to some info about it in the show notes.

(00:17:40):

But as a result, this recycling plant, and when I say recycling plant, that sounds positive, but really it was an enormous metal shredder, was forced to find a new place to operate out of, and they have fixed their gaze on the Southeast Side. As we know, this area is zoned for heavy industry, and there's already all kinds of environmentally devastating industry based there.

(00:18:02):

The Southeast Side community, in coalition with the rest of the Chicago Environmental Justice Network and a wide array of other organizers, said, "Absolutely not." They took on a multi-year campaign starting before the pandemic to try to keep the permit from being approved for this company to move in right across from a school.

(00:18:21):

When we started working on this podcast, the campaign was still in full swing and we talked to one of its lead organizers, Olga Bautista, who's also a member of our cabinet, about where the fight stood at that point and what she saw as a possible path toward a victory.

Olga Bautista (00:18:35):

Believe it or not, there was something good that came out of Trump. I know it's hard to believe.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:18:40):

Plot twist.

Damon Williams (00:18:41):

Didn't expect that.

Olga Bautista (00:18:44):

It forced these Democrats, Biden included, to say, "Look at Trump. He's peeling back EPA protections. Look at this environmental racism that's happening here. Look what he's doing." Well, guess what? These guys are now in office. If we cannot have environmental justice right now in Altgeld Gardens and in the Southeast Side of Chicago, we can never have it, not with the Democrats in power. This is their chance. They talked all this jazz about how if they are elected and what they're going to do. I want to see it.

(00:19:24):

They can do it. They can deny General Iron's permit. There's no excuses anymore. That's probably the first thing that we need to do to start to repair harm that has been caused to the Southeast Side is that we need to make an example of the situation so that every company who comes after General Iron is going to have to think twice about wanting to come in and pollute our communities.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:19:48):

Almost a year after that first conversation with Olga, we checked back in with her once the decision about the permit came down from the city.

Olga Bautista (00:20:01):

Hello.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:20:01):

All right. There we go. Perfect. So between when we talked last in mid-February and now, some things have happened. Olga, you want to just real quickly share what has happened in the last couple weeks?

Olga Bautista (00:20:17):

As you can see, I am completely overjoyed because the City of Chicago has denied the permit to General Iron. After three and a half years of organizing, fighting, advocating, press conferences, hunger strikes, protests to Lori Lightfoot's house, protests to Susan Garza's house, I mean all those things, and the city finally denied the permit, which is incredible, incredible news.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:20:52):

So how did you find out that this was the decision?

Olga Bautista (00:20:55):

Well, we had learned that the decision was coming and that it was good news, but the announcement wasn't made until 2:00 PM. And then I got the email, and it said the permit was denied. There was a link for their official report, 40 pages listing all these problems with the company. The City of Chicago went from calling them this is going to be a state-of-the-art facility and all these things, to they're actually bad players. There's really high levels of lead. I'm concerned about the workers that have been working there.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:21:36):

Now, as you think about that moment, not just what did it feel like emotionally, but of what you can remember, what did it feel like in your body?

Olga Bautista (00:21:45):

Literally, I was trying to tell my mom quietly, "I think we won," and she's like, "What? I can't hear you." But I hadn't said it out loud. And then I literally puked. Gross, a little TMI.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:22:01):

No, but very, very real.

Olga Bautista (00:22:03):

And then when the official news came, I just cried, all that hard work and really holding the line for so long because, essentially, we had lost. The city was going to give them the permit until the EPA intervened and said, "We need to do a health impact assessment." But it took so long. I think it's just really incredible what a committed, ambitious group of people who have the same goal can accomplish.

(00:22:40):

The commitment of this group of people is just incredible. I feel unstoppable. I feel like we can keep winning, keep fighting for our community. I just feel sorry for any polluter who thinks they can come into our neighborhood because it's not going to go well for them. We were in the middle of a global pandemic. All the things that we had learned about winning campaigns in the past, out the window. Our campaign actually started to do mutual aid.

(00:23:11):

We were already organized. We already had trust built, and we were able to help ourselves, our community, out of the pandemic. It was also in the middle of all of these racial uprisings that were happening across the country, Black Lives Matter marches in the Hegewisch neighborhood, a neighborhood that had the second highest voter turnout for Trump, second to Mount Greenwood. There was a Black Lives Matter march here.

(00:23:38):

Lots of those emojis with the mind blown. Every time something like the pandemic happened, you would think it would shut down the organizing. It made us closer. This was like the beacon. We were like the light that was keeping us going, and it wasn't me. I mean it was really the youth who really just took this on and was able to get us over the finish line and win.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:24:05):

We've talked about Hazel. What do you wish she could see about this moment in this fight, in this win?

Olga Bautista (00:24:12):

This was a multi-generational, multi-ethnic campaign that won. Had we not had all of the work that she had done to go all the way to the White House and then this campaign and this fight went all the way to the White House again. It went all the way to the US EPA Administrator, Michael Regan. I think that we really are standing on the shoulders of giants, and this is a continuation of wins that have happened in our community, like the work that they did to close the garbage dumps and to stop all of these things.

(00:24:55):

I feel like this scrappy group of activists from the far Southeast Side have just been doing this for so long. I hope that we are at a place where we can say, "This is not going to happen again. Whatever happens here, moving forward, we have to make sure that it's going to put us in a position where no polluter's going to get this close to receiving their full permits again."

Daniel Kisslinger (00:25:22):

Thanks for hopping on. It's good to see your face. It's good to see you glowing in this win, and we'll talk soon.

Olga Bautista (00:25:28):

Thank you. Okay, thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Damon Williams (00:25:33):

This coalition exemplifies how Cheryl sees environmental justice overall. It's an approach that truly does bring people together.

Cheryl Johnson (00:25:42):

What I love about the environmental justice movement, we understand the practice of environmental racism happen with brown and Black community. But it brings good people together in a commonality to understand that we all want to breathe clean air. We all want to drink clean water. We all want to live in areas that are safe. That's the commonality.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:26:06):

At its most effective, that coalition can even extend to the big green organizations, mainstream and environmental groups that historically have not made adequate space for environmental justice in their work. A good example of that is the Ready For 100 campaign, which cabinet member, Kyra Woods, explains.

Kyra Woods (00:26:25):

The campaign that I was responsible for was Ready For 100 Chicago. We focused on guiding Chicago, the government, to making a commitment to 100% clean renewable energy as a city. We really were intentional about trying to build a coalition to inform what the goal should be. Unlike other cities, the coalition approach was something that we tried to do here and we did here in Chicago and that other cities subsequently tried to do as well once we won our campaign.

(00:26:57):

Cheryl's name immediately came up and PCR, as an organization, to consider inviting into this space. That was amazing, that type of access, because then you go and read some more and you're like, "Oh my gosh, this literally is legacy." I think as another Black Chicago woman, it was special. It's like I don't know that the senior staff member understands how special this is because I didn't have language for this when I was younger and I wish I did. I wish I did in high school.

(00:27:23):

I wish all high school kids who wanted to be involved with environment could do this level of work to better understand what's not just happening in their backyard, but is somebody's home. This isn't just about the other side of town. This is about where your friend lives. This is where somebody's father or mother is from. This is Chicago, too. So that was really special for me to meet her personally. And then to have her be so involved with the campaign is an experience I will never ever want to overwrite in my memory.

(00:27:54):

We just really tried to stay close. I think she recognized that I was somebody who was not just genuinely interested in advancing a commitment, but how we went about developing that was really important to me. I think also honoring Hazel Johnson's legacy as a part of that commitment was important. Cheryl was very clear very early in the campaign that the city has never done anything to honor Hazel Johnson.

(00:28:20):

I said, "Well, as long as I have something to do with it, let's go. This could be the thing." So, gratefully, we inserted a clause that acknowledges Hazel Johnson's legacy.

Damon Williams (00:28:30):

On March 13, 2019, Chicago City Council passed a resolution that included the following language. All right, let me put my resolution voice on. "Whereas Hazel Johnson's trailblazing environmental justice work on Chicago's Southeast Side illuminated the linkage between socioeconomic public health and environmental inequities experienced in low-income and communities of color across the US, led to the passage of the first federal legislation to address environmental justice, and empowered strong environmental justice leaders in organizing in communities beyond Chicago, earning her recognition as the mother of environmental justice."

Daniel Kisslinger (00:29:11):

Man, they love a comma.

Kyra Woods (00:29:15):

I remember saying to Cheryl, "I know it's not much. I know that this doesn't mean that inherently the city will do a better job about environmental justice, but now we may have a different stake in the ground and something to point to in terms of legacy or in terms of principle alignment and value alignment." There was a point in all the editing where it's like, "Does this stay? Does this go?" There was a little pushback. I was like, "You're not taking out that paragraph right there."

(00:29:40):

I recognize that that paragraph in that resolution seems like nothing to some people, but that is just my seal on this to say, "I see you. I respect you. I honor this work that I now am a part of." This isn't something that the environmentalist movement at large or conservation people came up with. That was concern and care and love for family. That is us looking out for one another. So that's what this legacy means to me in terms of my bid for taking care of Chicago, and Black Chicago particularly.

(00:30:20):

Ooh, wow. That's the most emotional way I've delivered that ever. But it's true, and I'm honored to be able to do it with Cheryl. It'd be fine to have seen a talk or have been inspired by a speech, but to work with her and to run questions by her means so much. It always comes with a, "And my mother used to say," which is also, I guess, a way to also ensure that the legacy is beyond an executive order. And again, it is about family and care.

Damon Williams (00:30:52):

This resolution is an important marker. We've seen, in recent years, an increase in celebration and awareness of Hazel as a historical figure. So, in addition to the resolution and in addition to the street sign we opened this episode with, there has also been federal proposals to have Hazel on a stamp and a day designated in her honor, and these efforts are valuable. But awareness is not where Hazel would have wanted us to stop.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:31:17):

People could all jump up and say, "Oh, she's so great. She did this. She did that. She did the other. She made us aware." But anyone else would have gone beyond just creating awareness for others.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:31:27):

That's scientist and historian, Sylvia Hood Washington.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:31:30):

That's exactly what I'm talking about, that her gender and her race and where she lived, as powerful as she was, as transformative as she was, she didn't achieve anywhere near what she had wanted to achieve.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:31:45):

Hazel was super clear about what she wanted that legacy to be. Here's Cheryl reading Hazel's words from that Echo Magazine article in which Hazel directly lays at her vision.

Cheryl Johnson (00:31:56):

"My wish for my community is for them to learn to stand up to fight for their rights. We have meetings. But when it's time to speak up, I turn around and nobody's there. A lot of us still have the fear mentality from slavery time. I would love for a center to be built here to educate our children and their parents, too, because most of them don't know anything about the environment."

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:32:22):

To me, the best legacy for Hazel Johnson is for them to create that environmental justice institute that Hazel wanted.

Cheryl Johnson (00:32:30):

My mother goal, and which I'm fighting for, her goal was to build this C Building to an environmental lab where we could have partnership with university, government, and the community and businesses in this area to learn how to clean up this area and to prepare the future for those future jobs that we're talking about, green jobs today. That was her vision.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:32:55):

We see this vision, and the organizing to try to make it happen, distinctly documented in the PCR archives at the Woodson branch of the Chicago Public Library. In the early '90s, PCR sent out a community support letter for an environmental justice institute.

(00:33:09):

They asked their community members, "Would you support an environmental justice institute that has an environmental lab for air, water, and soil, an emergency alert system, apprenticeship programs and trainings for workers, inspectors, and assessors, a local EPA office, a state-of-the-art auditorium, childcare, and a community environmental policing station to monitor the environmental traffic in Southeast Chicago?"

(00:33:33):

And then the last question says, "Would you like to be informed of the next meeting for the environmental justice institute?" So we can see, as early as '94, the efforts to make this happen were in motion, and Cheryl breaks down what this fight has looked like in the 30 years since.

Cheryl Johnson (00:33:51):

I think in '94, we did an assessment of that vacant school building in our community, and that's where we wanted to build the Hazel Johnson Center at. But the resistance for environmental justice and all that was so strong and high in Chicago, you could almost cut it with a sock. You don't even need a knife.

Damon Williams (00:34:09):

The resistance?

Cheryl Johnson (00:34:09):

The resistance.

Damon Williams (00:34:10):

From?

Cheryl Johnson (00:34:10):

Elected officials.

Damon Williams (00:34:11):

Right, okay.

Cheryl Johnson (00:34:12):

And just policymakers and people of such. So they was like, "What's this Black woman from the project talking about environmental issues? Ain't nobody going to listen to her." So when we got chopped down from that, we just walked away from it. Last year, we learned that they was fitting to demolish the building. We organized, got a little media out of it, and we saved the building.

Newscaster (00:34:40):

This is the building we're talking about. It's the old school built alongside the rest of Altgeld Gardens in the 1940s. It's been boarded up for years. Neighbors say it still has a lot of life left inside of it.

Cheryl Johnson (00:34:52):

We here to challenge one of the systemic problems that we have in our community.

Newscaster (00:34:57):

Today, several community groups calling out a plan by Chicago Public Schools to tear down the former school building known as Building C.

Cheryl Johnson (00:35:06):

There's so much opportunity for this large building. They never give us the opportunity. There have been a vision for this community. There has been a feasibility study conducted on this building to say that it's a viable building.

Adella Bass (00:35:21):

We want to reinvest and not disinvest.

Lori Lightfoot (00:35:23):

It's been too isolated, too forgotten for way too long.

Newscaster (00:35:27):

Today, the mayor, asked about Building C, acknowledged the struggles of this far South Side community.

Lori Lightfoot (00:35:33):

There's a significant number of needs, and I'm committed to working with resident leaders, stakeholders in that community.

Newscaster (00:35:41):

A work in progress as the community attempts to keep their history from being torn down.

Cheryl Johnson (00:35:49):

We back at making that the Hazel Johnson Center. You see what I'm saying? So this time, it's going to happen because the CPS plan was that we going to always use against them. It was the fact that they said they was going to tear down and make a playground. So you just said, "Oh, we could let the community play, but we don't want to educate. We a educational system."

Damon Williams (00:36:13):

Yeah, hehe [chuckling]

Cheryl Johnson (00:36:16):

How fucked up do that sound? You know what I mean?

Damon Williams (00:36:18):

Yeah.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:36:21):

The C Building as well as the E Building next door and up top were all designated as part of the National Register of Historic Places in April 2022. That provides protection from them being torn down without proper oversight and process. The fight to stop the demolition of the C Building was partially about what the building could become, this Environmental Justice Center, but it was also partially to stop the harm that the demolition itself would cause.

(00:36:48):

If you demolish a building potentially loaded with lead and asbestos that has its foundation in toxic soil that might have PCBs, what would be the effect on the people who live around that building? PCR, justifiably, didn't trust that the proper precautions would be taken, and they had vision for how it could be used better. But what happens next? How does this long vacant and partly dilapidated building become this bustling hub of environmental justice?

(00:37:17):

In order for this to happen, Cheryl and PCR are going to need partnership from the three institutions of power that have failed them most over the years, government, the private sector, and academia. Those partnerships have the potential to be part of the repair we've been talking about.

Cheryl Johnson (00:37:37):

We envision the community revitalizing that building, partnering with experts, trade centers or trade schools or whatever and use the state-of-art technology. I'm very inexperienced in this thing that we're doing trying to revitalize and get this building and what it would cost to fix up the building. We want every level of government partnership to this. It is all about preparing the future policymakers, scientists because they going to need them.

(00:38:12):

So why not have a relationship or have a partnership with the local industry in this area, also? Because they going to need that workforce. We're trying to get the National Park Service to take acquisition of that building. I don't have the development skills to maintain and programming for this building. PCR don't have that capacity. But the National Park Service have that capacity, and they can allocate resources to keep the building up.

Damon Williams (00:38:43):

Cheryl is laying out a vision for a partnership model to get the center built, and she offers a proposal of a specific governmental partner.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:38:51):

She also names the ways that the center could be beneficial for local industry, providing trainings for the types of jobs that they'll need.

Damon Williams (00:38:58):

But what about our old friend, academia, that has a lot to offer in terms of research, capacity, and funding but, as we've discussed, has historically had an extractive and inequitable relationship with the Gardens and other environmental justice communities. The process of making the Hazel Johnson Environmental Justice Center a reality could be a really fruitful process building towards repairing this historically exploitative relationship.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:39:23):

Scientists and historian, Sylvia Hood Washington.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:39:26):

She didn't work for her name to be on the street. She was working for environmental health equity. Wouldn't it be nice, since she is the mother of the environmental justice movement, for them to finally give her that institute with her name after it, with Black folk and people of color in charge of it and not using the slave paradigm that gets you out there working in the field, picking the crops, and then they take it home and make the profit off of it?

(00:39:54):

If we had had an environmental justice institute, which Hazel had envisioned, we would have had people studying about Flint and everywhere else before it even emerged, if she had had the institutional support to create a formal partnership with those institutions that were sending people in there that if you're going to do this, then this is how you will support us. Ask for an environmental justice institute that truly uplifts the community, that truly is a legacy to her.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:40:23):

So these three pillars of institutional power, the government, the private sector, both sides of it, industry and philanthropy, and academia are needed to help build the center, needed to help the garden grow.

Damon Williams (00:40:38):

Well, coincidentally, the figure that arguably has the most connection to all of those pillars is in Chicago already.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:40:44):

Benny the Bull?

Damon Williams (00:40:46):

Benny does have the plugs. But, no. This feels like a good time to return to the relationship with the former president who promised to come back to the Gardens with resources and change in hand.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:40:58):

Here's an idea that was floating through my head. It was a political controversy because Hazel sort of slam-dunked Obama when he was running for president. Get the right group together and set up a meeting with Michelle Obama and Barack the next time they're in Chicago and ask them to fund this institute. Pull on his heart string. He claimed he was out there as a community activist working with Hazel.

(00:41:22):

As I said at the beginning of this conversation, there are streams of people coming through there getting their credentials, getting their creds for being activists. What did you bring back to it? You see what I'm saying? Let him check the box that he worked with her, but now don't let them off the hook by being part of the many, many, many who flowed through there and did not give back.

Cheryl Johnson (00:41:46):

What he'd do for Chicago? I see all the other presidents do things for their neighborhood where they come from. Oh, they building his library, a billion-dollar library that took public space.

Damon Williams (00:42:01):

It's important to note that, unlike all previous presidential libraries, the Obama Presidential Center will be the first that is not publicly owned. You can hear Cheryl making that critique, which brings us to an important point. We are currently proposing a path of repair relative to the relationship Barack Obama had to Hazel, Altgeld Gardens, and PCR. But earlier in the series, we heard Cheryl name that on, a personal level, she feels like the harm is irreparable.

(00:42:27):

Cheryl's personal feelings are valid, and she and Barack Obama may never be friends or cool again. So this isn't about fixing the relationship with Cheryl. But from where we sit, this is more than a petty beef. This was a communal harm committed by a figure in power. Therefore, there's a collective responsibility in calling for and building processes for repair.

(00:42:51):

The Obamas have the responsibility and, almost more importantly, the capacity to help make Hazel's vision come true, which on one hand could serve as a sense of a cosmic apology but, more importantly, can help empower the people of Altgeld Gardens, the Southeast Side, and the environmental justice movement overall.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:43:09):

But when we say empowerment, what needs to actually be in the building in order for it to be this cultivating force that helps the garden grow? We asked folks working and living with and around PCR what they think needs to be included.

Craig Hardaway (00:43:26):

One of the things, if I was sitting in on one of their committees or something like that, I would steer them more towards raising up some individuals to understand what policy is, to understand the legal ramifications of it. You know what I mean? I wouldn't say necessarily you got to go to law school, but just to be able to read a statute, know what the purpose of a bill is, how it go from, you know what I mean, a proposal to, you know what I mean, the House floor, the Senate floor, get voted on, and then get passed or go through the veto session.

(00:43:51):

Because you're going to always run into roadblocks. You're going to always run into critics. You're going to always run into people who don't want to see your vision to succeed because it's counterproductive to theirs. But having somebody on the team that understand their ideology, that can see that whole process through, I think that'll be the one thing that I'd add just off the top of my head.

Bernice Joseph (00:44:13):

I think that's awesome. I would even love to incorporate my spin class over there. Right now, I have 18 bikes that I do spin class. I would not mind providing some fitness classes for the community because we know the diabetes rate and the hypertension rate is drastically high in the African American community. So it is my life's mission, again, to not only provide spiritual guidance, but for our natural bodies as well.

Beria Hampton (00:44:48):

See, I'm looking at a lot of STEM programs. I'm looking at a lot of education versus being a teacher, where we actually educate them. I see a lot of community involvement there because we got a lot of residents out here who actually are thirsty, but no needs have been met because we don't have the resources. They need some help, and they need some direction. That's what we here for, to educate them, to help direct them in paths in which they want to go.

Courtney Hanson (00:45:15):

What I've heard from folks is there should be a museum or some sort of educational component about Hazel. We want it to be a space where organizing and training can happen. Obviously, there needs to be a kitchen. Food is a really important part of building community. We've talked a lot about having job trainings, so there would be space for that, especially around solar and some of the trades, and outdoor access. So I don't know, canoes and kayaks and all of the things to enjoy the river that we have and the woods that are so underutilized.

(00:45:55):

So I think those are important. But really, the legacy is about people in this neighborhood and in EJ neighborhoods across the city and the country leading the struggle for the change they want to see, which is what Hazel Johnson did.

Beria Hampton (00:46:12):

Not only would that C Building be Hazel Johnson Environmental Center, it'll be our new home, too, because we haven't found a solid placement yet. But we're looking for that to be our home for PCR as we build our capacity and move forward towards our vision.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:46:26):

Cheryl's heard these dreams of what the center should include and builds off of them as she describes what she hopes the center will contain.

Cheryl Johnson (00:46:33):

We want to create a museum in there, an environmental justice museum, to showcase people around the country trying to save their community. And then have a little café where we can sit and talk and drink protein juices or some coffee. The other one would be associated to training, getting people prepared for this Red Line extension. Construction is always needed, infrastructure. Look at all the infrastructure. We got thousands of bridge that need to be repaired, but how many people in our community know how to do that industry? Nobody.

(00:47:12):

Why not teach people how to revitalize their own community? Then they appreciate it more, and they would value it more. We taught kids maybe three summers ago, teaching them about how to save the trees out here. You know how much pride it brought to them kids just about learning about, yeah, I pruned that tree, I planted that tree? And that's just a tree. If we could plant other things that are positive for our community in our community, people value that more because they was at home.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:47:46):

That should be her legacy. Until we do that, and I'm not being mean, I'm not interested in any more streets being named after her. Give me something that says that her work and what she brought attention to is resilient and is thriving and is reproducing itself.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:48:06):

When we started building this project almost three years ago, our central question was how could we, as media makers and movement members, contribute both to making sure Hazel's work was being properly honored and that the work that PCR was doing today was being supported? We've learned that there are two answers to that question.

Damon Williams (00:48:26):

And that's where you come in. We're not raising awareness for the sake of awareness. This isn't just another podcast for you to have a fun factoid to pull out at a dinner party. We see you as a base to be activated to continue the work and to continue this legacy.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:48:42):

One, we all have to help the Hazel Johnson Environmental Justice Center be built in Altgeld Gardens. As we named, it's going to take reparative support from government, academia, the private sector, but it's going to take all of us, too.

Damon Williams (00:48:57):

To get this done, and especially to get this done right, it's going to need people. We can't be solely reliant on powerful institutions. Building the Hazel Johnson Environmental Justice Center will require mass advocacy, volunteer labor, plugging in on programming, and dollars from everyday people.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:49:15):

This is what it takes to build an institution that actually serves people.

Damon Williams (00:49:19):

So right now, you can go to peopleforcommunityrecovery.org, go to the Join Our fight tab, click donate, and begin supporting.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:49:27):

We'll also have more info in the show notes about how you can support the work of PCR in helping make that vision a reality. The other answer to that question requires something a little different from all of us. One of the clearest ways that we can honor Hazel's legacy is to bring that same critical lens and dogged determination to understand why where we live is the way it is, whether you live in a community that has borne the brunt of environmental racism or has been structured to be partially insulated from its harm. And as always, Hazel had the perfect metaphor for how we all have to fight for the places we call home.

Cheryl Johnson (00:50:07):

How she used to say that? She used to say, "Living in your own shoebox is better than living in anybody else mansion. But you have to take care of your own shoebox."

Daniel Kisslinger (00:50:20):

Hazel left us tools for how to take care of our own shoebox even when the challenges have expanded and evolved past what she saw in her lifetime.

Damon Williams (00:50:28):

For us, those tools take the shape of a methodology, what we call a Johnsonian approach to organizing, which will be a helpful framework no matter where you are. One, a dogged inquiry to learn everything you can about the environmental factors affecting you, your family, and your neighbors, whether that be in air, soil, water, food, in your work or learning space.

Juliana Pino (00:50:51):

I think Hazel Johnson saw a problem in her community and wanted an answer, and she talked to everyone she could to find that answer. I think if there's nothing else people take from this documentary, it's nurturing that sense of curiosity and not stopping until you get an answer.

Damon Williams (00:51:08):

Two, an intentionality about connecting the dots. As Hazel understood, the problems are interconnected and so are the solutions, and we need to take intersectional approaches in our fight for justice and repair.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:51:20):

That ability to make those connections in terms of how we as human beings function on the planet and what we do to cause trouble or try to stay healthy, that was a link that she was able to make. That's her major contribution, to be able to tie together those movements and those ways of thinking.

Damon Williams (00:51:36):

And three, lifelong commitment to care, nurturing, and relationship building as the grounding of our politics and intergenerational struggles.

Cheryl Johnson (00:51:44):

She didn't mind fighting. She fought for her kids, and she fought for her community, and when I say literally fight for her kids, my mother literally fought for her kids. She just felt that she was just doing things because she cared. It wasn't to get any credit or admiration. She just thought that this is what God told her to do, and she just did it. She wasn't expecting no trophies. She wasn't even expecting to be called the mother of environmental justice. All that came from her heart.

Damon Williams (00:52:18):

From listening to this story, this idea of this heart-based organizing can seem obvious or like a given.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:52:24):

But for decades, this idea of care and nurturing was antithetical to what organizing was, quote, "supposed to be."

Damon Williams (00:52:32):

And ultimately, these unsustainable approaches are less successful in building transformative power.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:52:37):

Olga talks about how she, like so many other mothers, including Hazel, found their work more difficult because of the expectations of who was supposed to be leading the work and how that work was supposed to go.

Olga Bautista (00:52:51):

I have had to fight very hard to create space for myself with a baby on my hip. It wasn't just space for me, but it was a space for the baby that was on my hip. I know that Hazel was going through the same thing, having to figure out childcare, having to figure out how to cook dinner when these meetings are happening at night. It is a huge, huge challenge. We have this style of organizing in Chicago where it's just like you come in. You meet. We have a strategy session. Everybody gets your marching orders. You go out. You do it.

(00:53:24):

There's a constant revolving door of activists coming in, and you're training them. That is not sustainable for moms, especially single moms, especially widows like Hazel was. You can't just be pushing people till they have nothing left because some people are showing up with already nothing left. You had to start creating a culture of care, and that's much harder. Some people don't have the patience for that. They just want to know what's the thing. What's the action? That's not going to work in a community, in a movement that's led by women and is led by mothers.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:53:58):

The same strategies that Hazel developed for how to care for her neighbors in Altgeld Gardens can provide a framework as we work to both build pathways of survival and the infrastructure of a just transition in the face of the devastating effects of climate change.

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (00:54:13):

Let me say it this way. Let me put it to you this way. If the environmental justice movement had succeeded, we would be in much better shape with climate change.

Cheryl Johnson (00:54:21):

She always said it was an either/or. Either we're going to do this shit right or we're not going to do it right, and we're going to see the change in our weather pattern, what we call climate change today. So change is inevitable. It's going to happen. Fossil fuel is a major problem to climate change that we experience today. You have a whole lot of people that's suffering from black lung disease from mining and the crude oil, and that whole production has been so antiquated.

(00:54:49):

We're almost going retroactive with technology today. Wind turbines been around forever, and we're trying to capture sunlight for solar. Well, they've been practicing that a long time ago to cook food. You know what I mean? Today, we seeing those cost benefit was where we should have stayed instead of digging. We progressing and regressing at the same time because we already used to do the stuff that we're trying to do now.

(00:55:22):

When you look at green capitalism, I just don't want it to be exploited and allow it to be superficial. It's just like green-washing. I'm just going to say these things, but this shit is really not going to happen for these folks or our planet or our community because the people think they are far removed from it because of their status. It's not about that anymore. It's the choices that we all going to have to make if we going to breathe clean air or breathe dirty air. We going to drink clean water or we going to drink contaminated water? We going to live on land that is healthy or not healthy? That's the commonality for all of us.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:55:58):

In the face of ensuing crisis, key figures in government are, for maybe the first time, really considering what taking this Johnsonian approach would look like. Debra Shore, who runs the region of the EPA that includes Chicago, told us last year about how the EPA working with the city and the state was developing the tools for a cumulative impact assessment that would cover the entire city. If you remember, this understanding of cumulative impact was at the core of what Hazel was demanding back in episode two.

Debra Shore (00:56:29):

Right now, our staff at Region Five is working to develop an approach and what role people in communities can play. We hope we'll be able to establish something that's durable, and that will last.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:56:48):

Now as we finish up the project, that ongoing citywide cumulative impact assessment, which unfortunately has the acronym CIA, is at the center of an executive order that the mayor, Lori Lightfoot, issued in one of her last days in office. This executive order to advance environmental justice for all Chicagoans ensures the completion of that assessment formally establishes the structure and role of a community advisory body charged with carrying forward environmental justice actions and requires the city to develop and implement robust community engagement standards, among other protections.

(00:57:21):

In many ways, it mirrors Clinton's executive order from 30 years ago, but it's the first time that Chicago has made this commitment. Cheryl's quoted in the city's press release, and she says, "People for Community Recovery and other community-led environmental justice organizations have been fighting for decades for policy change to prevent further harm to overburdened communities, like mine, on the far South Side. We're encouraged to see city government value the lived experiences of people on the front lines of the environmental justice struggle. The executive order solidifies a strong foundation for future policy change, and we look forward to continuing this future work and partnership."

(00:58:00):

She's the only person who's not a city official quoted in the press release. As the transfer of power on the fifth floor of City Hall transitions from Lori Lightfoot to Brandon Johnson, we've already seen Cheryl and other environmental justice workers invited into decision making in a way that's never really existed in Chicago before. Cheryl, Olga, Juliana, and Dr. Linda Rae Murray are all on subcommittees that are part of Brandon Johnson's transition team.

(00:58:28):

Of course, we don't know how this will all shake out, but it is exciting to be finishing this project in a time where possibilities for real repair feel a little more in reach.

Damon Williams (00:58:40):

It is from this vantage point that we can finally actually evaluate the work. Throughout telling this story, you might have noticed we were really struggling complicating these notions of wins and losses for these distinct efforts and fights, and sometimes we struggled and asked ourselves, "Are we being too critical?" But in viewing this embodied legacy of folks taking this immense responsibility in the tradition of Hazel's work, it's clear that a 18-month to four-year campaign cycle is not the appropriate timescale to really understand the impact of Hazel Johnson.

(00:59:13):

So, as we look nearly 30 years from the original summit or even more than 40 years since Hazel established the work in Altgeld Gardens, we can see the real victory in the people leading this work who see themselves in Hazel's legacy and a new structural reality that empowers them to move the work forward.

Daniel Kisslinger (00:59:33):

You've already heard from so many of these folks, and we asked a few of them how they see Hazel living on in their work.

Juliana Pino (00:59:40):

The way I see Hazel's impact in myself and the way that I approach the work in the world is to approach it from a place of relentless inquiry, to demand answers, to not only ask about the table where the decisions are made, but to question whether the table should exist, and it's about remembering where you're from and throwing down hard for the people you love.

(01:00:04):

It's also about navigating the systems and figuring out the places in the systems where changes can be made to benefit the long-term possibilities for community wellbeing.

Olga Bautista (01:00:15):

There are so many leaders across the city of Chicago, across the state, that also have similar experiences like Hazel did and see themselves now and are, in fact, leaders in their communities. We have seen Hazel's legacy turn up in schools, and now there's room and space for young people to not just be part of it, but to lead. For a long time, our region has been on the radar because of that grueling work that Hazel did. It is very far-reaching, just the impacts that she has had across the city, across the whole country.

Adella Bass (01:00:58):

It's a lot of Black women with a lot of loud voices in the community, and I just feel like they are respected and they are given those positions in those places and power because of what Hazel Johnson did, like I said, laying those bricks. It's now the steppingstone that they're standing on now and adding to that history of Black women and Black independency.

Mina Jefferson (01:01:23):

I feel like for me to continue this legacy is to a closed mouth will not get fed, speak on what I need to speak on and help my community because a lot of people is not going to say nothing, but it's only these few group of women who's going to have their big old mouth where they going to hear us, where they can't do nothing but hear us. So I want to be that group of women with the big mouth.

Adella Bass (01:01:44):

I love that.

Juliana Pino (01:01:47):

I think Hazel Johnson laid the groundwork to make it easier for my community to receive me and the work that I do in environmental justice, assuming they even know I'm doing it. I am not famous. My path has been comparably easier because environmental justice is a known field. It has created traction to where you're having programs built around it, and the issues that plague communities like mine are so well-known, but the term is also better well-known, or at least you can define it to someone and they're like, "Oh yeah, I know. That happens to me."

(01:02:26):

So I hope that as I continue with the activism that I do and the work that I do, my community can feel a sense of pride in me, but also inspiration that they can do it, too.

Cheryl Johnson (01:02:43):

My mother didn't believe how popular she was. The first thing I would really tell her, I was like, "You got a street named after you, and you the first in the country that have a street name with environmental justice in it," because she wouldn't have believed it. The same politician who dogged her out are praising her today. That would have been unbelievable to her. So making her believe in the fruit of her labor just by telling her same story over and over to hundreds of community people around the country that was inspired by her.

(01:03:26):

I would tell her. I'd said, "Mama, you don't know how many careers you have made only because of you." She'd probably say, "Girl, that ain't true." I was like, "Yes, it is." To see the growth of society and embracing EJ is a blessing because, at first, we was getting our ass kicked. I think that she would just be happy to see people build career, just to see that this movement has grown and people embracing it from all different section and the intersectionality of it. You know what I mean? So that's what she wanted to do, inspire people to learn how to make our world a better place or suffer the consequences.

(01:04:14):

I am dedicated to keep her struggle because she went through a whole lot to make sure that her work do not go down in vain. Today, to see people having a discussion about it, and I could hear her right now in heaven say, "I told you so."

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington (01:04:33):

I have a garden upstairs, a big-time garden. So I went outside. I had planted these beautiful irises. I planted those 15 years ago, and now they're reproducing. They're self-naturalizing. They're thriving. That should be her legacy. Make it a garden of intellectuals. Make it a garden of future activists. Create the environment that they will thrive and reproduce. We want to grow that excellence and build back up that soil and make it healthy.

(01:05:09):

So make Altgeld Garden that space where we are breeding our new crop of environmental activists, our new crop of environmental scholars who are dedicated to creating resilient and sustainable communities, not just in Illinois, but across the country. Let us be the children of Hazel. Let us be her flowers and her seasons that will thrive and grow to make her legacy a permanent and ongoing legacy.

Damon Williams (01:05:44):

Sylvia's speaking to a shift that has happened with us. We came into this project as documenters and storytellers, and we leave seeing ourselves as Hazel's children that have inherited both a responsibility, but also a great gift that offers a sense of pride and joy, knowing that we are connected to this life-affirming legacy.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:06:04):

We can see with so much greater clarity both the world we live in and the world we're trying to build because we're rooted in Hazel's garden.

Damon Williams (01:06:14):

We are humbled and honored to bear witness to the leadership of these brilliant Black women. So we thank Hazel, and we're grateful for Cheryl for continuing her work and being so gracious and sharing her story and all of the other participants and members of the EJ movement whose sacrifices and contributions so often go overlooked.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:06:33):

We've learned from you that the seeds Hazel planted have sprouted all over the world. Hazel's legacy is alive.

Damon Williams (01:06:41):

Her garden is still growing.

Hazel Johnson (01:06:45):

I think that's about it because I don't want to have no long drawn-out thing because I can tell you so many more other things that we have done together with some of these people right over here and over here, too. If we don't take no action, we going to be a lost cause. Thank you.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:07:27):

Help This Garden Grow is presented by Respair Production & Media with Elevate and People for Community Recovery.

Damon Williams (01:07:34):

The show is hosted and created by us, Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger. Our co-executive producers are Sylvia Ewing, Ann Evens, and Cheryl Johnson.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:07:42):

Our associate producer is Natalie Frazier. Our editor is Rocio Santos, and our consulting producers are Maurice and Judith from Juneteenth Productions.

Damon Williams (01:07:51):

Special thanks to our creative cabinet, Adella Bass, Olga Bautista, Tonyisha Harris, Juliana Pino, and Kyra Woods.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:08:00):

Our artwork is designed by Areanna Egleston with additional multimedia support from Davon Clark.

Damon Williams (01:08:06):

Help This Garden Grow was recorded in the Malik Alim Studio at The Breathing Room Space, a movement-building center stewarded by the #LetUsBreathe Collective.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:08:15):

You can find out more about the work of Respair Production & Media at respairmedia.com, get in tune with Elevate at elevatenp.org, and support the work of PCR at peopleforcommunityrecovery.org.

Damon Williams (01:08:25):

Much love to the people.

Daniel Kisslinger (01:08:26):

Peace.