Augusta Needs Home Page

In 1946, Peter Saulsberry paid $50 for a 50' x 100' plot of land just outside downtown Augusta. (1) His plot lay smack in the middle of a
large triangular field of swampland that stretched between two railroad tracks and the Merry Brothers Brickyard. In the midst of another
field, the Piedmont Wood Preserving Company (which became Southern Wood Piedmont in 1970) processed telephone poles.
Although swampy, the low price of the land, its proximity to downtown Augusta, and the fact that it had been set aside as a place for
African Americans, lured Saulsberry and several other families from their hometown of Waynesboro, Georgia. Augusta was expanding
rapidly in the years following World War II, and factory and service jobs were plentiful in the area (Cashin 1980). Men could walk to work
at Merry Brothers, Babcock and Wilcox ceramics factory, Piedmont Wood, or a new Georgia Power plant. Women could take the bus a
few miles into Augusta's "Hill" section to work as domestics. Those who (like Saulsberry) had saved enough money from military service
and/or farming could actually afford to buy property. Moving to Augusta thus offered rural African American families a double wage, a
chance for economic mobility, and a chance to build equity. Within 10 years, the field of swampland now known as Hyde Park had
transformed into a nascent neighborhood, which would eventually house approximately 200 families..

At the same time, however, life was not easy for Hyde Park residents. While they may have found employment, most still struggled to
make ends meet amid the daily injustices of the Jim Crow era. Until 1970, residents did not receive city water, and used outdoor pumps
connected to underground wells. In addition, they had no gas or sewer lines, paved roads or street lights. Living in a "swamp" also
meant that flooding was a major problem. In fact, residents loved to recall how certain families with canoes would paddle from house to
house, ensuring that all the kids in the neighborhood made it to school. What residents did not know was that the flood water carried
toxic chemicals, as did the water they pumped in their backyard wells and the wood chips that they burned in their stoves..

Like too many communities across the United States, in the late 20th century Hyde Park residents discovered that the hands that had
been feeding them had also been poisoning them. Much has been written about contaminated communities and the burgeoning U.S.
environmental justice movement. Such literature describes and analyzes the plights of white, working class communities as well as
African American, Hispanic American, and multi-ethnic neighborhoods, as well as Native American peoples. These studies provide
extremely useful accounts of how communities have fought back against the industries that have polluted them, how they cope with
living in toxic conditions and how they have formed networks with other communities in the course of fighting for their own
environmental justice. (2)

However, much of this literature provides short-term analyses of environmental justice cases. As a result, the attitudes of community
members and local residents toward their industrial neighbors are depicted as a unitary and uniform shift. In other words, the story
generally goes: industry provides jobs for community; industry pollutes community; community feels betrayed and fights back against
industry. Here, I argue that the nature of residents' relationships to industry cannot be summarily described by such familiar narratives.
Rather, a long-term look at an environmental justice community reveals that residents had complicated ideas about the role of industry
in their lives. As time went on, those ideas were perpetually in flux, and they were contested within the neighborhood.

Similarly, in describing the role of state institutions in environmental justice struggles, social science literature has tended either to
foreground it, or subordinate it to the role of industry. For example, sociologist David Pellow argues for the primacy of corporations,
which often "create the very frameworks (that is, the parameters) within which state policy can be made" (Pellow 2001: 51). On the
other hand, Foley and Yambert find that the state "structures all the rest, providing the arena and the rules of the game within which
more local political struggles can be carried out" (1989: 39). In contrast, this paper uses a longitudinal, ethnographic analysis to
contend that both industrial and state institutions play shifting and ambiguous roles. Communities then react to these roles strategically,
sometimes even reshaping them. Environmental justice struggles must thus be considered in the context of a host of interlocking
systems of injustices and discrimination, as well as shifting political and economic contexts.

Data for this paper were collected during 14 months of concentrated fieldwork in Augusta, Georgia, and six shorter return visits. The
elements of this fieldwork were fourfold. First, to facilitate participant observation, I volunteered as a full-time staff member for Hyde and
Aragon Park Improvement Committee (HAPIC). In addition to helping out with daily tasks (such as after-school tutoring, adult computer
training classes, making flyers, grant-writing and organizing community cleanup days), I attended organizational meetings including
large gatherings that invited the entire community and small strategy sessions among group leaders. I also attended rallies, City
Council hearings, and public forums, in most cases, I recorded my observations by taking notes, although a few meetings were tape
recorded with permission of all attendees present.

Second, I conducted approximately 18 semidirected, open-ended interviews with environmental justice activists at their homes, offices,
or the Hyde Park community center. Each interview averaged 45 to 90 minutes in length, and I spoke to many interviewees two to three
times. To capture the attitudes and understandings of a variety of activists, I interviewed HAPIC leaders as well as regular participants
who attended meetings, but did not take leadership roles. With the permission of informants, I tape recorded all interviews and later
transcribed them. I have changed the names of people who asked that I do so. In most cases, however, the people quoted here have
requested that their names remain unchanged. These people have reviewed the parts of the paper that pertain to them, and they have
given consent for its publication. (3)

Third, some of the material presented emerges from secondary research. This research included collecting census data, newspaper
articles, environmental health studies, and soil reports. Finally, I assisted Augusta State University (ASU)'s sociology department with
the creation and execution of a quantitative survey of Hyde Park. ASU students went door-to-door and completed 176 questionnaires,
or between 61.5% and 70.4% of Hyde Park's adult population (Sociology Research Methods Students et al. 1998). The survey
consisted of 41 questions designed to measure residents' attitudes and opinions about neighborhood concerns and behaviors as well
as environmental issues and the HAPIC organization.

Using the findings garnered from this research, I explore the complex political economy involved in instances of community
contamination. Importantly, I argue that Hyde Park residents' narratives signify the ways in which their relations to, and understandings
of, local industry and related political institutions shifted over time. I first show how community members' perceptions initially moved from
viewing industry as a provider to viewing it as an enemy, and how that change occurred against a culturally specific backdrop. Next, I
trace some of the ways in which strategies for addressing industrial pollution shifted over the years in response to the unfolding of
specific, localized events, as well as larger political and social changes. I then discuss the varying role of governmental institutions in
mediating community/industry conflicts. I conclude by discussing more recent events in Hyde Park (circa 2000-2004) that reflect
cleavages in neighborhood solidarity. These cleavages, I argue, can be attributed to changing economic and political structures, both
locally and nationally.

In Between the Tracks: Locating Hyde Park

In the 1940s and 1950s, moving to a neighborhood like Hyde Park was attractive for several reasons. Perhaps the most important of
those was the fact that, for $50, the African American farm laborers of Waynesboro and other nearby rural areas could finally acquire
their own piece of land. As long-time resident Charles Utley explained:
    A lot of families moved in that were [from] the rural
areas. Because in the rural areas, you couldn't own the
land. You were crop sharers [sic]. And that was the reason
my family moved here because otherwise they would
never have the opportunity to purchase the land. They
had to sharecrop it. And they had saved up money to
move to this area.

In addition, Hyde Park was close to a number of industries. By the end of the 1940s, Babcock and Wilcox, a thermal ceramics factory on
the neighborhood's edge, was Augusta's fifth largest employer (Chamber of Commerce 1947). Merry Brothers Brickyard, on its
opposite edge, was also booming and hired a good number of Hyde Park men. In the mid-1950s, approximately 100 homes in Hyde
Park (all of which were black-owned) filled three streets, and employment was at nearly 100%. Residents built three or four churches
and opened several businesses. Most of these ran at night and on the weekends, after their proprietors finished long days of factory
work.

Work was hard and money was tight, but the community was even tighter. Neighbors found ways to pool their resources, sharing cars,
televisions, and garden produce. Charles Utley remembered:
    We had no cars. Very few cars in this area. You had
a car, you cherished it. We had a community television.
I would go to your house if I wanted to watch television
because I didn't have one. There were maybe two televisions
on Walnut Street for the whole street. And we would
always watch television on Sundays. And the primary
show would be the Ed Sullivan show. So we would all
get together.

Utley's narrative describes a close-knit community, where neighbors shared what they had with one another. Mary Utley (Charles'
mother) played a major role in maintaining such neighborhood unity. She organized transportation to take seniors to doctor's
appointments, formed programs for local children, and planned various neighborhood events. Robert Striggles, who also grew up in the
neighborhood in the 1950s, painted a similar portrait of an exceptionally close community. Striggles said:
    So it really wasn't a bad area to live in up until about
20 years ago.... Before that everyone in this area owned
their own home.... Summertime, the activities that
we had out here, it was nothing but a ball field. Where
the recreation center is there? Right in that area. Before
then, they had different teachers that would come out
during the summertime. Basically you had baseball,
you had horseshoes and that's about it. But this way the
neighborhood came. And not only the kids was there,
when we had games, the parents was there. And that
really kept us together. (4)

However, close-knit as they were, residents could not escape Jim Crow's segregationist laws and especially the unequal employment
conditions it rendered. For example, in 1949, the median black income in Augusta was $789, 44.4% of median white income (Cobb
1975: 98). In addition, although employment rates were high, job ceilings for southern African Americans limited their opportunities, and
most were relegated to dangerous and menial factory jobs. In only two of many examples, David Jackson, St. smashed his leg while
working at Merry Brothers and was out of work for several years. Earl Park suffered a back injury at Babcock and Wilcox while still in his
mid-30s and spent the rest of his life on disability. Thus, although their industrial neighbors provided them with jobs, because they lived
in the segregated south, Hyde Park residents were unskilled and had no choice but to remain on the slippery bottom rungs of local
employment ladders.

Other kinds of risks came simply from living in the hole of an industrial donut. For example, until federal environmental regulations were
instituted in the 1970s, (5) Piedmont Wood discharged its residual water into Rocky Creek and Phinizy Swamp, while simultaneously
burning treated wood waste, producing smoke and fly ash. Bolstered by lax environmental regulations in Georgia (which was not unlike
other southern states), other industries similarly emitted waste relatively unchecked. (6) For many years, Hyde Park residents resigned
themselves to the conditions that their factory neighbors imposed on them as a part of neighborhood life. For example, they described
how they had grown used to the residue that covered the cars of those who lived near Thermal Ceramics (formerly Babcock and
Wilcox), the oil that often appeared on the top of ditch water, and the fact that their water sometimes "had an odor to it." Annie Wilson,
one of Hyde Park's first residents explained:
    That water one year, it was stinking. And we really
hadn't paid it that much attention ... In Aragon Park, my
niece was living over there, one time, that water was so
stinking they couldn't take a bath in it.

Although for this resident, the stinking water was a nuisance, it did not inspire her or her family to "pay it that much attention."

Some residents, on the other hand, said that they did suspect something might be wrong in the neighborhood, but because they felt
they did not have much evidence to back them up, they never addressed it. David Jackson remembered:
    My yard used to flood out more than anybody in this
whole area because all the water from the junkyard would
flow right in my yard. And when it leave, it leave all kinds
of grease filled and black looking dirt with the oil and stuff
that just shot up in here. But for years, we know something
wrong, but we don't know exactly what it is.

As Jackson's statement indicates, although blacks in the South are all too aware that they face a long list of institutional discriminations,
they have been slow to realize that the siting of hazardous waste facilities is also on that list. Not only have African Americans
historically viewed the environment as a white, middle class concern, but also the employment opportunities that these industries
promise often overshadow their detrimental environmental effects. As Charles Utley said:
    There was no one to tell the community people, you
shouldn't be there. Or to be a watchdog for what chemicals
they were producing. It was a way of life that blacks were
used to going to work, doing what they were told and not
asking why. As a result, damage [was] done to their health
and the environment.... They're [treated like] second class
citizens anyhow.

In the "black belt" (counties stretching from North Carolina to Louisiana with a 40% or higher African American population), African
Americans are more likely to be unskilled, poorly educated and intimidated by large corporations (Bullard 2000: 28). Sociologist Robert
Bullard describes how residents of these areas have historically been hesitant to question corporate and governmental polluters
because they did not want "to bite the hand that fed them" (Bullard 2000: 31). As one man in Hyde Park reasoned: "People are afraid
of the white man." Thus, although Hyde Park residents came from farming families and had deep attachments to the land, the
immediate need to keep a job and earn a decent wage in order to hold onto that land, frequently overshadowed their suspicions that
something was wrong with it.

However, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, factory jobs were no longer plentiful. As manufacturing jobs moved overseas,
companies downsized domestic production facilities or closed them altogether. For instance, when the industrial ceramics factory on the
northern edge of Hyde Park was at its peak of production in the late 1960s, it employed 1,500 people. By 2004, it employed
approximately 450. (7) In this case, downsizing resulted from major changes in steel production, which until the 1970s relied on the
ceramic bricks that the factory made.

By 1999, such reductions were apparent in Hyde Park. Among the neighborhood's approximately 200 families, the unemployment rate
was 18% (compared with approximately 7% in the county). The median household income in the neighborhood was $8,983, and
approximately 67.4% of people lived below the poverty rates (compared with approximately 19.6% in the county). Although
approximately 61% of Hyde Park's families owned their homes, 77% of them earned less than $20,000 per year (Sociology Research
Methods Students et al. 1998). While some residents held steady jobs as pipefitters, teachers, contractors or nonprofit employees,
others struggled to hold onto service jobs, or to make ends meet through government assistance.

Such disparities in income were reflected in (although certainly not always correlated with) the neighborhood's inconsistent
appearance, which amalgamated metropolitan and rural characteristics. Grass grew high, and tall pecan trees spread their branches
across large yards. Mainly, houses were freestanding and wood framed, interspersed with the occasional mobile home or "trailer."
Some were brightly whitewashed, trimmed in red or blue, and bordered by flower-filled lattice, but others had peeling paint and porches
cluttered with odd pieces of furniture and dirt yards. In many cases, the owners and renters who occupied the more ramshackle homes
could not afford, or were too old or infirm, to keep them up (according to a 1998 survey, over half of Hyde Park's residents were over
the age of 50 [Sociology Research Methods Students et al. 1998]). Moreover, of the roughly 200 houses in Hyde Park, approximately
10% stood vacant. Reasons for the vacancies are several. Many original residents had passed away and family members had not
come to claim their homes. Or, after spending years on the market, a few owners had simply abandoned their homes. Occasionally
abandoned homes would periodically become squats, or crack houses.

At the same time and regardless of its state of repair, nearly every house in Hyde Park had a wide, country-style porch. Neighbors
spent ample time on these porches, discussing the news of the day and neighborhood goings-on. Indeed, despite the fact that in 1998,
one of the neighborhood's most lucrative industries was the selling of crack cocaine, residents remained just as neighborly in 1999 as
they ever had. What had changed over the past thirty-odd years was that, whereas each porch had once overlooked a plentiful
vegetable garden, in 1999, almost all gardens had been left to wither. Thus, as I show in the next section, residents' memories of the
"golden years" of stable neighborhood life in the 1950s and 1960s became further tainted in the 1990s, as they realized that their soil,
air and water were toxic.

Poison in the Well: Discovering Toxic Contamination

Indeed, when Southern Wood Piedmont (SWP) closed in 1988, community/industry bonds were drastically torn asunder. In the late
1970s, in compliance with new federal regulations (such as the Clean Water Act), SWP had redirected its waste disposal and installed
monitoring wells on its property. In 1983, those wells revealed onsite groundwater contamination from wood preserving chemicals
(including creosote, arsenic, chromium and PCBs). Investigations over the next five years established two plumes of contamination.
One extended approximately 2,000 feet north of the plant, and another extended east along an old effluent ditch. Five years later, SWP
decided to close its Augusta plant, partly because the soil and groundwater contamination could not be adequately remediated as long
as the plant remained in operation. (9)

Residents of Virginia Subdivision, a mostly white neighborhood that shared a border with SWP and lay across a field from Hyde Park,
had suspected for some time that something was amiss with the wood factory. As early as the 1970s, they had begun filing complaints
with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division about a foul odor emanating from the drinking water drawn from their backyard
wells. They also began documenting the number of residents with cancer, and were alarmed by the results. (10) A year before the
plant's closing, residents of Virginia Subdivision joined with several local companies that owned property around SWP and filed a class
action suit seeking damages for trespass, nuisance, and neglect. In mid-1990, SWP's parent company (ITT/Rayonier) settled the
lawsuit for approximately $8.6 million.

Several long ditches connected Hyde Park and Virginia subdivision to one another and to SWP's property. Some Hyde Park residents
claimed that their water had always tasted suspicious, but unlike Virginia Subdivision, almost all Hyde Park residents I spoke with
agreed that they did not seriously question the conditions of their neighborhood until around 1990. Most of the residents I interviewed
attributed the beginning of their environmental awareness to a large flood in 1990 that swept over Hyde Park and left in its wake a foul
smelling bluish-white mud and houses full of corroded furniture. Johnnie Mae Brown remembered the "high water" of 1990:
    Most people in the neighborhood didn't even think
about [the environment] until we had that flood. After the
flood we knew that something was wrong because that
water, everything that the floodwater touched, it was no
good no more.

Ollie Jones also recalled:
    That would have been about when that high water
was ... in the nineties ... Anyhow a lady come out here, she
was from Channel 12 and the lady was interviewing me.
My water was so high it was all in my porch and stuff
and a lady was interviewing me about the contamination
because of the water and all that and I said, 'yes,' it's been
like that for quite a while cause the water would come
up from the sewers and things. And that was when I first
really got into it, you know ... [The water] had a funny
color and an odor.

Shortly after the flood, the SWP closing appeared frequently in the local news.

Although Virginia Subdivision was adjacent to SWP and Hyde Park was located across a field from it, Hyde Park residents strongly
believed that the ditches lining both sides of their streets carried water directly from SWP through their neighborhood. They quickly
linked those ditches to their own smelly drinking water and foul-smelling mud. Moreover, the same chemicals found in Virginia
Subdivision were discovered within 15 feet of Hyde Park's Jenkins Elementary School (Hewell 1989: 1A). Some Hyde Park residents
alleged that they had seen SWP trucks dumping waste into nearby fields at night. (11) They also realized that the prison crews working
on Hyde Park's ditches had not been around for "quite some time." (12) Indeed, at least a year before the flood, Richmond County
officials had halted ditch work in Hyde Park because they were worried about the possibility of contamination (Hewell 1989: 8A).
Residents often bitterly pointed out the irony that while prison workers were prohibited from working in Hyde Park, they had no choice
but to live there.

Soon, fond narratives about the days of backyard pumps turned to worries about whether the water being pumped had been toxic.
Similarly, before gas lines were installed in the neighborhood, Hyde Park residents had cooked and heated their homes from wood
burning stoves. A common chore for neighborhood children was to go into Southern Wood Piedmont's (SWP) field, gather left-over
creosote-treated wood chips and then take them home to burn in those stoves. (13) Charles Utley remembered:
    We would get the firewood from the chips that they
would use to make the wood, and it was easy to burn so
we would take that, and we would put it in the heaters
and we would heat with that.

When residents realized that the wood chips contained creosote, this familiar story about Hyde Park's "old days" shifted from
emphasizing pride at overcoming hardship to worry over health. For example, Robert Striggles explained:
    You see when we was burning that wood, we didn't
know that it was harmful to us. We was burning creosote.
We didn't know because creosote was a cancer-causing
agent.

With each of these new realizations, Hyde Park residents' anger at the industries surrounding them grew.

Residents were also incensed at being excluded from the Virginia Subdivision settlement. Although they had not yet filed any legal
actions against SWP, they believed that offering them a settlement would have been "the moral thing to do." (14) In addition, Virginia
Subdivision residents had not made an effort to include Hyde Park in their lawsuit. Because at the time, Virginia Subdivision was a
mostly white neighborhood and Hyde Park was an entirely African American neighborhood, Hyde Park residents interpreted their
exclusion both from the original lawsuit and the settlement as a clearcut case of racism. Soon, two local attorneys (one black and one
white) approached HAPIC leaders and began organizing a class action lawsuit against the wood factory. Now, residents' narratives
focused on the systemic injustices (corporate as well as social and political) that led to an unequal situation.

Rooting Out Responsibility

Although their lawsuit did not charge the factory with environmental racism, residents firmly believed that racial discrimination was the
primary reason for the situation described above. For example, Charles Utley once told me that Hyde Park's situation had "95% to do
with race." In numerous interviews, I asked residents to state why they thought their neighborhood had been contaminated and why
they had not received any help. The more residents I interviewed, the clearer it became that racism was the framework from which they
viewed their circumstances.

Certainly, Hyde Park residents also believed that their neighborhood's image as a low-income area contributed to their situation. Yet,
Virginia Subdivision's settlement confirmed for them that even the presence of low-income white people garnered enough sympathy
from the judicial system to lead to compensation. That Virginia Subdivision residents actually received very little did not mitigate Hyde
Park residents' sense of being discriminated against. This was particularly clear when I interviewed Ollie Jones, a bus driver for
Richmond County Public Schools who had lived in Hyde Park for 42 years, and his wife, Ruth, a 30-year Hyde Park resident. I asked
the Joneses to name the reason for the Hyde Park situation. Ollie responded:
    You want me to be frank with you? If this was a
white neighborhood, now I'm being honest, government
would've stepped in here and wouldn't have been about
two or three words said. Another thing is if this had been
a rich neighborhood it wouldn't have been nobody in here,
they would have moved them out of here. But most of the
people are poor, black people.

In this case, after I prodded him to be blunt, Jones immediately cited race as a reason for the fact that Hyde Park residents had
received no governmental assistance. Jones went on to explain:
    If you look at [Virginia Subdivision] over there for
instance, the majority of the peoples over there is white
people, right? And Piedmont is connected to this place too,
but they were complaining over there, they didn't hesitate,
they bought them out.

    Ruth Jones: But they wouldn't do that for us.

For the Joneses, when white people complained about contamination, SWP "bought them out." However, when the black residents of
Hyde Park complained, SWP ignored them. Totsie Walker, who was in her mid-80s and whose son had worked at SWP, agreed:
    [Being black is] the biggest part. If we was in a mixed
up neighborhood, they would've done something. But
you see it wasn't. Now you see that's the way I feel about
it ... they just don't care you see.

Later in this paper, I discuss the ways in which income levels in Hyde Park varied. Certainly not everyone in the neighborhood could be
considered low income, but as residents plainly pointed out, everyone in it was African American. Johnnie Mae Brown said:
    Yeah, we're black, low-income people in the neighborhood.
And not everyone is on the poverty line, you know,
but we're still in the neighborhood. And I think it's because
we're black first of all. That's the most important. We're
black, poor people. And they just build anything they want
around us and we don't have no say so.

Brown argues that while actual income levels in Hyde Park differed, living in an all-black neighborhood meant that Hyde Park's
residents "don't have no say so." Her statement, then, highlights her perception of the powerlessness of blacks in Augusta, regardless
of income level, profession or homeownership.

Skeptics will argue that siting decisions are market-driven, not deliberately racially motivated (see, for example Anderton et al. 1994).
Yet, even if corporations do use race-neutral criteria when they locate hazardous waste sites, or (as in the case of Hyde Park) when a
neighborhood grows up around existing hazardous sites, other kinds of institutional discrimination contribute to environmental racism
and make it almost impossible for residents to leave and escape contamination. First, the generally white racial makeup of local zoning
and planning boards gives African Americans little say in siting decisions. Second, despite the Fair Housing Act and other civil rights
reforms, realtors continue to steer African Americans towards existing "ghettos," and mortgages and home improvement loans are
allocated most often to white neighborhoods (Massey and Denton 1993). Racially differentiated neighborhoods produce uneven
property values (i.e., black neighborhoods tend to have lower property values).

In turn, public education systems, which are financed through property taxes, are vastly unequal. Poorer educations give African
Americans less access to the kinds of jobs that would enable them to move out of a contaminated neighborhood (Cole and Foster
2001; see also Bullard 2000). Finally, many of those who can choose to move to a white neighborhood are reluctant to do so because
of historic experiences of racism and persistent white antipathy towards integration (Cole and Foster 2001). All these factors illustrate
the degree to which situations like those in Hyde Park result from complex and interlocking systems of discrimination that are generated
by economic, political, and social dynamics.

Hyde Park residents were well aware of these complexities. Indeed, while all residents attributed their situation to racism, the sources
they named ran the gamut between specificity and ambiguity: some mentioned local government, some corporations, some federal
policies and some stereotyping. As I described earlier, some of the factories and plants surrounding Hyde Park were there before it
became a neighborhood. Yet, some residents reasoned that racism was why they could only afford to live in the midst of factories in the
first place. Others answered that, although SWP and Babcock were there when they moved in, at least four other factories joined them
in a 30-year period. Many referenced a combination of reasons. For example, Arthur Smith pointed to racial stereotypes. He explained:
"I think with Hyde Park and Aragon Park, it was the arrogance again of big companies saying, 'those people are not educated. Those
people do not vote'." Other HAPIC leaders cited more systematic practices of racism, referring to their situation as "environmental
apartheid" or "residential holocaust." Charles Utley called it "a form of genocide." For Utley, the "genocide" of environmental racism
stems from a deliberate, planned and systemized racism made up of both corporate greed and discriminatory political institutions. In
this view, each aspect of the system facilitates the other: corporate greed initiates environmental racism and institutional racism
enables it.

Thus, while not all residents agreed on the primary causes of environmental racism, they did concur that it was at work in some form or
another. Moreover, residents' accounts reflect their awareness that corporations alone do not cause or perpetuate environmental
racism; rather, their practices often work in partnership with state agencies in a tangled and mutually constitutive system of
discrimination. Although they initially launched their battle from an anti-racism premise, as time wore on, it became obvious that it would
need to be waged on multiple fronts. Here again, community members' narratives reveal an ever-deepening recognition of the tangled
webs of power and corruption contributing to their situation.

Shifting Strategies

Initially, HAPIC's strategies in fighting environmental racism were aimed primarily at individual industries. First, they organized a boycott
of ITT subsidiaries, particularly Sheraton Hotels. (15) Next, they decided to hold a series of marches during the week of the 1994
Masters Golf tournament, the one time of year that Augusta generated worldwide attention. In gathering support for their protest,
activists contacted local pastors with a letter headed, "Environmental Racism is Alive and Well in Augusta." The letter urged:
    Churches have historically played a pivotal role in
our struggles for justice. This new civil rights battlefield
to stop the environmental genocide of our people, and
other people of color and poor people urgently needs the
support of all our churches.

The tactic of appealing to pastors signaled the degree to which residents initially identified their environmental justice battle with more
traditional civil rights movements. (16) In addition, the Masters Week protests very clearly called attention to corporate greed as one of
Hyde Park's main enemies. Youths' protest signs read: "We will be your future, so save us ITT-SWP." Adults' placards proclaimed, "ITT
you can run but you can't Hyde," "Environmental Injustice in Hyde Park," and "We're being killed for the almighty $$ by ITT-SWP."
These signs demonstrate how, in the early 1990s, Hyde Park activism definitively targeted the industry that they believed was their
main polluter and its parent corporation. It also clearly demonstrates prevailing attitudes of industry as betrayer.

As the years wore on, the circumstances surrounding Hyde Park's polluted waters became increasingly muddy, and HAPIC activists
grew to realize the degree to which they were fighting a complex and insidious battle. In 1993, the EPA conducted a $1.2 million study
to determine levels of contamination in Hyde Park's air, water and soil. The EPA found highly elevated levels of lead and PCBs in
ditches near the Goldberg Brothers scrap metal yard. In addition, two soil samples indicated elevated levels of arsenic, lead or dioxins.
Chromium and lead exceeding EPA comparison values were detected in 11 groundwater wells. Although the findings led the Agency for
Toxic Disease Registry (ATSDR) to suggest posting warning signs around ditches, the agency also stated that currently they had not
found enough instances of any chemicals to constitute an "urgent health hazard" and that it did not constitute a significant threat to
residents' health unless they "inadvertently ingested it on a daily basis for many years" (Agency for Toxic Disease Registry 1994;
Pavey 1994: 9A).

These findings were announced one winter evening at a community meeting at the Jenkins Elementary School in Hyde Park. Although
the night was cold, the meeting grew quite heated. After hearing the EPA's initial announcement, Reverend Alvin Gilchrist, a local
resident, presented the EPA's division director with a four gallon bucket of sludge taken from the ditch in his backyard. Asking the EPA
official to smell the sludge, Gilchrist asked if he would want to live anywhere close to it. The crowd in the packed cafeteria shouted,
"Answer, answer," and the official replied, "no." Over the next few minutes, tensions continued to escalate until one man threw a chair
onto the stage.

Not only were residents angry at the content of the EPA's findings, but also at how it was presented. For one thing, although "ingesting
soil" is a term of art commonly used in environmental risk assessments, it is also a common stereotype in Georgia that African
Americans eat dirt. Thus, the term of art was immediately understood to be a racial slur. Moreover, for the first 30 minutes of the
meeting, EPA officials discussed concentrations, key contaminants and sample data, but residents still had no idea whether and to what
degree their environment was contaminated. According to a newspaper report, Charles Utley finally broke in and said:
    You need to know one thing. All of your data says,
primarily, something we can't even comprehend. Secondly,
what is happening to the people? Why is this going on?
Why are there respiratory problems like we have? Why are
people dying of circulatory (diseases)? That is what they
want to know. They don't want to know how much arsenic
per million, per billion, per trillion (Cooper 1993: 15A).

When I asked one activist to explain why technical language raised the community's ire to such an intense degree, he said:
    I think [the EPA officials] looked down at the area.
That's exactly what it was in my opinion. And the reason
was, if you come into this area and you're giving them
statistics that they don't understand, that they had never
been dealing with then what are you doing? You're
looking down on them.

This man describes how the community characterized technical jargon as an aggressive act designed to exclude, belittle and
disempower them. When I further questioned him about why the EPA "looked down" on Hyde Park, he responded simply: "This is a
minority area."

Not a group to take such events passively, HAPIC investigated the testing agency contracted by the EPA. They discovered that SWP
had contracted extensively with this agency in the past. Although they could not prove that its past affiliations had unfairly weighted the
agency's results, HAPIC activists believed that they had found a clear conflict of interest. They no longer trusted that the EPA was
necessarily a disinterested party and began to suspect them of racial bias. Accordingly, HAPIC attorneys filed a Civil Rights complaint
against the Environmental Protection Agency. The complaint stated that HAPIC attorneys had evidence (17) that the Georgia
Environmental Protection Division (EPD) had endangered Hyde Park by concealing data on the release of hazardous substances. They
also claimed that the state Attorney General's office never enforced environmental cleanup plans for either SWP or Goldberg Brothers
scrap metal yard. According to the complaint, all these oversights and injustices were due to Hyde Park's racial makeup. (18)

Residents were not entirely surprised to discover that the EPA itself might be guilty of racist practices. In fact, residents' mistrust of the
government was pernicious and stemmed from a long history. For instance, when they speak about their distrust of scientists, a number
of environmental justice activists with whom I've worked (both within and beyond Hyde Park) bring up the notorious Tuskegee syphilis
experiments. This history of unfair treatment at the hands of a government institution certainly predisposed Hyde Park residents to look
upon both government and federal officials warily.

At the same time, residents' relationships to governmental agencies in general were complicated. For example, initially, and despite
their mistrust, residents had pinned high hopes on the EPA's potential to rescue them. As one man said: "When we first heard about
the EPA study, we thought the cavalry was coming in." Even after those hopes were dashed, activists remained aware that local, state
and federal politicians and agencies might represent a vehicle for accomplishing their goals, and that like it or not, these entities would
act as primary mediators between the community and its industrial neighbors. Thus, throughout the 1990s and into the next decade,
residents continuously appealed to governmental representatives (such as city council members, the EPA and EPD) to intervene on
their behalf, especially as they became increasingly alarmed by the degree to which all of the industries surrounding them potentially
endangered their health.

For example, over the years, the Goldberg Brothers scrap metal yard had expanded until its piles of tires, car parts and rusting metal
spread into the backyards that lined the west side of Walnut Street. Water flowing from the ditches around the scrapyard had often
looked suspicious, but certain test results (combined with activists' increased knowledge about toxic chemicals) alerted residents to the
possibility of serious contamination in and around it. In 1997, Arthur Smith attended a regional environmental justice conference where
some of his colleagues advised him to contact the EPA's Emergency Response Team (ERT). Smith returned from the conference and
quickly organized a neighborhood-wide phone and letter-writing campaign. Eventually the EPA reappeared in Hyde Park in the form of
the ERT. This time, scientists determined that Hattie Elam's yard on Walnut Street contained dangerous levels of PCBs and warranted
a $100,000 cleanup, financed by the U.S. EPA (Pavey 1998: 1C). They also ordered Goldberg Brothers' owner to erect a concrete
retaining wall designed to stem the flow of chemicals into the yards of Walnut Street residents. However, the ERT did not find significant
enough contamination in other yards around the Goldberg site to merit similar cleanups. Residents complained bitterly that the
$100,000 spent on one person's yard could be funneled into relocation or wider cleanup costs, and they were skeptical of the ERT's
limited findings. Yet, the fact that they received the attention that they did from a federal agency confirmed for them the existence of
contamination in their neighborhood, and it pointed to the government's potential as an agent of change, even in a limited respect.

Thus, over the years HAPIC activists attacked environmental racism on multiple levels. These variegated strategies reflected shifts in
their perspectives on their toxic situation. First, residents placed most of the blame on the wood preserving factory. Next, they extended
that blame to include all the industries surrounding them, as well as government agencies. In these initial stages they presented their
struggle as one against racism. However, when race-based organizing failed to achieve residents' goals, they de-emphasized
environmental racism and began to rely, upon more race-neutral strategies. At the same time, their partial victory with the 1998
junkyard cleanup underscores the complicated and indeterminate nature of HAPIC's relations with state agencies as both complicit in
their problems and a potential avenue for remediating them. Finally, turning to an EPA division for help, even after they had become
disillusioned with its potential to "save" them, foreshadows a similarly complicated and shifting attitude toward industry; which I describe
in the following section.

Industry Revisited

New Directions

One afternoon in the summer of 1999, I sat in the spacious blue carpeted office of HAPIC treasurer Melvin Stewart. Over the air
conditioner's hum, Stewart and I discussed the fact that eight years after its filing, Hyde Park's lawsuit against SWP had not been
resolved. Stewart postulated that delaying the lawsuit might have been SWP's strategy all along. He said:
    They have the funds to prolong these cases as long as
they want to. They're not paying any money out so they
can just wait for people to die. I think they think the longer
they make people wait, the less active they will be. That's
really what's happened as far as the lawsuit's concerned.

Other activists I spoke with took their suspicions even further and accused SWP/ITT of actually buying off HAPIC's attorneys as well as
one or two local leaders who had suddenly dropped out of the fight. Such allegations have never been substantiated. What matters
here is that HAPIC activists believed them to be true--and that these kinds of statements reveal the great lengths that activists believed
the companies would go to, in order to not pay Hyde Park residents.

Resigning themselves to the fact that their lawsuit might never pan out, HAPIC leaders looked to longer-term solutions to their
problems. This phase entailed traveling to a great number of conferences, which had a major effect on the life of HAPIC over the next
several years. Between 1995 and 1997, HAPIC leaders attended (to name a few) the Southwide Environmental Justice Network
development meeting in Atlanta, GA; the Transportation, Environmental Justice and Social Equity Conference in Chicago, IL; and the
People of Color and Disenfranchised Communities Environmental Health Summit in Waveland, Mississippi. These conferences opened
up new strategic possibilities and paths for HAPIC's relocation goals.

In 1996, Utley and Stewart attended a "Brownfields 1996" conference in Pittsburgh that set them on a new course toward relocation.
Brownfields are defined as abandoned or underused properties in urban areas that are marked by real or perceived contamination
(Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response 2002). In 1995, the Clinton Administration's EPA developed the Brownfields Initiative
to investigate these sites, clean them if necessary, and redevelop them as environmentally friendly businesses that would also employ
local residents. Because many Brownfields sites are located in poor urban areas, initiatives are meant to stimulate economic
development as well as to address environmental problems. Although the program initially did not provide for residential relocation, (19)
it gave HAPIC leaders new hope and redirected their environmental strategy. Stewart explained:
    We went to several conferences that were dead ends.
One day we got this letter from the Brownfields Initiative.
They were having a conference in Pittsburgh and I said to
Charles, "Let's go to it." ... By the time we left Pittsburgh,
we knew that we were on to something. We weren't sure
what, but we said this is the best lead that we've had, including
the lawsuit, as far as getting this relocation.

Stewart, Utley and Smith reasoned that securing a Brownfields grant would give them another foot in the door to federal funding. Their
faith in the seriousness of their contamination was strong, and they believed that new rounds of tests from a different source within EPA
would reveal significant contamination and eventually lead to relocation.

HAPIC leaders chose to use the former Goldberg Brothers scrap metal yard as their Brownfield site, hoping that once the EPA realized
just how contaminated that area was, let alone the rest of the neighborhood, they would find a way to relocate all of Hyde Park's
residents. In June of 1999, the EPA announced that Augusta was one of 57 cities awarded a Brownfields pilot grant. The grant mainly
funded environmental investigations at the site, but it also included a community involvement component that involved establishing a
computer resource center in Hyde Park, as well as funding for some preliminary research into potential uses for the site. (20)

Some of these uses included housing environmentally friendly industries. In fact, placing some kind of industry on a Brownfields site is
seen to be highly desirable as a mechanism for bringing economic development to that area. Thus, the Brownfields grant signaled a
shift on the part of some Hyde Park residents back toward viewing industry as a potential ally. However, that perspective on industry
was by no means uniform. Moreover, not all residents agreed on what ought to be done with the site of the former junkyard.

New Challenges

Late afternoon on a mid-August Thursday in 1999, Arthur Smith and I corralled a few Hyde Park children into helping us heft and unfold
50 or so metal chairs and set them up in the main meeting room at the Mary Utley Center. Smith and I were grateful for the extra hands.
We were expecting a larger than usual turnout for that night's community meeting where we planned to answer questions about the
Brownfields grant. News of the grant had just appeared in the AUGUSTA CHRONICLE and on television, and ensuing rumors had
already shot from house to house and up and down Hyde Park's streets. Many residents believed that the funding meant relocation,
and emotions were running high. In addition, whereas in the early 1990s almost all residents regularly attended HAPIC meetings, now
only a core group attended consistently. One resident confided to me that most people felt that HAPIC leaders "took too long" to
accomplish things.

Despite all the news conferences, lawsuits, protests and meetings of the early 1990s, little measurable progress had been made either
toward a neighborhood-wide cleanup or toward relocation. While they still considered events like the Masters Week protest successful,
residents were growing discouraged and weary of waiting for relief. The Brownfields grant was the first positive news about the
contamination situation they had heard in a long time.

Right around 6:00 p.m., the meeting's start time, people began to file in and fill the rows of chairs. Some came straight from work in
hospital uniforms or coveralls. Others wore sport shirts and slacks or brightly colored shorts and blouses. Older women (who, as usual,
outnumbered older men) covered their gray hair with wide-brimmed hats and leaned on canes.

A major part of the Brownfields grant was community participation. In fact, we had been told that it was being used as a national model
for a participatory grant, which meant that community members were supposed to have significant input into the redevelopment of the
junkyard. However, ideas about that redevelopment were certainly not homogeneous. Many people wanted more community services
on the site. They wanted a recreation center where children could congregate, play and do homework after school. They wanted a
swimming pool. They wanted satellite offices for the city and state services upon which they relied. They wanted a laundromat, and a
walking path so that adults could get some exercise. On the other hand, some believed that according to the EPA's vision, bringing an
environmentally friendly industry onto the site would increase the neighborhood's overall economy and value would increase. Then,
people who wanted to move out of the neighborhood would eventually be able to do so in a kind of trickle-down effect.

But those who favored more community services were skeptical that industries would uphold their promises of local employment.
Indeed, the industry favored to locate on the Brownfield site in 2004 (a manufacturer of a new kind of residential and industrial siding)
agreed only to hire five Hyde Park residents, out of approximately 35 future employees. In addition, many people did not believe that
any industry ought to profit from the junkyard site. For instance, one activist said:
    They should hire every young man and young woman
who wants to work to clear the site out. We should buy
both sides of the property.... We should become business
people. We should be the ones to control everything happening
in the junkyard.

Thus, some residents were not satisfied with either a trickledown scenario or a scenario where they had only partial say in the future of
the junkyard, or the neighborhood. Still other people believed that the Brownfields grant could be used to leverage other kinds of
programs that would not rely on industry to supply jobs or incomes. Activist Terence Dicks, for example, wanted to develop a
micro-enterprise program in Hyde Park, where residents could be trained to start their own businesses.

Differences in ideas about what to do with the junkyard seemed to reflect class differences within the neighborhood. For the most part,
people with lower incomes favored the installation of community services on the site and those with higher incomes favored industry. As
I mentioned earlier, there was a noteworthy amount of economic diversity in Hyde Park, which is typical of many urban African American
neighborhoods. Even after the passing of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, economic mobility among African Americans
has remained highly uneven (see Gregory 1998). In Hyde Park, some people secured stable jobs, becoming teachers, ministers or
small business owners, while others always held one, two, or three "blue collar" jobs simultaneously and still others depended on public
assistance. For example, Charles Utley's father, George, came to Hyde Park as a former sharecropper and then worked for Babcock
and Wilcox industrial ceramics factory. After a series of factory jobs, the senior Utley was able to land a position with the Georgia
Highway Department. Mary Utley could then quit her job as a housekeeper and focus on community needs. Charles Utley, a Vietnam
veteran, attended Paine College on the G.I. Bill. A good number of the Utley's neighbors also went to college and graduate school. Yet,
many other people in Hyde Park had to leave school at an early age to supplement their family's incomes and had never returned,
limiting their chances for better-paying jobs. Some got injured on the job at a relatively early age, or quit work to help an ailing family
member and remained on fixed incomes for the rest of their lives. In other words, there was much economic diversity and gradations of
family income within the neighborhood, but that diversity had occurred rather rapidly, over the course of one generation.

HAPIC leaders tended to be among those who had incomes and education levels on the higher end of the scale. Moreover, as they
extended their networks of activism beyond Augusta, they partially separated themselves from their constituency. Only a few people
were invited to attend out-of-town conferences, and HAPIC's leaders' activities often seemed mysterious. In addition, by obtaining
funding from various agencies, leaders took on new commitments. In other words, as they applied for and received grants from the EPA
and various other foundations, HAPIC leaders found that they needed to comply with program priorities, guidelines and expectations.
These tasks sometimes distracted them from the immediate needs of their constituents. In this way, HAPIC follows the patterns of many
African American neighborhood groups, which increased their affiliations with various institutions after the civil rights era. Anthropologist
Steven Gregory argues that such relationships solidified organizational hierarchies as community organizations "depended less on the
political mobilization of residents than on the tactical support of local political elites" (1998: 98). Although HAPIC leaders continued to
ask for community members' approval in all their major decisions (as the Brownfields project exemplifies), full community participation
was no longer always necessary for HAPIC's activities.

The combination of HAPIC leaders' higher incomes and extensive outside networks had a significant effect on how they were perceived
by their constituents. Many people in Hyde Park believed that HAPIC leaders siphoned off grant funds for personal use. Each new car,
piece of expensive clothing or home improvement was noted and discussed. (21) This mistrust of activist leaders, especially those who
seemed to have achieved a certain class status, has historic antecedents, and in some ways it is also a byproduct of the civil rights era.
As far back as the 19th century, elite African Americans worked to "uplift" their impoverished brothers and sisters; however, these
efforts often turned out to be patriarchal and pejorative (Gaines 1996; see also Gatewood 1990). Some argue that this tradition carried
forward into civil rights movements. Political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. states: "The [civil rights] movement had begun as a result of
frustrations within the black elite, and it ended with the achievement of autonomy and mobility among those elements" (1986: 71). This
history may have shaped and underscored HAPIC members' suspicions of their leaders, particularly if those leaders seemed to
represent middle-class lifestyles. Thus, not only did HAPIC members begin to disagree on strategies having to do with the future role of
industry in their neighborhood, but also an undercurrent of class tensions now emerged behind intragroup disagreements, further
threatening group solidarity.

Elsewhere I develop a more detailed analysis of class and accountability among African American environmental justice activists (see
Checker 2002a, 2004b: 31). (22) What I wish to stress here is the degree to which class differences underscored and perhaps
heightened different perspectives on the role of industry in the future of the neighborhood. Initially, residents interpreted the system
oppressing them as being a racist one. With race as the primary basis for their organizing identity, residents were able to overlook their
class differences. However, as the group became more successful in terms of developing outside networks, strategies and priorities
grew more diffuse and diverse. That diversity was further complicated by perceived class differences. In the end, the fact that divergent
perspectives and intra-neighborhood disagreements were interpreted in class terms is yet another example of how various systems of
oppression work together to inhibit the success of environmental justice movements.

Conclusions

This paper has illustrated how one community interpreted and acted upon interlocking systems of oppression (corporate greed,
institutional racism, and uneven economic opportunity) that converged upon their neighborhood in the form of toxic contamination.
Long-term ethnographic investigation reveals that in the community's view, local industry did not simply move from "provider to
poisoner" and remain that way; nor did state institutions play a uniform role in community affairs. Rather, residents' narratives show how
they interpreted their environmental experiences through the lens of their race and class experiences. Because of this race and
class-tinted perspective, residents quickly recognized that their problems resulted from interconnected, and historically unjust, systems,
which included local industries and environmental regulatory agencies.

Moreover, residents' attitudes and identities were themselves in flux. Initially, racial identity acted as a primary basis for activism, and
residents had used fairly straightforward civil rights-based strategies to fight for environmental justice. However, as strategies began to
diversify, maintaining solidarity became more complicated. Diversified strategies led to disparate opinions, and those disparities
seemed to cleave along class lines. Uneven class mobility then became yet another factor complicating and inhibiting Hyde Park's
search for environmental justice. Thus, this paper has added to our knowledge of the complex processes by which environmental
justice communities come to name and challenge their oppressors, and how those processes develop and change over time. Although
an ethnographic perspective allows the consideration of a multiplicity of factors involved in environmental justice situations and
struggles (not the least of which is community members' own perceptions) we have few long-term ethnographic accounts of
environmental justice movements, especially in the U.S. (see Williams 2001). Further detailed and longitudinal analysis of such
movements will shed much needed new light on our understanding of how environmental justice works, and how it can be combated on
a day-to-day level.

Finally, the various complexities depicted in this paper suggest the need for more nuanced and careful studies of environmental justice
conflicts. More specifically, the relative and shifting role of government agencies recalls anthropologist Laura Nader's (1972) famous
plea for anthropologists to turn their attentions to "studying up," or to examining the institutions and organizations that affect everyday
lives (i.e., insurance, commissions, the Better Business Bureau, air pollution agencies). Such studies would shed greater light on the
processes whereby environmental responsibilities and regulations are developed, implemented and exercised in the United States.
Indeed, once we truly deepen our understandings of the dynamics at play in community/industry relationships, we can work toward
finding ways to rebalance them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Funding for this research was provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation (grant SBR-9806988). Its analysis was helped
by grants from the Morris K. Udall Foundation and New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. I wish to extend my
heartfelt gratitude to the residents and activists of Hyde Park, who generously allowed me to participate in their activities and ask them
endless questions. I also wish to thank Maggie Fishman, Katherine Lambert Pennington and Andrew Gardner, and anonymous
reviewers, whose insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper helped it enormously.

NOTES

(1) Some of the information contained in this article can also be found in Checker 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2004a, and 2004b.

(2) This literature is quite vast. For some (but certainly not all) examples of working class neighborhoods and toxic contamination see
Edelstein 2003; Gottlieb 1993; Schwab and Gibbs 1994. For some overviews of the environmental justice movement, see Bryant 1995;
Bullard 1993, 2000; Harvey 1996; Novotnoy 1995, 1999. For some examples of cross-class, cross-ethnic and/or cross-race alliances,
see Alley et al. 1995; Checker 2002a; 2004; Cole and Foster 2001; Pena and Mondragon Valdez 1998; Pulido 1998; Stonich and
Bailey 2000.

(3) It should also be noted that New York University's Human Subjects Committee approved both research projects.

(4) Like many versions of "the good old days" glorified visions of Jim Crow-era ghetto life have become something of a trope. A number
of social scientists counter it, arguing that life was not necessarily so cohesive. See di Leonardo 1998; Hannerz 1969; Williams 1992.

(5) For example, the Clean Water Act and the reauthorization of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act were passed
in 1972, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was passed in 1976.

(6) For the middle decades of the 20th century, southern politicians attracted northern business in part by establishing tax exemptions
and low interest loans for new manufacturing plants as well as relaxed enforcement of pollution standards and environmental
regulations (Bullard 1989). Moreover, the South offered a nonunion climate and plenty of low-wage workers (Cobb 1975; Wright 1986).

(7) Interview with Walt Alexanderson, Thermal Ceramics Public Relations Director. 2004 information courtesy of Augusta Chamber of
Commerce (www.augustagausa.com).

(8) Because Hyde Park combines parts of two census tracts, I contacted the Regional Development Center in Augusta, Georgia in
March 1999 to generate this figure, which they derived from the 1990 U.S. Census.

(9) Most of the information in this paragraph was taken from the "Southern Wood Piedmont Augusta Plant History," a document
prepared by SWP's attorney and on file with the author.

(10) However, these illnesses were never proven to correlate with the toxic chemicals found in residents' groundwater.

(11) Virginia Subdivision residents made similar allegations and some said that they had photographed such activities; however, I never
saw any such photographs or other documentation of illegal dumping, and SWP strongly denies that it ever took place.

(12) J.P. Leverett as quoted in Hewell 1989: 8A.

(13) It should be noted that SWP did not sanction such activities.

(14) SWP did institute an extensive remediation program. They constructed a slurry wall around the site that is impervious to water,
they excavated the most contaminated parts of the soil, and they began flushing hundreds of thousands of gallons of groundwater into
the county's sewage system (interview with SWP's attorney, 8/4/03).

(15) The boycott never went very far since pinpointing ITT's targetable subsidiaries proved difficult and most grassroots activists could
not afford to stay in Sheraton Hotels.

(16) Elsewhere, I discuss in far greater length the ways in which HAPIC activists defined environmental justice in broad terms that
included more traditional social justice goals such as decent housing and better employment and educational opportunities as well as
clean air, water

(17) I was unable to obtain further information about the specific nature of this evidence.

(18) The U.S. EPA's Office of Civil Rights eventually found no wrongdoing in response to the civil rights complaint.

(19) More recently, thanks to the efforts of grassroots environmental justice activists, the Brownfields Initiative was amended to include
residential areas.

(20) For more information on Hyde Park's 1999 Brownfields grant application, as well as their more recent 2003 extension of that grant
to include a parcel of land across from the former Goldberg Brothers scrap metal yard as well as some residences, see www.hapic.org.

(21) I found these rumors to be entirely untrue and tried to dispute them when I heard them, explaining that I had access to HAPIC's
budgets and could confirm that their funds went to the after-school tutoring program, community cleanups, or equipment for the Mary
Utley Center. I also noted that Utley had offered to show people the budgets on several occasions.

(22) For some other, recent ethnographic accounts of the social construction of class and class stratification among African Americans,
see Gregory 1998; Jackson 2001; Pattillo McCoy 1999.

REFERENCES CITED

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (1994). Health Consultation Final Release. Augusta Richmond County, Georgia;
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, March 3.

Alley, Kelly, Charles Faupel, and Conner Bailey (1995). The Historical Transformation of a Grassroots Environmental Group Human
Organization 54(4): 410-416.

Anderton, Douglas L., Andy B. Anderson, John Michael Oakes, Michael R. Fraser (1994). Environmental Equity--The Demographics of
Dumping. Demography 31 (2): 229-248.

Bryant, Bunyan (1995). Introduction. IN Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies And Solutions, Bunyan Bryant (ed.). Washington, DC:
Island Press, pp. 1-7.

Bullard, Robert (1989). In Search Of The New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press.

Bullard, Robert (1993). Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End Press.

Bullard, Robert (2000). Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. Third edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Cashin, Edward (1980). The Story of Augusta. Augusta, GA: Richmond County Board of Education.

Chamber of Commerce, Augusta Georgia (1947). A Brief on Industrial Augusta, Georgia.

Checker, Melissa (2001). Like Nixon Coming To China: Finding Common Ground in a Multi- Ethnic Coalition for Environmental Justice.
Anthropological Quarterly 74(3): 135-146.

Checker, Melissa (2002a). Troubling the Waters: Race, Activism and the Environment in the U.S. South. PhD. Dissertation,
Anthropology, New York University.

Checker, Melissa (2002b). It's in The Air: Redefining The Environment as a New Metaphor for Old Social Justice Struggles. Human
Organization 61(1): 94-105.

Checker, Melissa (2004a). Treading Murky Waters: Day-To-Day Dilemmas in the Construction of a Pluralistic U.S. Environmental
Movement. IN Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power; and Public Life in America, Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman (eds.). New
York: Columbia University Press, pp. 27-50.

Checker, Melissa (2004b). "We All Have identity at the Table": Negotiating Difference in a Southern African American Environmental
Justice Network. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11(2): 171-194.

Cobb, James (1975). Politics in a New South City: Augusta, Georgia, 1946-1971. Ph.D. Dissertation, History, University of Georgia.

Cole, Luke W. and Sheila R. Foster (2001). From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice
Movement. New York: NYU Press.

Cooper, Sylvia (1993) Neighbors Near Wood Plant Get EPA Results. Augusta Chronicle [Augusta], September, 17: 15A.

di Leonardo, Micaela (1998). Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Women in Culture and Society). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Edelstein, Michael (2003). Contaminated Communities: Coping With Residential Toxic Exposure. Boulder: Westview.

Foley, Michael W. and Karl Yambert (1989). Anthropology and Theories of the State. IN State, Capital and Rural Society:
Anthropological Perspectives on Political Economy in Mexico and the Andes, Benjamin S. Orlove, Michael W. Foley and Thomas F.
Love (eds.). Boulder, CO: Westview, pp. 39-67.

Gaines, Kevin (1996). Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.

Gatewood, Willard B., Jr (1990). Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 18801920. Fayetville, AR: University of Arkansas.

Gottlieb, Robert (1993). Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, DC: Island.

Gregory, Steven (1998). Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.

Hannerz, Ulf (1969). Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community. New York: Columbia University Press.

Harvey, David (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell.

Hewell, Hal (1989). Samples Collected At Park. Augusta Herald [Augusta], June 24: 1A, 8A.

Jackson Jr., John L. (2001). Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Massey, Douglas, and Nancy A. Denton (1993). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of The Underclass. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.

Nader, Laura (1972). Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. In Reinventing Anthropology, Dell Hymes (ed.).
NY: Pantheon Books, pp. 284-311.

Novotny, Patrick (1995). Where We Live, Work and Play: Refraining the Cultural Landscape of Environmentalism in the Environmental
Justice Movement. New Political Science 23(2): 61-78.

Novotny, Patrick (1998). Popular Epidemiology and the Struggle for Community Health in the Environmental Justice Movement. IN The
Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States, Daniel Faber (ed.). New York: Guilford, pp.
137-158.

Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (2002). Brownfields. Electronic document, www.epa.gov/swerops/bf.

Pattillo-McCoy, Mary (1999). Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Pavey, Robert (1994). Hyde Park Risks Low, Study Finds. Augusta Chronicle [Augusta, Georgia], February 9: 9A.

Pavey, Robert (1998). Cleanup Begins in Hyde Park. Augusta Chronicle [Augusta, Georgia], June 26:1C, 7C.

Pellow, David N. (2001). Environmental Justice and the Political Process: Movements, Corporations and the State. The Sociological
Quarterly 42(1):47-67.

Pena, Devon and Maria Mondragon-Valdez (1998). The "Brown" And The "Green" Revisited: Chicanos And Environmental Politics in
the Upper Rio Grand. IN The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States, Daniel Faber
(ed.). New York: Guilford, pp. 312-348.

Pulido, Laura (1998). Environmentalism and Economic Issues. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Reed, Adolph (1999). Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Schwab, Jim, and Lois Marie Gibbs (1994). Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue-Collar and Minority Environmentalism in
America. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Sociology Research Methods Students, Kim Davies, Robert Johnston, Ernestine Thompson, Robin Bengtson, Sarah Firman, Albert
Jimenez, Karen Jones, and Regina Murray (1998). Hyde Park Neighborhood Survey Report. Augusta: Department of Sociology,
Augusta State University.

Stonich, Susan, and Conner Bailey (2000). Resisting the Blue Revolution: Contending Coalitions Surrounding Shrimp Farming. Human
Organization 59(1):23-36.

Williams, Brett (1992). Commentary: Poverty among African Americans in the Urban United States. Human Organization 51(2):164-174.

Williams, Brett (2001). A River Runs Through Us. American Anthropologist 103(2):409-431.

Wright, Gavin (1986). Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War. New York: Norton.

Melissa Checker

University of Memphis

Department of Anthropology

COPYRIGHT 2005 The Institute Inc.
See more articles from Urban Anthropology & Studies of Cultural Systems & World Economic Development
Download from www.AugustaNeeds.com