Black Studies and the Production of Environmental Justice Knowledge

INTRODUCTION

Since 2019, Williams College has spearheaded a transformative approach to environmental justice education, focused on endowing precollege and undergraduate students with interdisciplinary skills to support communities striving for environmental equity. This initiative reimagines the training of future students in environmental justice studies, emphasizing practical, community-engaged research aimed at addressing an array of environmental challenges confronting different locales. Through our innovative program, students have actively contributed to environmental science testing, oral history collection, and geographic mapping in regions such as St. Louis Metro East and Florida’s Gulf Coast, demonstrating significant strides in mitigating the impacts of environmental contamination and advancing the pursuit of environmental justice. Our experiences in these communities underscore the critical role of academic–community partnerships in fostering sustainable environmental solutions.

Centreville, Illinois, recently reincorporated as Cahokia Heights, stands out as a prime example where structural inequities have led to pronounced environmental justice concerns. A Black community near the Mississippi River floodplain, Centreville is marked by socioeconomic and racial disparities. ¹ Despite an annual investment exceeding $1 billion in river restoration nationwide, communities such as Centreville have been consistently overlooked. ² Frequent flooding exacerbates property value decline, diminishes quality of life, and deepens existing inequities. ³ We aimed to unravel the complex dynamics between storm patterns and channel infilling, and their combined effects on flooding frequency and severity, pioneering a novel approach that merges geomorphology and hydrology with environmental justice principles. Our community-centered research methodology emphasizes collaboration with local residents to address the underlying causes of urban flooding. Through fieldwork and active community involvement, we have sought to shed light on the direct and indirect impacts of persistent flooding on surface water quality and the well-being of community members. This technical endeavor has been complemented by engaging residents in the data collection process, fostering a shared sense of ownership and active participation.

In Tallevast, Florida, a small Black community of 80 families that sits on Florida’s Gulf Coast between Manatee and Sarasota Counties, residents have been besieged by water contamination and coordinated industrialization that places their bodies and lived environment at risk. ⁴ In 2003, residents discovered that the beryllium facility in the center of town, the American Beryllium Company (ABC), had been leaking toxic solvents, including trichloroethylene (TCE), into their groundwater since the early 1960s. ⁵ While essential to the space program and to defense-related production, machining beryllium left the Tallevast community vulnerable to illness. Although groundwater clean-up operations are underway, there remains widespread concern about environmental quality throughout the community. ⁶ Moreover, the cleanup of groundwater has been so aggressive that sinkholes are arising, threatening the structural integrity of homes. The nature of groundwater contamination may be reducing air quality within homes, potentially poisoning air with volatile organic compounds. While Lockheed Martin has directed remediation efforts in Tallevast for close to a decade, residents remain distrustful of their safety, a belief that is justified by hazardous mishaps from the “pump and treat system” that has discharged contaminated water into the community. ⁷ Even more, local and state agencies enact policies that privilege commercial land development, facilitating the increased encroachment of industries that now encircle Tallevast. ⁸ At the same time, Lockheed Martin has refused to relocate residents because it claims that its remediation plan is sound, a claim that is endorsed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP). ⁹

In generating critical and usable knowledge for communities suffering from environmental challenges, our program also aids students in developing a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the consequential difficulties of contamination and equips them with the competencies to enter graduate schools and the professional sector. From our extensive conversations with community members, we have also found that environmental science testing, much like consulting support, generates data for legal cases and policy advocacy, but it is only one form of knowledge that has been beneficial to communities in supporting them in forging a political path. Ongoing community fora illuminate their need for information—interdisciplinary information—that we, as a small liberal arts college with a strong Black Studies tradition, can uniquely offer.

By Black Studies, we mean knowledge generated from the demands of past and present Black social movements: organizing resistances against state actions that jeopardize human lives; transforming epistemic structures, both in the academy and beyond, that justify and sustain inequalities; and developing human-centered pedagogies that guide students toward actively changing the social order. ¹⁰ In the following sections, we outline our approach to generating environmental knowledge, recount the origins of our program, and demonstrate how it has evolved along with our deepening relationships with communities that actively resist environmental inequities. Instead of solely relying on the questions and approaches that might emerge from disciplinary protocols, we listen closely to our community partners and develop research strategies that address what they express to us as most urgent.

METHODS

Our view of Black Studies is particularly informed by protests at the City College of New York in 1969, when Black and Puerto Rican students demonstrated for an open admissions policy. When June Jordan, the famed poet and journalist, taught Freshman Composition at City University of New York in the fall 1969, she wrote “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” a statement on the need for the production of knowledge that would not remake the corporate university, which she understood as fundamentally designed to form individuals into efficient and competent laborers for the machineries of racial capitalism. Rather, education should serve the needs of communities that suffer from the inequalities resulting from corporatization. For Jordan, university institutions must embrace “Black Studies,” an approach to knowledge that rescues students “from the amorality of time and science” by foregrounding the urgency of the problems facing Black lives, and by facilitating the creation of safe community. ¹¹

At Williams, our Black Studies approach to addressing environmental injustice (1) establishes enduring collaborations with community partners to understand the contours of the environmental challenges they face; (2) resists disciplinary divisions among the humanities, human sciences, and natural sciences to crystalize that which communities find most useful to know; and (3) gathers interdisciplinary information to narrate and visualize the entangled histories of land use. By expanding the avenues by which knowledge can be produced and utilized, we offer tools for empowerment to aid communities in thinking strategically and inventively about their futures.

ESTABLISHING LASTING COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

Our impulse to build a collaborative research program that benefits victims of environmental injustice is shared by other institutions. For instance, the Carnegie Foundation has defined an ideal for the partnership between scholars and communities, in which community engagement is “the collaboration between higher education institutions and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.” ¹²

Professional organizations like the American Association of Geographers and the American Geophysical Union are at the forefront of initiatives to define the ethical and meaningful relationship between scholars and communities. ¹³ This approach emphasizes collaboration across a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including communities, policymakers, and nonprofit organizations, to generate socially relevant knowledge. Such community-directed research integrates teaching and service in innovative ways to suit the unique needs of each partnership. Central to this approach is the principle of working hand in hand with community members to tackle issues that they identify, ensuring that the research process contributes positively to the community rather than extracting from it.

Despite calls for more refined approaches, the recent attention on community-directed research can be seen as evidence that traditional collaborations between disciplinary-oriented science programs and communities are not working optimally. Scholars are in need of rubrics that properly assess the significance and impact of their work, and communities are in need of research to support their justice efforts.

At Williams, we began our approach to facilitate collaborative research with residents by identifying courses that presented students with opportunities to encounter first-hand the realities of environmental contamination. Such courses were already underway in the Africana Studies curriculum, which is structured by the tradition of Black Studies. One course, “Touring Black Religions in the ‘New South,’” was a 3-week experimental, travel course to the Gulf Coast of Florida that began in 2013. The class afforded students time with multiple Black Protestant religious communities. “Touring” in the course title signaled not only students’ journeys to different churches but also the growing tourism industry that challenges Florida’s local economies and alters landscapes in the state. As participant–observers, students took part in worship services and interviewed local residents about how their faith and theologies shaped their understandings of, and responses to, economic changes in the region. Students attended services in three different Black churches: The Life Center, a “mega-church” in Eatonville; Old Landmark Cathedral Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal-Holiness church in St. Petersburg; and Bryant Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, a small mainstream denominational church in Tallevast. Of all the church communities, students were particularly drawn to Bryant Chapel and the larger story of Tallevast, the site of a high-profile case of groundwater contamination from beryllium engineering. Students met with the leadership of Family Oriented Community United Strong (FOCUS), which describes itself as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the health, environment, and quality of life of residents in Tallevast … [and those who] own properties, lots, pieces or parcels of land [in the community].” ¹⁴

The sustained partnership between Williams students and the Tallevast community made evident the need for elevating campus discourse, which resulted in a 2017 lecture series and moderated conversations, informed by Black Studies, on the political histories of environmental justice and what we then called “Afro-diasporic environmentalism,” or the multiple ways that communities of African descent throughout the globe have understood the landscapes they inhabit, and the multiple challenges to the preservation of those lands and their bodies. The following summer, buoyed by the rich conversations initiated by the speaker series, we held a summer colloquium with faculty and students interested in community-focused environmental justice research across the humanities and natural sciences. In response to FOCUS leadership’s expressed concerns about the effectiveness and safety of Lockheed’s remediation plan, two students from the first cohort of colloquium participants spent two weeks in Tallevast conducting ethnographic research and collecting soil, water, and air samples that were returned to the Williams College science laboratory for testing.

COLLATING TECHNOSCIENTIFIC DATA

Our 2019 summer colloquium, informed by ongoing conversations with FOCUS leadership about concerns with the increased circulation of environmental contaminants, shifted our focus from ethnographic observations to environmental science testing in Tallevast. Groundwater contamination by TCE and other carcinogenic compounds underscored the challenges of managing its environmental and health impacts. In response, innovative approaches to detect TCE were developed through four honors theses, where undergraduates in geosciences and chemistry employed laboratory techniques capable of identifying and quantifying TCE at very low concentrations. This technical sophistication allowed for a nuanced understanding of TCE’s presence in the environment, highlighting the importance of sensitive detection methods in assessing exposure risks.

The collaborative effort to assess TCE contamination in Tallevast represented a groundbreaking approach to environmental monitoring, particularly through the integration of scientific techniques with community engagement. To facilitate direct community involvement in monitoring the air Tallevast residents breathe, the project embraced passive air sampling techniques, a decision that significantly democratized the data collection process. ¹⁵ Passive samplers, designed for simplicity and ease of use, allowed Tallevast residents to actively participate in the sampling without needing technical expertise. These samplers relied on the diffusion of air through a sorbent material that captured organic solvents present in the environment. This approach not only reduced logistical barriers to widespread sampling but also empowered the community by involving them directly in the research process.

The integration of these technical advancements in environmental science with a model of community engagement marked a significant step forward in addressing public health concerns related to environmental contamination. The use of advanced analytical methods for the precise detection of organic solvents at low concentrations addressed the critical need for sensitivity in assessing exposure risks. Simultaneously, the adoption of passive air sampling methodologies enabled widespread community participation, fostering a sense of agency among Tallevast residents. Together, these methods provided not only a comprehensive understanding of TCE’s presence in the environment, but also a blueprint for future efforts in environmental justice and public health advocacy. By empowering communities with the tools and knowledge to monitor their surroundings, this approach underscores the potential for collaborative research to make meaningful contributions to both scientific knowledge and to communities affected by the disparate health impacts of environmental contamination.

FACILITATING COLLECTIVE MEMORY

In our extensive conversations with FOCUS, we have found that Tallevast residents cherish, even more than our scientific testing services, visits from our faculty and students to listen to their story, whether in community fora or in individual interviews. Residents value our consistent attentiveness to what is transpiring in their environment. Over time, our conversations with residents have led to student-directed research projects and senior theses across humanities and human science disciplines.

One project entailed reviewing nearly 1800 government documents detailing state and local agency responses to the contamination from the standpoint of narratives we have collected from residents. Our article, “Poisoning Tallevast,” details the complicity of the FDEP with Lockheed Martin, which assumed responsibility for the contamination after it purchased ABC, the polluting industry. ¹⁶ Instead of partnering with Tallevast’s community leadership to determine a course of action to ensure residents’ safety and sense of security, FDEP has consistently deferred to Lockheed’s claims about its remediation plan, despite the doubts of other scientific experts, and evidence of a cancer cluster in the community. ¹⁷

Acknowledging the failure of state agencies to act on behalf of Tallevast, we have continued to listen to what the community needs and to collaboratively formulate projects to aid them in creating a database of knowledge for political strategizing. Looking beyond the state for resolution to environmental degradation is also a key feature of Black Studies, as well as of Pellow’s “Critical Environmental Studies.” ¹⁸ In a sense, we have heeded the historical lessons from Warren County, North Carolina, a community often acknowledged as the modern origin of the Environmental Justice Movement. When legal remedies initially proved ineffective, community leaders mobilized organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the United Church of Christ, to enact nonviolent direct actions against the state. ¹⁹ The protests, which lasted 6 weeks, have since captured the theoretical and historical imaginations of many scholars of environmental justice and are thought to have initiated the field.

In Tallevast, environmental threats coordinated by private industry and the local government have not ended at the failing remediation. The Manatee County Board of Commissioners continues to rezone properties on Tallevast’s perimeter for industrial use. In the last decade, the County has built a depot for public buses in Tallevast’s northeast corner and rezoned former agricultural land in its southwest corner for a new Amazon distribution center. Moreover, the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport continues expansion efforts in the northwest section of Tallevast. Current Tallevast residents who are surviving the contamination, and newer residents who are unaware of or indifferent to the community’s toxic history, are now compressed by industrial growth that will certainly further compromise the community’s natural environment. What were once intermittent community disruptions now amount to a frequently pulsing industrial squeeze. ²⁰

Our ongoing community engagements have launched a number of projects to generate usable information for the community. For one project, students studied geological reports from Lockheed to map the movement of the plume. Two years into Lockheed’s remediation program, FOCUS conveyed to FDEP that Lockheed’s reporting data was “very cumbersome and difficult to process, even for experts in the field. The Department and affected public deserve more concise, clear, and less deceiving presentations of the facts and data.” Moreover, there was an expressed concern with the accuracy of the data to properly delineate the extent of the plume and doubt about the effectiveness of the “pump and treat system” to flush contaminants of concern, including 1,4 Dioxane and certain chlorinated volatile organic compounds within the proposed time period of 5 years. ²¹ By the 6-year mark, residents remained wary of the effectiveness of the “pump-and-treat” system. Students trained in critical cartography and geographic information systems read closely Lockheed’s remediation reports to create an animation of the movement of the plume over time for residents to interpret the data. Students also made historical maps of industrialization, measured sinkholes, and conducted air quality testing.

Students have also collected video recordings of personal testimonies and then contextualized their narratives within Black literature. One student considered interviews with, and observations of, Tallevast residents within the Black future worlds imagined in Octavia Butler’s books, Parable of the Sower and Fledging. Another student spent concentrated time with FOCUS’s two Co-Executive Directors, speaking with them over the course of months about environmental injustice, political activism, and community repair and framing the conversations within psychological theories of healing and holism. Both students presented their projects at community fora, which obliged them to talk through the appropriateness of their theoretical narratives for understanding what residents themselves have witnessed and experienced in Tallevast. We have found these conversations to be instructive to our ongoing efforts to accurately capture what has transpired in Tallevast and to present ideas to residents in a way that contributes to their own collective visioning process.

We have identified three lessons from our work, each of which is informed by our Black Studies framing of our initiative. First, instead of producing knowledge based on the model of selling professional expertise to address targeted issues, what is necessary is sustained involvement in a community to listen carefully to its concerns, build relationships, and generate data that can aid the community in cohering a collective memory of its environmental challenges, create timelines of those problems, and develop strategies for achieving its vision of justice. Generating knowledge aids a community’s education and vision of its political options.

Second, knowledge production must not solely rely on those as dictated by discipline, scientific or otherwise, but must emerge from collaborations with communities. This challenges researchers to not limit themselves to established conversations, or to traditional measures of labor productivity that might impede designing research that is in direct response to a community’s urgent needs. And finally, should environmental science testing be requested, it must be presented to the community within the context of the community’s ongoing story about itself. This model of reporting requires multiple modes of conveying the significance of data, including its potential shortcomings. As we have demonstrated in our work with Tallevast, scientific data can usefully be shared through visual representations of land use.

CONCLUSIONS: TOWARD AN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE CLINIC

To stabilize our community-driven research, we have launched the Williams Environmental Justice Clinic (EJC) to foster relationships between faculty, students, and communities and to illuminate, from multiple disciplinary vantage points, environmental catastrophes, governmental neglect, and political activism. Our aim is to extend our Black Studies-inspired approach to other locales in need, collecting and conveying data in ways that will cultivate political consciousness among those impacted, whether for litigation, policymaking, or for self-determined solutions beyond those permitted within state apparatuses. We realize that the shape of EJC is particular to the learning environment of our institution. However, as we note in our “Introduction,” we believe that our success is attributable to the specific size of our liberal arts environment that enables and encourages formulating questions and collecting information that is not limited to disciplinary boundaries. This malleability of knowledge production, and our commitment to Black Studies traditions, allows us to respond to what we learn from listening to community members.

In addition to EJC’s ongoing work in Tallevast and Centreville, we have recently formed a partnership with the Capital Region Air Justice Lab at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, which has taken significant strides in addressing air quality issues within the New York Capital District. The endeavor was prompted by our realization that our ’62 Center for the Performing Arts, which sits on Main Street in Williamstown, is directly related to the industry responsible for polluting the air. Since it opened in October of 2005, the ’62 Center has hosted performances sponsored by the Department of Theater, the Music Department, as well as the Williamstown Theater Festival during the summer months. One of our campus’s most prominent and beautiful structures, the ’62 Center costs $51.9 million to build, almost half of which was donated by Herb A. Allen, Jr., class of ’62, and founder and former president of Allen & Company. The ’62 Center was constructed from structural lightweight concrete, a versatile and fire-resistant building material that is significantly lighter than normal concrete.

Norlite, LLC, which produced the structural lightweight concrete, is an industrial plant located less than an hour away from Williamstown in Cohoes, New York. Norlite’s production process mines shale from an onsite quarry, expands, and heats shale in a rotary kiln, making the concrete durable, stable, strong, and highly insulative. However, the burning process emits toxic dust, as well as hazardous waste of over 400 toxic chemicals, including mercury and heavy metals. ²² Tanker trucks transport huge quantities of chemicals to and from the production site, which is adjacent to Saratoga Sites, a public housing facility for low-income residents, the majority of whom are white. Many current and former residents who have organized into an activist organization called “Lights Out Norlite” claim that Norlite is the largest single source of mercury pollution in the state of New York, and sits in the center of a cancer cluster extending from Cohoes to Troy and Rensselear County. ²³ Although a serial violator of environmental laws for over 30 years, having received nearly 20 consent orders and fines, Norlite still benefitted from environmental laws permitting it to store and burn hazardous waste. But as a consequence of committed protest and activism, the Department of Housing and Urban Developed will relocate the residents of Saratoga Sites to a safer environment, and Norlite announced that it would cease core operations in March 2024. ²⁴

The EJC supports a mission to build a dense network of sensors capable of monitoring particulate matter across the Capitol region. By integrating sensors into a calibrated public data network, the collaboration aimed not only to map out particulate matter distribution but also to elevate community understanding and drive actionable insights. Workshops and educational programs were designed to enhance community-wide competency, enabling residents to interpret air quality data and understand its implications on public health and environmental safety. Community engagement is playing a pivotal role in the project’s progress, with the collaboration actively facilitating discussions and participatory activities. These efforts were underpinned by a solid foundation of community trust and collaboration, ensuring that the project’s objectives resonated with the residents’ immediate concerns and aspirations for a healthier living environment.

Our experience in scientific work, while significant, does not overshadow the importance of archiving oral histories of resilience and preservation. Partnerships with community organizations and media companies enable a robust dissemination of humanities-centered environmental knowledge to form citizen educators equipped with extensive knowledge of environmental safety regulations and policies around land use, as well as conceptual cartographies of their own physical environments.

Our vision of EJC is very much inspired by the intellectual-activist traditions of Black Studies, where knowledge is developed with historical nuance and careful systematic analysis to empower communities. In aiding communities to plot the environmental battles waged against them, we also aspire to bridge, conceptually and historically, environmental catastrophes across time and space, as well as imbricate prior and future local movements. We are particularly interested in the shape of collective memory of environmental resistance for current local activists, policymakers, and media pundits. We want to identify archival forms that might enhance memories for organized resistances against environmental assault. Discrete disciplinary knowledge tends to resist such formations, and even when they are more pliable, they articulate themselves in a language that might be removed from the lived experiences of communities in need. For this reason, EJC not only studies the specificities of the environmental challenges and intersectional inequities communities face but also strives, through written and visual storytelling, to cohere collective memory for community movement.