Editor’s Note: What follows is the first in an intended series of reflections by the author on experiences in the undertaking of a research program undertaken in Africatown, Alabama, as detailed below.
My first trip to Africatown, Alabama, came in mid-March, 2022. This was my first time ever traveling to there; up to that moment, I had only been to the general Mobile area a couple of times, and even then only drive-through trips for my husband and me to get our COVID-19 vaccines.
The occasion for my trip is my role as co-principal investigator on a five-year, 1.25 million grant through the National Academies of the Sciences, Gulf Research Program called “STEMMing the Tide: Empowering Youth to Meet Coastal Environmental Challenges.” The aim of the grant is to partner with community climate activists and environmental justice agencies and teachers in Africatown “to develop an environmental justice and locally relevant curriculum that aligns directly with the Alabama State science and social studies standards.” My first trip was alongside my co-principal investigators from Birmingham-Southern College: Dr. Vince Gawronski, Professor of Political Science; Kate Hayden, Associate Professor of Chemistry; Roald Hazelhoff, Director of the Southern Environmental Center; and Kelly Russell, Associate Professor of Education.
I was unsure what to expect. Over the past few years, Africatown’s national profile has been raised in large part due to the 2019 discovery of the Clotilda, which is said to have been the last ship to transport captive Africans in 1860 to the United States from what was then the Kingdom of Dahomey. But knowing Africatown’s significance from afar and knowing it up close are quite different matters. I did anticipate that we would connect with area residents, community elders, and local organizations to learn more about their vital work along lines of environmental justice and climate change activism. I imagined that our time there would be fruitful in terms of what it would do to help mold a clearer vision for how our grant work might take shape over the next five years.
I knew, of course, that in spending time in Africatown, however brief, we would begin to better comprehend the meaning and reality of inhabiting and working in a community whose boundaries are nearly entirely contiguous with one factory/industrial site after another. I hoped our project would receive buy-in from area stakeholders, especially as it became clearer to those whom our work is meant to support that our intentions are rooted in a concern for Africatown and the future of the Gulf Coast, and not guided by a profit motive to capitalize on Africatown’s recent national profile. I also believed our resolve for this work would strengthen further as our trip inaugurated our project’s transition from theory to reality.
There were several things I encountered, experienced, and observed that I could not have anticipated. Our initiation into Mobile came by way of some not-so-veiled racism courtesy of our hotel’s front desk attendant. On the morning of Wednesday, March 23, I walked into the hotel lobby heading straight toward the front desk. Having been on the road for some time without reprieve and needing time to stretch, freshen up, and prepare for some early afternoon meetings, I was hoping for a swift check-in. The front desk attendant, though, appeared noticeably disinterested in me. He did not care to ask my name to reference my reservation. Initiating the exchange myself, I asked if I could check-in. He flatly told me no rooms were available, giving no indication of when any might open up. I asked if there was a microwave I could access to warm my packed lunch. He said: “No, there aren’t any.” A hotel with no microwaves? I headed back to my car to eat what remained of my lunch, cold.
I waited in my car for what seemed a reasonable amount of time before returning to the lobby. What do I see? The same attendant, confronting a new set of people—all white—with a very different attitude. These different people, though, were my people, the rest of the grant team. I walked over to greet them, as they appeared to be having a much simpler time gaining access to their rooms and acquiring relevant information about their stay. I overheard them being told, for instance, where they might grab good, local cuisine in the immediate vicinity, and how valet parking was available to guests in the adjacent parking structure, information that I—a fellow guest—would have found useful at the time of my arrival.
Once the attendant realized that I was with the group he’d just assisted, his countenance immediately shifted. My visible association with the group freed him to extend to me his customer service, which, it turns out, is capable of alchemical feats: this hotel, just a moment ago barren of any microwaves, suddenly came in possession of one! (Indeed, the microwave was just to the left of the attendant.) While not entirely surprising, this was a rather demoralizing start. In the ensuing moments, I may have come off as brusque to the rest of the team; I do not think they recognized I was, in that moment, inhabiting a different reality, one where my being treated as a guest was commensurate with my literal proximity to whiteness.
Upon arriving to my room, I spent time gathering myself. This is something Black people often learn how to do if we are to navigate the world with the intent of carrying on in environments designed to fracture us. And in that moment, I had meetings for which I needed to prepare, so I had to get myself in order. That I more-or-less accomplished, though I was still a bit shaky. Par for the course, I guess.
This incident is significant not just in conveying the experience I had as a researcher, but in making sense of the matter my research team would be addressing. These kinds of pervasive anti-Black attitudes have an enduring salience in shaping Mobile’s social and political climate, contributing to Africatown’s being used as a literal dumping ground by those placing the prospect of making money over the lives of Africatown residents. I got a very small taste of that, albeit in different form. This was my inauguration into our work there. It seemed fitting.
This experience fit into a complex dynamic. On the one hand, it is, of course, one thing to read about Africatown, its history, and the environmental injustice issues that beset it; it is quite another to be there, feet on the ground, taking sight of the many sprawling industrial plants that form the community’s circumference. On the other hand, the nature of the injustices is such that their gravest aspects are often invisible to the naked eye, and the responsible parties often sought to lessen the visibility of the harm rather than the harm itself. Yet it is nonetheless quite difficult to grasp the full meaning of the invisible aspects of these injustices without seeing some of their quite profound effects in person. Neither reading alone nor seeing alone is enough to grasp the matter at hand.
Prior to our trip, I read much about the Scott Paper Co., and how in 1992 it released into the air over 630,000 pounds of chloroform, a chemical known to cause cancer. It is no wonder so many Africatown residents are known to have either died of cancer, have recovered or are recovering from it, or know friends and family who have had the disease. On this matter, International Paper (IP) is a primary co-conspirator. For years—spanning the mill’s opening in 1928 to its closing in 2000—its large stacks emitted dioxins and furans, a highly toxic, carcinogenic compound. Africatown residents know well that their community’s high rate of cancer is a direct result of inhabiting an environment where it was once commonplace for area cars to become blanketed by the chemicals flowing out of both Scott and IP’s mills, often causing them to rust. A devastating fact—one that tells us that both companies recognized their direct complicity in causing immense harm to the community—is that both Scott and IP are said to have, for years, offered free car washes, day or night, to Africatown residents. These companies quite literally attempted to wash away evidence of their crimes so that they might continue to pollute without reproach.
Africatown residents thus did not need to conduct a broad public health study to establish the correlation between these plants and the community’s cancer rates; the evidence of this was and remains something found in their very bodies. This intimate, embodied knowledge of IP’s terrible misdeeds is what in 2018 led a contingent of nearly 250 Africatown residents to sue the company, citing that its toxic emissions caused a raft of irreparable damages. From what I can gather, this suit is still ongoing.
In short, coming to terms with the full weight of the harm imposed upon Africatown by industry demands being able to summon the full range of one’s senses to apprehend the sheer insidiousness of it all. The continuity of wanton harm caused by heavy industry companies, those engaged in what Rob Nixon refers to as “slow violence,” is not always made evident at the visual register. One is bound to miss things if committed to a view of violence which posits that degrees and spheres of injury can only be measured against that which one is able to see. Knowledge of damage is transmitted also through what one may smell, feel, and by what one hears, or perhaps even by what one does not hear, smell, or feel.
This dynamic was fully on display that Thursday, when our team all piled into a member’s SUV to make the trip. We strove to be mindful of our carbon footprint: our rolling up in three cars to make a short five-mile journey would not have looked good, nor, as a matter of environmental well-being, would it have been good. We were heading to meet with Ms. Charmyne Thompson, the Director of Africatown’s Reverend Robert L. Hope Community Center. It was a relatively temperate day, so a couple of us rolled down our windows to take in some air. As we crossed the Cochrane-Africatown bridge—a towering cable passage, over 7,000 feet in length, engineered as an alternative route for trucks and other travelers along routes 31, 90, and 98, whose construction simply exacerbated Africatown’s growing environmental problems—Kelly remarked about her noticing that the quality of the air had changed quite remarkably.
A very distinct odor had suddenly saturated the environment, a smell I imagine residents of Africatown, unfortunately, know well. It is the kind of miasma with which folks inhabiting other areas plagued by similar environmental justice issues are familiar. Residents of Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” for instance, report being overwhelmed by a putrid odor, a smell mimicking something like rotten eggs. The toxins that pervade Africatown’s air, land, and water were made known to us even before our having stepped foot in the community.
Africatown’s environmental problems are discernible also at the auditory level. A few weeks before our full-team visit, Vince and Roald had gone to Africatown in order to connect with its community members and potential community partners as well as to physically survey the area, so that when our grant officially began, we would be able to hit the ground running having some additional preliminary knowledge around how best to proceed and with whom. After having returned, both Vince and Roald commented on Africatown’s distinct soundscape. In a sort of astonished tone, Vince told of how the community is blanketed by what felt like an eerie absence of sound; no birds could be heard, a sound many of us are perhaps so inured to hearing that we take for granted what about our communities their being there signifies. This sonic experience Vince described paradoxically as “suffocating,” a fitting term given the connection here between the existential experience and the literal source of the sonic absence.
I quickly learned that the report was true. Having arrived at the Hope Community Center—a meeting and recreational place open to Africatown residents of all ages, those ranging from the very young to senior citizens—one of the first things I became conscious of was how few sounds permeated the landscape. We went midday, so I did not expect the community to be bustling with activity, especially because the neighborhood school—Mobile County Training School (locally referred to as “County”)—had not yet let out. Still, I was taken aback by the overwhelming quiet that greeted us.
The stillness can appear rather innocuous when read against existing narratives about the meaning and utility of soundlessness. We might more readily associate a lack of sound with the experience of peace or view it as a conduit for reflection and contemplation. These are not unfounded linkages, but those conventional associations might distract from what, in some instances, the quiet is actually telling us. In the case of Africatown, the thinned soundscape conveys, among other things, a story about the role of heavy industry in flattening out biodiversity in an area that was once rich with life. I am not an ecologist and I cannot claim to speak with a high degree of authority, but what I believe in this case is validated by what I heard. And what I heard was a vacuum of sound wherein no birdsongs could be detected. This is terrifying.
This speaks to precisely what is both incredibly infuriating and baffling about how the industries and people in power responsible for these noxious changes to the environment in and immediately around Africatown are still able to do what they do with relative impunity. The deep devastation they have caused and continue to produce is overwhelmingly evident. One need only look and listen in order to arrive at that awareness. Yet it has taken many years for Africatown residents to begin to see efforts to redress years of accumulated damage—some of which, of course, is irreversible. Among these irreversible effects is the loss of human lives. But it is almost as if some have accepted Africatown’s situation as the inevitable outcome of a commitment to “modernity,” whatever that is. Put differently, Africatown’s plight might be considered a function of operating in accordance with racial capitalism’s natural order. It is simply the cost of doing business.
Here, I find James Baldwin’s words instructive. Writing on the reality and deliberateness of racism, he expressed that there is the tendency to look at our worlds and form the assumption that what is is so because it just happens to be that way. Aspects of our social and political realities, Baldwin posited, are sometimes read as “acts of God,” an idea that displaces human agency’s centrality in producing conditions that shape our existences. Africatown’s environmental issues (among other related problems) did not just happen; they are evidence of an elaborate racial schema at work which renders some groups of people—and, by extension, some environments—disposable, unworthy of the care and protection afforded others.
This sentiment was the leitmotif of our conversation with Ramsey Sprague, a volunteer of the Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJAC) and long-time Mobile community leader. During our one-hour exchange at a coffee shop just under ten minutes away from Africatown, Ramsey mapped out a telescopic picture of the history of local governance as it relates to Africatown. He stressed how the environmental racism that plagues Africatown is the result of an inordinate number of decisions and indecisions, all of which seem centered around positioning Mobile as an industrial power center, even when the costs associated with that agenda entail Africatown’s literal deterioration.
That being said, witnessing in Africatown the obvious signs of neglect and abnegation of care by the city of Mobile can be overwhelming. It was for me, at least in large part, because I was reminded once again of how racism takes shape in ways that have real, material, enduring, and sometimes fatal consequences. This knowing came through in remarks delivered by Major Joe Womack, Africatown native and President of Africatown-CHESS (Clean, Healthy, Educated, Safe, and Sustainable), during a panel at the 2022 National Conference of Black Political Scientists annual conference. He emphasized that Africatown’s decline is a clear indication of just how real a possibility it was that the “the city was just going to remove the community and put up a sign saying ‘Africatown was here.’” In other words, Africatown’s worsening condition over the years reflects the general attitude among some Mobile government officials and area industry heads that Africatown and its inhabitants do not matter. Africatown residents, for their part, have flung that message back in the faces of those who have failed to bestow upon them the kind of care and protection of which they are most deserving by mere virtue of the fact that they are human beings.
What has happened is that Africatown residents have pushed back; they are pushing back. Signs of that—of renewal and hope—are visible throughout the community. For instance, there is the welcome sign at the edge of the community that calls attention to the work being done to revitalize Africatown. It reads, “Welcome to Africatown,” a reception bolstered by a set of lines listing some of the community’s new, emergent, and long-standing sites of pride, which include, as written: “Heritage House; Hope Center; Community Garden; Mobile County Training School.” That sign is an annunciation that change is coming and that it is already underway. I like to think of it as a form of talking back, especially as we take sight of the fact that the sign is quite literally facing the factories! This visual form of resistance embodied in that sign announces the possibility for Africatown residents to inhabit a different future, one in which their environment may become, once again, a place where all forms of life may flourish. The sign tells that Africatown residents have laid claim to that future.
Desireé R. Melonas
Desireé R. Melonasis an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Black Study and PoliticalScience at the University of California, Riverside. In addition, she is a co-principal investigator on aNational Academies of the Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Gulf Research Program Grant toco-develop environmental justice-focused curricular interventions throughout schools in and aroundAfricatown, Alabama. Finally, Desireé is a 2020-2021 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow.
