NBEJN Joins HBCUs to Expose Environmental Racism in Tennessee

NASHVILLE, TN, December 3, 2007 -- A half-dozen historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) joined forces with the National Black Environmental Justice Network (NBEJN) for the “Take Back Black Health Toxics Tour” in Dickson, Tennessee. The tour showcased a slam-dunk case of environmental racism. A broad coalition of environmental, civil rights, and faith-based groups met at Nashville’s Fisk University Race Relation Institute (RRI) and boarded two 30-passenger buses to Dickson, a small town of 12,244 residents located about 35 miles to the west.

"We are elated to have so many national environmental justice leaders at Fisk to kick off this year’s Charles S. Johnson Think Tank. This is more than a coincidence. It is providence," said Sheila Peters who directs the Race Relations Institute at Fisk. The RRI was founded in 1942 by Fisk’s first African American president Charles S. Johnson to research and combat racism. In addition to Fisk University, the tour attracted HBCU students and faculty from Tennessee State University, Meherry Medical College, Clark Atlanta University, Dillard University, and Howard University. Students and faculty from Vanderbilt and East Tennessee State University also joined the tour.

The tour, organized by the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University (EJRC), was designed to educate and pressure Congress and other elected officials to make the elimination of environmental hazards in low-income and people of color communities a national priority. It spotlighted the devastating impact of toxic contamination on the Harry Holt family whose wells were poisoned with the deadly chemical trichloroethylene or TCE by the nearby Dickson County Landfill, located just 54 feet from the Holt's property line.

“All levels of government failed the Holt family. We planned the toxics tour for national environmental and health leaders and the world to see up close and personal the devastating impact of toxic racism and government failures on a hard working, tax paying African American family,” said Robert D. Bullard, who directs the Environmental Justice Resource Center in Atlanta. “This family continues to be treated like expendable throwaway second class citizens whose health is valued less than that of other Dickson County residents,” stated Bullard.

The Holts’ story, profiled in the 2007 United Church of Christ Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty study that Bullard co-authored, is called the “poster child” of environmental racism. “It is ironic that generations of Holts and their relative in the Eno Road community survived the horrors of post-slavery racism and “Jim Crow” segregation, but may not survive the toxic assault and contamination from the Dickson County Landfill,” said Bullard.

Drums of toxic wastes were dumped at the landfill in 1968, the same year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. Government officials first learned of the TCE contamination in the Holt family wells as far back as 1988, but assured the family their wells were safe. TCE is a probable human carcinogen. The Dickson case has been featured in numerous national media feature stories, including CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, People Magazine, Essence Magazine , and Crisis Magazine.

In 2003, the Holt family sued the city and county of Dickson, the State of Tennessee, and the company that dumped the TCE. The family is represented by the New York-based NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (LDF). The case is still pending. “Whatever the outcome of this litigation is, Sheila Holt Orsted and the Holt family have already won. They are standing up for other people as they stand up for themselves, and you can't put this genie back in the bottle,” said Theodore M. Shaw, director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. and attorney for the Harry Holt family. “This is a passion now that goes beyond the Holt family.''

The Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP issued a press statement in support of the Holt family. “The Tennessee State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) feels strongly that the Holt family has been gravely wronged. Today, we call upon leaders at the local, state, and federal levels of government to move quickly to remedy this situation,” said Jimmie Garland, Tennessee State NAACP Conference Third Vice President, who read the statement at the tour press briefing.

Dickson County solid waste department currently operates a recycling center, garbage transfer station and a Class IV construction and demolition landfill at the Eno Road site, where 20-25 heavy-duty diesel trucks enter the sites each day, leaving behind noxious fumes, dangerous particulates, household garbage, recyclables and demolition debris from around Middle Tennessee. The garbage transfer station alone handles approximately 35,000 tons annually. Residents have continually called for operations at the landfill to be shut down and the site cleaned up.

One day before the tour, a front-page story ran in the Dickson Herald, reporting that the County Commission had agreed to accept a $400,000 offer on its $4 million claim against a former local company that dumped toxic waste at the landfill several years ago. In November 2006, Dickson County commissioners voted unanimously to settle lawsuits with several white families who had alleged groundwater contamination from the leaky landfill located in the historically black Eno Road community.

What Some Tour Participants Are Saying

“I wanted national leaders from around the country to see for themselves how my family was treated. We were treated like the garbage and toxic wastes that were dumped next door at the Dickson County Landfill. No Americans should be treated like garbage. I wanted them to see and touch the wells that contained the TCE-contaminated water that killed my father—the water that my entire family drank, cooked with, and bathed in. I wanted them to see the Dickson County Humane Society Animal Shelter (a facility that houses dogs waiting to be euthanized) and duck ponds that were tested from 1992-1999 by the government—but not my family’s wells. Government officials cared more about dogs and ducks than they did about my family’s health. Dogs and ducks don’t pay taxes, but we do. I will start chemotherapy next week, and prayer changes things.” – Sheila Holt Orsted, plaintiff in Holt v. Scovill lawsuit, Dickson County, TN

"I take my hat off to the activists who are the backbone of the environmental-justice movement. The Holt family is a family of warriors. They didn't pick this fight; it picked them. Martin Luther King was only 26 years old when the Montgomery bus boycott came to him and he didn't set out to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, but that's what history and God held for him. This family is not taking this as a defeat.'' -- Theodore M. Shaw, director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. and attorney for the Harry Holt family, New York, NY

It is high time more HBCUs join in struggles to assist black people take back their health. We have three HBCUs -- Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta University -- that were founded in the 1860's to educate newly freed slaves, joining forces. We have Meherry Medical College in Nashville, located less than 40 miles from the Harry Holt homestead in Dickson. Certainly, our black institutions today can team with the National Black Environmental Justice Network, NAACP, and other organizations to free our communities from toxic slavery and environmental racism that's ravaging our health and killing us slowly but surely. -- Robert D. Bullard, Director, Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA

“The tour brought much needed attention of the significance of toxic contamination to the Eno Road Community. It also serves as a model to other communities that one black family can make a difference in the welfare of all if they remain focused. Environmental racism will not be tolerated.” -- Jimmie M. Garland, Sr., Third Vice President, Tennessee NAACP, Clarksville, TN

“I support all of the persons fighting for justice in Dickson. No one in Dickson has been more involved than the Harry Holt family. If half of the 1,000 families that some folks claim are affected had been supporting this case it would have been settled by now and this dump would have been cleaned up. The Holt family stood up against the company and the county that poisoned their well water when no one else did. They deserve our praise and our prayers for their unselfish bravery.” -- Rev. Jerry G. Jerkins, Pastor Emeritus, St. Johns Missionary Baptist Church, Clarksville, TN

“I have toured dozens of environmentally-impacted communities across this land over the past two decades. I am struck by the similarity and shocked by government actions or rather inaction. As a Hurricane Katrina survivor, I see the slow government response to the man-made unnatural disaster in New Orleans and the disastrous government response to Holt family’s well contamination problem as two sides of the same coin. Twelve years is far too long to wait for clean water. The Holts, like thousands of Katrina survivors, have learned the hard way that waiting for the government can be hazardous to your health.” -- Beverly Wright, Executive Director, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University in New Orleans, LA

“Tennessee, home state of the environmental guru Al Gore, is also home to the environmental heartbreak of the Holt family. Other communities are suffering from environmental racism due to unequal enforcement and compliance of environmental laws. The tour, although revealing and disturbing, was a stark reminder that solutions to environmental injustices come in the form of the coalition building that was demonstrated by the tour participants. The lawsuits should proceed expeditiously and settlements should be enforced so that no other family suffers raw environmental racism.” -- Leslie Fields, National Environmental Justice Director, Sierra Club, Washington, DC

"The Dickson tour was a devastating reaffirmation that racism is the primary predictor of disparate impact and of unequal environmental protection. For these reasons, WE ACT works to develop environmental health literacy and leadership so residents of color and low income can recognize and assess the hazards in their homes and communities." -- Peggy M. Shepard, Executive Director and Co-Founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice based in Harlem, NY

"I've heard Sheila Holt Orsted's moving story several times, but seeing her home, her family, and the landfill next door left me even more determined to do what I can to end this and other environmental injustices. What has happened to the Holt's is truly shocking, and the depth of outright, ongoing racist decision-making needs to be a wake-up call to America, especially white people, that even in this day and age, racism continues to harm people across the country." -- Bobbi Chase Wilding, Organizing Director of Clean New York, New York, NY

“The toxic tour was very important and necessary to enhance our understanding of environmental justice. It is one thing to read and hear about environmental racism but to actually visit a contaminated site is another. By moving from classroom to community, my students at Fisk University learned a great deal about the real world. This type of fieldwork promotes a greater appreciation of on-the-ground environmental justice struggles and empowers our young people to get involved.” -- Dr. Shirley Rainey, Sociology Department, Fisk University, Nashville, TN

"When I visited the Holt Family's property I was shocked and saddened by how peaceful everything seemed. To have your whole family’s health and land quietly stolen away is a pain I just don't know if I could bare. I am sure that if more families of color connected those dots we would realize that our health problems are not all our fault. I appreciate Sheila Holt-Orsted and her family for inviting us into their reality because now I want to do toxic tours of every city I visit." -- Kari Fulton, Howard University Campus Climate Challenge Coordinator Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, Washington DC

"Sheila Holt-Orsted demonstrates that community activists are the backbone in which social movements are built; lawyers, scientists, and politicians are merely the activists’ limbs. The toxic tour in Dickson was a community call-to-action to work together, to struggle together, and to achieve environmental justice. It was also a call to action to mobilize communities all over the country facing similar struggles. NRDC, on behalf of the Holt family and the entire Dickson community, will be a part of this effort for the long-haul, providing the legal and technical assistance needed to clean up the Landfill’s toxic contamination." -- Al Huang, Environmental Justice Staff Attorney, Natural Resource Defense Council, New York, NY

“The way the Holt family has been treated in Dickson is mind boggling. How government agencies can ignore and then justify their inaction is the reason the EJ movement exists to support and to fight for those that are defenseless against their unjust circumstances. In some places people may say they are victims of environmental racism, but in the Dickson case, the Holt family has documentation that clearly shows what we call environmental racism. The landfill has not been cleaned up and the Holt family has not been compensated for the years they drank and bathed in water laced with poisonous substances.” -- Rita Harris, Sierra Club Environmental Justice Organizer, Memphis, TN

“The toxics tour brought to the national forefront the importance of this landmark case in environmental-exposure induced health disparities.” -- Darryl B. Hood, professor of Neurobiology and Neurotoxicology, Meherry Medical College, Nashville, TN
“The Holt family environmental justice case, if nothing else, reminds us that we have not ‘overcome.’ We, as a collective scholars, grassroots activists, physical scientists, students, legal experts, clergy, health specialists, historians, elders, etc., must work toward achieving justice for all in terms of environmental quality. In Dickson County, we are at the "mountain top" and the "promised land" of remediation and recovery is in sight. But, we must not rest now, for the most difficult part of the fight remains ahead of us, especially for Sheila Holt-Orsted. We must keep the memory of our ancestor Harry Holt on our minds, and the health of Sheila in our prayers as we march forward.” -- David A. Padgett, Associate Professor and Director of GIS Laboratory, Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN