After more than eighteen months of intense organizing and legal maneuvering, residents of tiny Convent, Louisiana and their allies forced Shintech Inc. to scrap plans to build a $700 million polyvinyl chloride plant in the mostly African American community. The decision came on Thursday, September 17, 1998 and was hailed around the country as a major victory against environmental racism. The driving force behind this victory was the relentless pressure and laser-like focus of the local Convent community. "The Shintech plant would have been the final nail in our coffin. Shintech go home," said retired Convent school teacher Gloria Roberts. "We vowed never to give up this fight. We had right on our side, and we won. We will take our fight to Plaquemine where the company now wants to go," says Emelda West, a long-time Convent residents and member of the St. James Citizens for Jobs and the Environment." (West is featured on the EJRC's website "Heroes and Sheroes"). Plaquemine residents and their allies are gearingup to fight Shintech's new plan. "That Shintech would still persist in making PVC in Louisiana is obviously a huge disappointment and another battle will be joined as they try to permit the new site," stated Robert Kuehn Tulane Law School professor who served as the attorney for the residents.

Damu Smith, a Greenpeace organizer who worked in the trenches with the local Convent citizens, praised the residents for sticking it out to the end. "All eyes were fixed on Convent. The people stayed unified despite the big money-forces numerous attempts to divide them," Smith said. Smith was also critical of Shintech for its new plan to build a facility near Dow Chemical in Plaquemine. "This is an obvious face saving move by a dirty industry that is becoming more dead-end and obsolete by the day," Smith stated.

Important team-building lessons can be learned from the Shintech case. Convent residents were successful in assembling a broad array of allies on their team from grassroots community, legal, environmental, scientific, church, and civil rights groups to support their legal and technical arguments. Opponents of Shintech contend that the permitting of the plant by the Louisiana Department of Environmental in the mostly black community would be tantamount to racial discrimination and thus violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Luke Cole, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Race, Poverty and Environment Center, summed up the importance of coalitions. "It is heartening to see that when the people of Convent reached out, they were able to put together a coalition that brought people, science and the law together tobeat big business and the Governor of Louisiana." Cole further stated, "In this time of backlash against people of color in general and environmental justice in particular, it is important to build the victories and move our agenda forward. Let the people of Convent lead the way!"

The importance of community solidarity was also emphasized by United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice leader Charles Lee. "Records from formal and informal hearings and opinion polls consistently revealed overwhelming community opposition to the Shintech plant. Convent residents proved once again that David can indeed defeat Goliath," said Lee.

Increased community pressure and mounting empirical evidence of environmental racism forced the company to rethink its plans. "There is no doubt in my mind that the proposal to site the Shintech plant in the middle of the Convent community follows a patterns that has been documented across the region," said Beverly Wright, director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University in New Orleans. Wright, who served as one of St. James Citizens for Jobs and the Environment's expert witness and researcher, said "Our geographic information system analysis clearly shows that African Americans live closest to the polluting industries in Convent and St. James Parish."

Shintech, Inc. had applied for an air permit to build a $800 million polyvinyl chloride plant in mostly black and poor Convent, Louisiana. The PVC plant would have been located in St. James Parish, a parish that ranks third in the state for toxic releases. Over 17.7 million pounds of toxic releases were reported in the 1996. The average American is exposed to about 10 pounds of toxic releases per year. St. James Parish residents are exposed to a whopping 4,500 pounds of toxic releases per year without the Shintech plant. The Shintech plant would add 600,000 pounds of air pollutants annually. The community already has a dozen plants that are so close to homes, residents could actually walk to work. But in reality, the jobs are not there for Convent residents.

Grassroots groups are making sure that governmental agencies enforce environmental and civil rights laws. The hard work of these groups is now paying off on the ground and in the courts. Recent environmental justice legal victories were won in Flint, Michigan, Chester, Pennsylvania, and in Forest Grove and Center Springs, Louisiana. On May 1, 1997, after eight years of litigation, Citizens Against Nuclear Trash or CANT won a precedent-setting court decision from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. The three-judge panel concluded that "racial bias played a role in the selection process" and denied a permit from Louisiana Energy Services to build a uranium enrichment plant in the middle of Forest Grove and Center Springs, Louisiana, two rural African American communities that date back to the 1860s and 1910, respectively. The decision was upheld on appeal on April 4, 1998. LES packed up and left town on Earth Day, April 22, 1998.

Nathalie Walker of the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund and lawyer for CANT, sees the Shintech victory as part of this string of environmental justice wins. "The Shintech win reinforces our win against LES," stated Walker. Professor Keuhn agrees wit this assessment. "With the victories in Homer, LA and Chester, PA, we may start to see a change in corporate behavior as a result of community efforts to raise environmental justice issues."

This past February, EPA Administrator Carol Browner issued interim Title VI guidance for facility permitting. Because of the growing number of Title VI complaints, EPA issued interim guidance to address these problems. She also appointed a 25-member National Advisory Council on Environmental Policy and Technology or NACEPT to advise the agency. States have had 34 years to implement Title VI. Most states have chosen to ignore the law. Instead of blasting EPA for acting, states need to develop standards, procedures, and tools to implement the law.

Governments must live up to their mandate of protecting all communities and the environment. Anything less that is unacceptable. Many of the problem, disputes, and complaints could be prevented if existing environmental, health, land use, housing, and civil rights laws were vigorously enforced in a nondiscriminatory way. No community, rich or poor, urban or suburban, black or white, should be allowed to become a sacrifice zone or dumping ground.

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