Rekindling a prophetic moral vision for justice, social change and movement building
Pollution does not discriminate based on race. The sources of pollution benefit the wealthy while harming the poor.
President of Repairers of the Breach, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, & author of The Third Reconstruction.
Aug 20
Ecological Justice Is A Moral Issue
There are communities in this country that are being contaminated. Toxic waste from multinational corporations and energy companies is being dumped into wells and rivers with no regard for the environment or the people who live nearby. All of this pollution gets into drinking water and the air and creates numerous health problems for these communities.Last week we held a two-day “Ecological Justice Organizing Tour,” in North Carolina where we heard from former Vice President Al Gore; his daughter, Karenna Gore, director of The Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary; along with impacted residents of these toxic waste dumps. Residents who live near the Duke Energy’s coal-fired steam station described waking up in the morning years ago to find their cars covered in coal dust. After being stored in coal ash ponds, the heavy metals from that coal is now in the well water that they drink, leading to multiple health problems. A Northampton County resident said that they attended the tour because their community was “killing them.”
People all around the country have been victims of toxic waste dumping. From Eden, North Carolina, where wells have been contaminated by coal ash courtesy of Duke Energy; to towns along the Cape Fear River, which has been contaminated by GenX chemical spills from the Chemours Chemical Company; to the indigenous tribes that have land along the Atlantic Coast Pipeline route. People who live near open pits of industrial hog waste and factory feedlots also often experience health problems due to the harmful toxins and odors they are forced to live with.
It should come as no surprise that the people who are most affected by these toxic sites are those who are living in poverty. The 140 million Americans living in poverty are the ones who are most at risk of environmental health issues and are the least likely to be benefitting from the profits of the corporations at fault. In fact, it is impossible to even begin to consider solutions to this devastating problem without first addressing issues of systemic poverty and systemic racism that are keeping people sick, without access to health care, and without the opportunity to obtain safe and healthy food and homes.
If we want to find true solutions to the issues at hand, it is important to talk with those who have lived through it. These are the voices needed to fix the laws, public policies, and systems that are currently destroying people’s lives and the environment. Impacted resident Bobby Jones said, “I’ve knocked on too many doors where people have lost loved ones… and then you see this giant company that’s completely in denial about its role.”
It is impossible for our elected leaders to claim that they care about us when they are allowing corporations to destroy the very environment we inhabit. These immoral politicians don’t care about where a multi-billion dollar corporation dumps its waste if the money is lining their pockets. We have too many lawmakers that would rather benefit from the death and destruction caused by pollution than to invest in the renewable energy that would be good for the environment and save lives. And Republican governors are further perpetuating the problem by refusing to expand Medicaid or raise the minimum wage. In North Carolina alone, there are 1 million uninsured people, and half of them could receive coverage with Medicaid expansion. These policies, or lack thereof, are keeping people sick and poor. But we shouldn’t be surprised, because the same politicians who refuse to expand Medicaid also refuse to renew the Voting Rights Act. They’re the same ones who refuse to implement living wages and oppose immigrant rights.
Environmental justice is not a left or right issue. It is not a black or white issue. It is a moral issue. Although pollution does not discriminate based on race, we do know the sources of pollution benefit the wealthy while harming the poor. How long do you think our government would let a corporation dump coal ash into the drinking water of a wealthy suburb? Because the victims of pollution are poor people, they are ignored in favor of the monetary gain that these corporations provide.
There should be no argument against preserving our planet and making sure that these companies are disposing of their waste in a way that’s not harmful to the environment and not harmful to the communities in which they reside. There should be no opposition to funding clean energy initiatives with the aim of replacing harmful fossil fuels.The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is calling upon all Americans to rise up and say that they are sick and tired of this nation’s lawmakers putting profits before people. The Poor People’s Campaign is being led by Repairers of the Breach in partnership with national and local partners. Our lives depend on real solutions being implemented now and that starts with addressing not only the pollution, but the wealth gap, and the lack of health care.
To find out more about the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, visit www.poorpeoplescampaign.org.
Read More
MORAL MOVEMENT NEWS
Former VP Al Gore Visits North Carolina As Part Of Eco-Justice Organizing Tour
Public Radio East
Former Vice President Al Gore heard the concerns of Goldsboro residents who live near four coal ash pits, as part of a two-day ecological justice tour that began at Rev. Dr. William Barber’s church on Sunday.Former VP Al Gore Visits Goldsboro As Part Eco-Justice Tour by VALERIE CROWDER
Former Vice President Al Gore heard the concerns of Goldsboro residents who live near four coal ash pits, as part of a two-day ecological justice tour that began at Rev. William Barber’s church on Sunday.
“I’m primarily here in North Carolina to listen and to learn,” Gore told the congregation at Greenleaf Christian Church during an environmental justice-themed Sunday morning service.
Five years ago, Barber created Moral Mondays, a series of social justice demonstrations that began in North Carolina and gained traction nationwide. Now, the ecological justice organizing tour, led by Barber and Gore, seeks to shine a national spotlight on environmental injustices happening in North Carolina's poor and heavily minority communities.
“If we can take the message that began here in North Carolina and spread it across the country – the way Reverend Barber has taken the message and the medium of Moral Mondays across the country – then I think we can have a much better chance of healing our politics,” Gore told reporters following the church service, which was the first stop in the tour.
The NC Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach helped organize the tour, which began in Goldsboro and ended on Monday with an evening service at Shiloh Baptist Church in Greensboro.
During the church service in Goldsboro, Gore brought up the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent decision to roll back some federal coal ash monitoring regulations that were implemented in 2015.
“This coal ash is poison. Now, they want to stop monitoring it in the same way that the law used to require,” Gore shouted from the pulpit. “If they don’t want to know whether or not the poison is going into the groundwater and from the groundwater into our bodies – if they don’t want to see – then they don’t monitor. If they don’t want to take action, they take the responsibility away from the experts and give it to some political appointee.”
During the service, two Wayne County residents spoke about air and water pollution from the H.F. Lee Power Plant in Goldsboro which burned coal for nearly six decades until Duke Energy built a natural gas station at the site about six years ago. Four coal ash basins are also on the plant’s property, which is located along the Neuse River.
Toxins from these unlined coal ash pits have leached into the groundwater, contaminating nearby residents’ wells, said Mindy Hodgin, Rosewood community resident and member of the Down East Coal Ash Coalition.
“A big side effect of all this seepage is that there’s people who can’t even drink their well water,” Hodgin said.
The plant is located within a census tract in Goldsboro where an estimated 30 percent of the residents live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2015, well water tests on residents living within a half-mile radius of the HF Lee plant revealed high levels of cobalt, hexavalent chromium and other pollutants, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“They’re sending out letters telling these people, telling them to not even take showers out of the waters coming out of their wells because they’ve got hexavalent chromium and boron and manganese and all these things that are naturally occurring, but not in the levels that we have them here,” said Hodgin, who lives about two miles away from the plant. Hodgin says she and her family haven’t experienced any health problems living near the plant.
Duke Energy has denied that its coal ash pits are leaking harmful chemicals into the groundwater. Still, the company reports it has provided residents living within a half-mile radius of the plant alternative water sources, including bottled water and access to water treatment services.
Duke Energy is seeking a State Department of Air Quality permit to re-burn the coal as at its Goldsboro site, as part of a recycling process that would turn it into materials used in concrete. Hogdin says she and other residents spoke out against the permit at a public hearing at Wayne Community College last month.
“I don’t think we’ve heard anything back on that,” Hogdin said. “But based on history and experience, they’ll get their permit, and they’ll be able to re-burn this ash into a community that they’ve already been polluting for years, Progress Energy polluted for years and CPNL polluted for years. And we need some state legislators to stand up for this community.”
Part of the tour’s aim was to mobilize voters to support candidates who would pass tougher environmental regulations on companies that pollute, said Rev. William Barber.
“We’re not against corporations. What we’re saying is people are first. And corporations can go to solar. Corporations can do the things that are good for the environment,” Barber said. “Are you going to choose greed or are you going to choose a future? That’s really the question – greed now, no future later. Or choose future now, and still have a blessed economy and a blessed future later. That’s really the choice – the moral choice.”
READ MORE
America Needs The Gospel Aretha Franklin Sang Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove in The Hearld Sun
"In a moment when political forces are working to pit Americans against one another, often in God’s name, the gospel Aretha Franklin sang is the good news America needs."
America needs the gospel Aretha Franklin sang BY JONATHAN WILSON-HARTGROVE, Guest column
Aretha Franklin, the undisputed “Queen of Soul,” died at her home in Detroit on Thursday. She was 76 years old. While her singular voice will be celebrated around the world, the way she popularized the message she grew up hearing her daddy, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, preach at Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church may in fact be her most important legacy.An interpretation of the Bible that condensed the collective wisdom of black people’s faith-rooted resistance to white supremacy, the gospel Aretha Franklin sang did more to transform society in the 20th century than many Americans realize. In the midst of our nation’s current moral crisis, that good news is a balm our bruised and battered democracy sorely needs.
Cornell University historian Nick Salvatore, who wrote the definitive biography of Aretha Franklin’s father, shows how the Rev. Franklin’s public ministry in the mid-20th century, which extended far beyond New Bethel through recorded sermons and a rigorous travel schedule, was “part of a multi-generational struggle by African Americans to reinterpret the meaning of American democracy.”
That struggle had given rise to Reconstruction following America’s Civil War, when scores of black preachers served in state legislatures and the US Congress, enacting a faith passed down on plantations through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution.
As the black preacher Frederick Douglass said, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” The gospel Douglass preached took on flesh in the shared political power of the Reconstruction era that brought good news to poor people through Freedmen’s Bureau hospitals, public education, and some modest protections for black workers.
But the white Redemption movement of the 1870s highlighted a very different faith in American public life — a resurrection of slaveholder religion that sanctified white supremacy and made it law under Jim Crow.
By the time the Supreme Court had codified “separate but equal” in its 1896 Plessey decision, Douglass was dead and one of the most famous preachers in America was a white son of the South, Thomas Dixon, who had started a mega-church in New York City and would go on to write the best-selling novel that the Ku Klux Klan used as a recruiting tool in the 1920s, after D.W. Griffith made it into a major motion picture, “The Birth of a Nation.”
Black Social Gospel
Still, the black Social Gospel that had celebrated the Jubilee of Emancipation while offering prophetic vision to the black preacher/politicians of the Reconstruction era did not go away. It was sustained and passed on in churches like the ones in which the Rev. C.L. Franklin learned to preach, sing, and shout the good news.
Whether in the rural South or in inner city Detroit, those churches instilled in the faithful a confidence that they mattered to God, even when the world called them the n-word, and a courage to fight for justice, even when the courts and legislatures denied them equal protection under the law. This two-fold message of the black Social Gospel was both indivisible and for all.
Earlier this year, after the Rev. Billy Graham died, commentators speculated that, because of his international television ministry, Graham preached the gospel to more people than any other single person in human history. But the good news Billy Graham preached was not the gospel that Aretha Franklin sang.
A white son of the Southern Baptist church who made efforts to leave his tradition’s racism behind, Graham always focused his preaching almost exclusively on the individual’s personal relationship with Christ. At New Bethel, such a gospel was unimaginable.
For Aretha Franklin, to have a relationship with Jesus was always to necessarily engage in a quarrel with the systems that oppress poor and black people.
“I’ve been locked up, and I know you’ve got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace,” Franklin said when explaining why she would post bail for jailed Black Panther activist Angela Davis.
We cannot remember Aretha Franklin’s musical career without recalling that it was rooted in the gospel she learned at New Bethel, an organizing center for Detroit’s civil rights movement and the place where she befriended that movement’s most famous preacher, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When she sang, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” at King’s funeral, Franklin led the nation in mourning the most well-known voice of the black Social Gospel since Frederick Douglass.
Read More
Civil Rights Leader Dorothy Cotton Remembered With Songs, Calls To Action
The Ithaca Voice
At a celebration of Dorothy Cotton’s legacy, the Reverend Dr. William Barber opened his remarks with a call-and-response: “Forward together, not one step back.”READ MORE
Civil rights leader Dorothy Cotton remembered with songs, calls to action BY DEVON MAGLIOZZI
ITHACA, N.Y. — At a celebration of Dorothy Cotton’s legacy on Saturday, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II opened his remarks with a call-and-response: “Forward together, not one step back.”Cotton’s family, friends, neighbors and colleagues spoke of honoring the civil rights leader and educator by carrying on her work. Hundreds of people packed Bailey Hall for the celebration Saturday.
“She doesn’t need us to stand here and praise her,” said longtime friend and civil rights activist Aljosie Aldrich Harding. Instead, she asked the gathered community to think about “how you can take the spirit of Dorothy Cotton and the lessons from Dorothy Cotton and the spiritual power of Dorothy Cotton and teach and share in your home and in your community.”
Cotton, who passed away in June at the age of 88, dedicated her life to advancing civil and human rights. She worked as the educational director for the SCLC and led its Citizenship Education Program throughout the 1960s. In Ithaca, where she lived for more than three decades, she partnered with colleges and community organizations to continue her advocacy.
The Dorothy Cotton Jubilee Singers perform at the celebration of the life of Dorothy Cotton in Bailey Hall. (Cornell University Photography)
Speakers at the memorial emphasized her tireless energy, her role as a woman in a male-dominated movement and her love of music.
“I couldn’t honor Dorothy Cotton without having a sing-along,” said Baruch Whitehead, who directs the Dorothy Cotton Jubilee Singers. The choir, which is dedicated to the preservation of “negro spirituals,” sang throughout the program. At multiple points the audience joined in.
Rev. Barber has been crisscrossing the country as co-chair of the revived Poor People’s Campaign, but made time for the trip to Ithaca to honor a woman who he called “my sister, my mentor, my hero, my woman apostle.”
He evoked Cotton’s legacy by using music to bring the audience to a fever pitch. “If the spirit says move, you got to move!” he began, citing a spiritual song that Cotton was known to sing.
“So how do we honor Dorothy? If we want to honor Dorothy then let us say in our time, when things need to be done right now, if the spirit says march, let’s march y’all. If the spirit says go to jail, let’s go to jail y’all. If the spirit says take on Donald Trump, let’s take on Donald Trump y’all. If the spirit says vote, let’s vote y’all. If the spirit says stand up for freedom in the 21st century, let’s stand up y’all. That’s the only way to honor Dorothy.”
Celebration of the life of Dorothy Cotton in Bailey Hall. (Cornell University Photography)
Rev. Barber speculated that Cotton would tell people fed up with current politics “to stop fussing and fighting … and to organize and deal with it.” He also called on attendees to “remember and commend” Cotton as a woman who was often overshadowed by the men around her.Several speakers emphasized Cotton’s role as a woman in a movement dominated by men. Harding said, “Dorothy Cotton did not help Dr. King, or help this person. Dorothy Cotton was a leader in her own right.” Harding encouraged women to follow Cotton’s example. “I want to call on the women to step forward and take our rightful place,” she said.
Planning committee member Peyi Soyinka-Airewele described Cotton as a “feisty feminist” and said, “She’d be delighted because we’re in a community … where we have three female, formidable college presidents.”
The presidents of Cornell University, Ithaca College and Tompkins Cortland Community College all acknowledged Cotton’s commitment to education and community dialogue. Cornell’s Martha Pollack said Cotton was “a role model for countless other women, inspiring them to teach and to lead.”
(l.-r.) Aljosie Aldrich Harding, long-time friend of Dorothy Cotton and a National Advisor to the Dorothy Cotton Institute; Elder Gwen Hinton-Perry, niece of Dorothy Cotton; Shirley Collado, president of Ithaca College; Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University; and Orinthia T. Montague, president of Tompkins Cortland Community College. (Cornell University Photography)
Ithaca College President Shirley Collado said Cotton had “a resounding voice that encouraged dialogue, facilitated empowerment and brought many, many people together.”Orinthia Montague, president of Tompkins Cortland Community College, called Cotton “a champion for education, political activism, and supporting humanity in all rights,” and credited Cotton with creating opportunities for women of color to lead.
Cotton’s niece, Elder Gwen Hinton-Perry, spoke to her aunt’s motivational role in the family. She said her aunt “always wanted more for her family,” and shared an anecdote about a time when Cotton and her sisters had dinner in a hotel restaurant.
“One of the sisters said, ‘Wow this is such a beautiful place. I would love to work here one day.’ Aunt Dorothy corrected her and said, ‘Why can’t you aspire to own this place?’ Her mindset was always over the top,” Hinton-Perry said. “If she was going somewhere, nothing stopped her.”
The three-hour memorial featured letters and acknowledgments from leaders and organizations across the country. Ambassador Andrew Young, who worked closely with Cotton at the SCLC, wrote that she was his “sister and mother superior.” Activist Marian Wright Edelman wrote that Cotton’s legacy should teach us “if you see something wrong, sometimes you may need to start an action all by yourself.”
Amidst all these calls to action, it was the music that brought people to their feet.
Minister Nelson Watkins, who worked with Cotton on the annual Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage, remembered how she described the crescendo of weeklong citizenship education sessions. As participants embraced their rights as citizens, she told him, the songs progressed “from ones of sorrow on Monday to freedom songs on Friday.”
The Jubilee Singers began the memorial with a plaintive song. Its lyrics narrated a search for peace and strength “in the time of the storm.” They ended the ceremony with a song called “Anticipation.” Anticipation that, to honor Dorothy Cotton’s legacy, the assembled would move forward. Forward together, not one step back.
All photos courtesy of Cornell University Photography.
Follow us on Medium to read more from Rev. Barber & the Moral Movement
READ OUR BLOG
JOIN THE POOR PEOPLE'S CAMPAIGN: A NATIONAL CALL FOR MORAL REVIVAL
We're uniting tens of thousands of people across the country to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality.
SIGN THE PLEDGE
Trainings & Events
States Across The Country Hold "Speak Outs" Events
FIND LOCAL EVENT
Rise Columbus For Climate, Jobs, And Justice
JOIN US
Southeast Wisconsin People's Climate March
JOIN US
Check out more events, tune in to our livestream and find movement resources
EXPLORE
Support Our Work
Repairers of the Breach is a nonpartisan not-for-profit organization that works with diverse religious leaders from every U.S. State and the District of Columbia to develop a prophetic social justice vision rooted in moral analysis, moral articulation, and moral action. Help us continue this work by making a one-time donation or becoming a monthly sustainer.
DONATE
(919)432-4103
Repairers of the Breach
***
No comments:
Post a Comment