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As the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a ban on affirmative action in Michigan and the country marks 60 years since the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education, we look at how segregation is still pervasive in U.S. public schools. An explosive new report in ProPublica finds school integration never fully occurred, and in recent decades may have even been reversed. Focusing on three generations of the same family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the story concludes: "While segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened." We are joined by Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose article, "The Resegregation of America’s Schools," is the latest in the ProPublica series "Segregation Now: Investigating America’s Racial Divide."
Environmental reporter Dan Fagin joins us to discuss his book, "Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation," which has just won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Fagin tells the story of how a small New Jersey town fought back against industrial pollution and astronomical rates of childhood cancer, and ultimately won one of the largest legal settlements in U.S. history. "We don’t look for patterns, we don’t analyze those patterns. That is a terrible tragedy," Fagin says of the failure to examine environmental and industrial data gathered by local, state and federal agencies. "People are dying because we do not do effective public health surveillance in this country."
Stories:
Jim Crow in the Classroom: New Report Finds Segregation Lives on in U.S. Schools
As the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a ban on affirmative action in Michigan and the country marks 60 years since the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education, we look at how segregation is still pervasive in U.S. public schools. An explosive new report in ProPublica finds school integration never fully occurred, and in recent decades may have even been reversed. Focusing on three generations of the same family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the story concludes: "While segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened." We are joined by Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose article, "The Resegregation of America’s Schools," is the latest in the ProPublica series "Segregation Now: Investigating America’s Racial Divide."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The Supreme Court has upheld Michigan’s ban on affirmative action at state colleges and universities. The case centers on a 2006 voter referendum in Michigan that barred race- and sex-based preferences in admissions. An appeals court previously ruled the ban violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. But in a six-to-two decision, the Supreme Court overruled the lower court. The justices in the majority argued policies affecting minorities that do not involve intentional discrimination should be decided at the ballot box rather than in the courtroom. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued, quote, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race ... is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination."
Tuesday’s ruling will likely bolster similar anti-affirmative action measures in several other states, and it comes as this spring marks 60 years since the landmark Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, which was intended to end segregation in America’s public schools. But an explosive new report finds school integration never fully occurred and, in recent decades, may have even been reversed. "The Resegregation of America’s Schools" is the latest in an ongoing series by ProPublica called "Segregation Now: Investigating America’s Racial Divide," and it focuses on three generations in the same family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
AMY GOODMAN: The report concludes that, quote, "while segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened."
Well, for more, we’re joined by the author of "Segregation Now," the whole series, Nikole Hannah-Jones. She covers civil rights for ProPublica, with a focus on segregation and discrimination in housing and schools.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! Congratulations on this remarkable series, and coming out now at the same time that the Supreme Court has backed a ban on race as a factor in college admissions. Before we talk about Tuscaloosa, if you could briefly comment on this idea that race shouldn’t matter when you look at the schools of America.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Well, I think it’s very obvious, if you just look strictly at the facts, that we still have a racialized K-12 system and that black and brown students tend to be in schools where they’re receiving an inferior education. They have a less rigorous curriculum. They’re less likely to get access to classes that will help them in college, such as advanced placement physics, higher-level math. And they are most likely to be taught by inexperienced teachers. So, when you have this system where black and brown students are receiving a very different education than white students, and then once you get to the college level you say race no longer matters, and despite your disadvantage in a public educational system, that now we are all—everyone should compete at the same level, I think, in some sense, it’s just—there’s just a big disconnect between what’s happening on these two levels of education.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting, Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, very eloquent dissent, against Chief Roberts.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Yeah, so, in 2007, Chief Justice Roberts wrote in a decision striking down voluntary desegregation orders in Seattle and in Louisville, Kentucky, and these were two districts that wanted to maintain integration in the schools because they understand the value of that for students as—I guess, really in terms of education. And what Chief Justice Roberts said, a very pithy response, the way to stop discriminating on race is to stop discriminating on race. And Justice Sotomayor definitely addressed that and said, "You can’t ignore the existence of race, and the way that you eliminate racial inequality is not to pretend that it doesn’t exist." So, she was directly kind of addressing that response.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you explain, Nikole—you said that minorities, black and brown students, receive an inferior education. Could you give a kind of overview of why that’s the case? Is it because of districting, where schools—what schools get what kinds of resources, etc.? Why is that the case?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: What’s often forgotten about Brown was Brown was really addressing the system of racial caste that we had then and that resources will really—
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean by Brown, Brown v. Board of Education.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Oh, I’m sorry. Right, Brown v. Board of Education, which was the 1954 ruling, the landmark ruling that struck down the concept of separate but equal in schools. And what it understood was that resources follow white students in this country, that schools that have a significant percentage of white students get better teachers. They get better textbooks. They get better, really, curriculum. And so, today, that’s still the case. We have not eliminated that kind of connection between resources and race.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So could you talk about what it is that prompted this study? This was a year-long investigation that you conducted. How did you come upon the topic and decide to research it in this way and focus on Tuscaloosa?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Well, I had—prior to working on school segregation, I had spent nearly two years working on housing segregation and really looking at the federal failure—the 45-year federal failure to enforce the Fair Housing Act, and asking why, when we have a fair housing law, we still have so much racial segregation. And so, during the course of that, I became very interested in the connection between segregated housing and segregated schools, and I knew I wanted to do some reporting on school segregation, in particular.
And I focused on the South because, despite what a lot of people think, the South actually did desegregate. And it went from being completely segregated to, within a span of 40 years, even now, to becoming the most integrated region of the country. The South also educates the most black students. So you have the one region of the country that actually did desegregate, and they’re educating the most black students, and they are starting to now slide back on that. And so, to me, it was critical to write about the South first because that’s where we have the most to lose.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to 2007. The Tuscaloosa School Board approves a redistricting plan then that further segregated black students. This is school board member Ernestine Tucker speaking in a video that accompanied the ProPublica investigation.
ERNESTINE TUCKER: My position was: We’ve rushed into this. We need more time. We need more research. But for the majority of the people on the school board, who represented the majority of the voters, it was OK. And I said to them, "We will experience the damage of this decision for the next 50 years." I said, "It’s criminal, what we’ve done tonight."
AMY GOODMAN: That was Tuscaloosa School Board member Ernestine Tucker. This is Shelley Jones, former chair of the Tuscaloosa School Board.
SHELLEY JONES: We have maintained a desegregated school system. There are all kinds of evidence that—that every day, I think, the board endeavors, yet today, to maintain that and to ensure that. Those who had doubts that this would—that desegregation and the Green factors would be maintained of desegregation, I think now they realize, in fact, yes, we do—we see it in action. It is taking place.
AMY GOODMAN: Former Tuscaloosa School Board Chair Shelley Jones from a video by Maisie Crow called Saving Central. Can you talk about the role of the school board in Central High? You know, it’s interesting, Central, because Central was also Little Rock, Arkansas.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: But you looked at Tuscaloosa.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Right. So what brought me to Tuscaloosa, what I was interested in was the South had been reshaped largely because of federal court orders. So the courts had forced integration on the South, and it had been successful. And over the last 20 years, we’ve seen a lot of those segregation orders lifted by the courts, and what we found was that as districts lose their federal oversight, they do begin to resegregate. And Tuscaloosa has become one of the most rapidly resegregating school districts in the country. And that’s largely because of what the school board did with Central.
So, in 2000, when a federal judge released Tuscaloosa from its court order, the school board immediately voted to split up Central. And Central had been created by the court order. In 1975—or, excuse me, ’79, 25 years after Brown, Tuscaloosa still operated a virtually black high school and a white high school. And so, a court forced the merger of those two schools, and it created Central. And it was actually an integration success story. But because of fears of white flight, the board voted in 2000 to split apart that school, and they created three high schools—two integrated and one that was entirely black.
And so, what I really wanted to show with this report is that segregation is not an accident. And I think a lot of times we focus on, well, it’s just—you know, it’s natural, or it’s based on where people live. But the irony of Central High School is Central High School is actually located in an integrated neighborhood, but the white students right across the street from the school are gerrymandered into a district to go to an integrated school, and that Central was created as a black school by the intentional drawing of district lines.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you explain, Nikole, why is it that federal judges have been lifting court-ordered segregation mandates? Because that’s obviously had an enormous effect on this resegregation.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Right. I think part of it is—I mean, in the '90s, the Supreme Court began to really roll back desegregation. And so, it made it much easier for school districts to get out from under desegregation orders. Prior to that, the Supreme Court had a very high standard, which was districts had to eliminate, root and branch, all vestiges of segregation. But by the ’90s, the court was saying that they only had to do it to the extent practicable. In other words, they didn't actually have to eliminate it, but if they showed that they tried in earnest, then a court could release them. So, that started to happen. And then, during the two Bush terms, Bush really had a policy of trying to get as many of these orders dismissed. There was integration fatigue. I think people felt like, after 40 or 50 years, that enough time had passed and that we had eliminated anything that could be related to the time before Brown, and any current discrepancies and any current disparities are related to kind of things like neighborhood and poverty and have nothing to do with race.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the principal of Central. Let’s go to Clarence Sutton Jr., speaking in the video Saving Central: One Principal’s Fight in a Resegregating South, which accompanied the ProPublica investigation.
CLARENCE SUTTON JR.: If we did school 8:00 to 3:00 like we always did it, we would still be in the same spot. You just can’t do school like everyone else does school. It takes me giving up my day, my evening. It takes my wife saying, "Do what you have to do," and be understanding. It takes a faculty to say, "We’ll come in our school free. Don’t worry about paying us. We’ll all donate two hours. We’ll come in on Saturday." It takes that kind of people. It’s a system that’s just getting in place, but I feel like we’re 10 years behind. So we’re working faster to play catch-up. When I went to Central High School, I felt special. The whole state thought we were special. You had National Merit scholars. You had four or five foreign languages being taught. You had the best teams. You had a math national championship. But to break that up, that’s something I think I will never really understand.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Clarence Sutton Jr., principal of Central High School in Tuscaloosa in that video by Maisie Crow. Explain who Mr. Sutton is and his role at Central.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: So, Dr. Sutton is the principal of Central, and he actually attended the integrated Central and then was a product of that integration and now is teaching at a school that is 99 percent black and more than 84 percent poor. And so, he really talks about the educational struggles, because it’s not just the racial segregation, but it’s also the segregation of these students by income, that you take the most disadvantaged students and concentrate them in one school, but also don’t give that school the resources. I mean, for 10 years, Central didn’t even offer a physics class. There were years where it didn’t offer advanced placement classes, while the most integrated high school had 12 advanced placement classes. Teachers who were let go of other schools could be rehired at Central. So, what people feared would happen when Central was broken apart, which was that these poor black students would be separated and written off, is largely what people say happened at Central.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: You also suggest, Nikole, that Alabama state officials actively encouraged white parents to remove their children from public schools. Why did they do that? And what was the impact of that ultimately?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: I think today we tend to forget that there was a reason the Supreme Court had to rule on the issue of school segregation. In the South, it was written into the law. White supremacy was written into the law. And there was a belief that black students should not attend schools with white children. And elected officials fought very virulently against desegregation. And when it became clear that the courts were going to force desegregation, white officials in Alabama and other parts of the South shut down schools. They shut down sometimes entire districts. And they also encouraged what were called segregation academies, which were white flight academies, private academies that were set up to educate white students who were for fleeing the public schools. So, a lot of times we attribute white flight to busing or to desegregation, but it really was begun and led by public officials.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Another striking fact that you bring up in your piece is, while there was this racial segregation, there was an enormous amount of economic diversity. One of the people you profiled, James Dent, one of his classmates at Druid High School was Condoleezza Rice. So how is it that that economic diversity works together with this racial uniformity?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Right. So, at the time, in Tuscaloosa and other places, every black person in the community went to the same high schools, because the schools were segregated. So, no matter how wealthy you were or how poor you were, you went to the same high school. And that economic diversity has always been very important. But now, what happens is that in—the integrated high schools are largely being integrated with more middle-class black students, and what’s left behind in these segregated schools are the poorest black students in the community. And so, not only are they experiencing no racial diversity, but they’re also experiencing no economic diversity.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, I wanted to go to the title of your investigation, "Segregation Now." Let’s go to that famous inauguration speech by Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who had been elected as a Democrat on November 14, 1963.
GOV. GEORGE WALLACE: Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this Earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Democratic Governor George Wallace in his inauguration address after winning the race for governor. That was back in 1963, Nikole. That was more than a half a century ago. And that is the title of your series that you’ve spent a year investigating and writing.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: We chose "Segregation Now" not to necessarily say that what George Wallace predicted would be true, because it’s not. What George Wallace and others like him wanted was all-white schools. All-white schools don’t really exist anymore. But all-black schools do. And that’s the segregation today, is that 60 years after Brown, and really, I show through a single generation of one family, integration is gone for many students.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, in New York, a study has just shown New York has the most segregated schools in the country.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Absolutely. And this is one of the things where I hoped the story—excuse me—would do some myth busting, because we all up here have this perception of the South. The South did integrate. We have never seen true desegregation in the Northeast or the Midwest. And if you look at in terms of neighborhoods and schools, the most segregated parts of the country have—for black people, have consistently been in the Midwest and in the Northeast.
AMY GOODMAN: Seventy-three percent of charter schools in New York City were deemed so-called apartheid schools, where white enrollment was below 1 percent?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Yes. And over all of the New York public schools, it’s about a quarter of black students. And in Chicago, it’s a third of black students are in these so-called apartheid schools. So I think there’s a lot of reckoning to be done.
AMY GOODMAN: Why apartheid schools?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: They call them apartheid schools because they’re 99 percent black or brown. And that’s not my terminology, but when you talk to the researchers who use this term, is they want to shock Americans with that term. They want to say—because we have kind of come to accept once again separate but equal. When you look at Race to the Top, when you look at No Child Left Behind, we’re still trying to make these separate schools equal. And never in the history of our country have we managed to do that. So I think what they’re really trying to do is say these schools are unjust, and they want to shock people with that terminology.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Nikole, you’ve done a remarkable job. We’re going to link to your series. Nikole Hannah-Jones joined ProPublica in late 2011, covers civil rights with a focus on segregation and discrimination in housing and schools. Her major ongoing investigation is "Segregation Now: Investigating America’s Racial Divide." And we will—her latest piece, "The Resegregation of America’s Schools." We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.
When we come back, the new Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction writer Dan Fagin will join us. His book is called Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. Stay with us.
Toms River: How a Small Town Fought Back Against Corporate Giants for Toxic Dumping Linked to Cancer
Environmental reporter Dan Fagin joins us to discuss his book, "Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation," which has just won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Fagin tells the story of how a small New Jersey town fought back against industrial pollution and astronomical rates of childhood cancer, and ultimately won one of the largest legal settlements in U.S. history. "We don’t look for patterns, we don’t analyze those patterns. That is a terrible tragedy," Fagin says of the failure to examine environmental and industrial data gathered by local, state and federal agencies. "People are dying because we do not do effective public health surveillance in this country."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We spend the rest of the hour looking at a fascinating story of a small town ravaged by industrial pollution, a town suffering from astronomical rates of childhood cancers scientifically linked to local air and water pollution, a town that ultimately came together, fought back and won one of the largest legal settlements in the annals of toxic dumping. That town is Toms River in New Jersey, and it’s the focus of a new book that has just won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. In Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, environmental reporter Dan Fagin recounts the 60-year saga of rampant pollution and inadequate oversight that makes Toms River a cautionary example for industrial towns, not just in the United States, but also in other countries like China.
Two of the Toms River residents who share their ordeal in the book are Linda Gillick and her son Michael, whose fast-growing tumors decimated his body. This is Linda, followed by Michael, speaking to the show Earth Focus.
LINDA GILLICK: I was 30 when I had Michael. You know, the first 30 years of our lives were carefree, like any young couple, you know, trying to pay your bills, enjoy life and doing things. And then you get a child that has cancer, and your whole life changes completely. It now is surrounded and revolves around your child that is sick.
MICHAEL GILLICK: I was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, which is a cancer of the sympathetic nervous system, and still have effects of it today.
LINDA GILLICK: Michael is alive. He’s a miracle. He’s received the last rites many times. He is 34 years old, has very limited normalcy to his life.
MICHAEL GILLICK: The tumor is pushing my spine pretty much out of my body, like it’s wearing away the skin. It’s also encompassed—like it wraps around, like, all my organs—my heart, lungs, kidneys, all that. And there’s no surgical way to remove it without me either bleeding out on the table or becoming a vegetable, I was told.
LINDA GILLICK: I would buy the powdered Enfamil or Similac, and I would mix it with the tap water. And so, everything that my son got was mixed from the Toms River tap water. I really believe that that’s where his cancer came from.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Linda and Michael Gillick, two residents of Toms River, New Jersey. Their story is told by our guest, Dan Fagin, in his now Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. You can read an excerpt on our website. Dan Fagin is associate professor of journalism and the director of Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. For 15 years, he was an environmental writer at Newsday.
Dan Fagin, welcome to Democracy Now! Where were you when he heard you won the Pulitzer Prize?
DAN FAGIN: Well, I was at home, actually. I work at home some days. And I was in one room, and my wife, who’s also a journalist, was working in another room. And I had—this is how much of a surprise it was to me: I had even forgotten that it was Pulitzer day, which for a journalist is a big thing to forget. But my wife remembered. She writes for Reuters, and Reuters was up for a prize, that she knew of, so she was checking. And it came over, and she just started shouting, "Dan! Dan! You won! You won!" So it was a—it was a wonderful moment.
AMY GOODMAN: So, your book is Toms River. Talk about why you chose this New Jersey town that most people outside New Jersey probably don’t know about.
DAN FAGIN: Well, for many years, I was the environmental reporter for Newsday, which is a large newspaper, circulates on Long Island and in New York City. And on Long Island, in particular, cancer patterns were a huge issue for our readers, and I was very interested in—what they’re interested in is what I’m interested in. And I thought it was quite fascinating to understand epidemiology, which is a complicated word for a very simple concept, which is patterns of cancer, patterns of disease, and trying to interpret those patterns. It’s like a mystery story. So I wrote a lot about that on Long Island, especially about breast cancer, because that was such a huge issue. But I never really felt like I was getting to the bottom of it, that I was giving readers the kind of core understanding that they needed, also because I felt like the really good science wasn’t being done on Long Island.
But it was being done in this town in New Jersey that I had heard about, Toms River. And I went down there and wrote a story, and I thought it was quite fascinating. I thought the people involved were amazing, including but not limited to the Gillicks, who you just—who your viewers just met, and listeners. And I thought, well, if I ever get a chance to really write—get the time to write a deep book about this fascinating subject of cancer epidemiology, I would look for a great narrative, and a great narrative where also great science was being done. And, well, that was Toms River. So when I went to New York, I finally had that choice—I went to NYU, I finally had that chance.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you talked about, in the book, a chemical plant opening in Toms River in 1953. Could you tell us about what that plant was, how it was initially received in Toms River, and how the story unfolded from then?
DAN FAGIN: Sure, sure. So, Toms River was really a town like any other town. It was a sleepy town down on the Jersey Shore. The economy was somewhat moribund. So, when one of the big Swiss chemical companies, Ciba, started looking for a place to relocate their operations—they had gotten into some trouble, environmental trouble, pollution and also—
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Where?
DAN FAGIN: In Cincinnati, Ohio, and previously in Basel, their original hometown. I sort of trace that historical—
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In Switzerland.
DAN FAGIN: In Switzerland, yeah. I trace that evolution over time. Basically everywhere they went, they eventually became a most unwelcome neighbor. But when they came to Toms River, initially everyone was thrilled, because this was going to be, or it was, ultimately, one of the largest dye manufacturing plants in the country, one of the larger ones in the world. And then it eventually expanded from dyes into plastics and other chemical products. And for many years, it was the most important employer in Ocean County. And they weren’t—wasn’t just that there were a lot of jobs; they were well-paying jobs, good blue-collar jobs. So, in some ways, it was a real agent for social mobility—as long as people didn’t think too hard about the long-term consequences. There was a lot of short-term thinking versus coming to grips with the long term.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Ciba manufactured dye. Could you talk about—which you do in the book—what are some of the dangers associated with dye manufacturing which leads to these to chemical pollutants, etc.?
DAN FAGIN: Right. Well, it turns out that dyes are fascinating to look at for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that all of the big chemical companies that we know and love—starting with BASF, the largest chemical company in the world, still around; Ciba; Sandoz; so many—GAF—so many of the big chemical companies started out by manufacturing dyes, which was really the first great product of the chemical age, starting in the 1850s. On the other hand, the thing about making dyes is that it generates a tremendous amount of hazardous waste. I mean, a lot. In Toms River, I was able to show that it actually generated much more waste than usable product. And all that product had to go somewhere. And traditionally, where they put it was either in the ground or into the water. And that’s exactly what they did in Toms River, too.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is truly an astounding story, and it’s the residents that played a key role in uncovering what was going on. I wanted to turn back to Link TV’s Earth Focus, that did this story, to Toms River resident Linda Gillick describing the effort she made to uncover the reason why her son Michael and so many other children in the area were getting cancer.
LINDA GILLICK: I put up a map of the whole county so that we could see where our children were located for our caseworkers. And as the years went on, we noticed that Toms River had become one big dark area full of pins. It was a big concern. And I did reach out to the state health department numerous times and told them of my concerns, and was told over and over again that there was not a problem.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Linda Gillick describing this effort she made to find out what was going on. Tell us about Linda and her son Michael.
DAN FAGIN: Linda’s a fascinating person and a very brave one and, most of all, an extremely determined person. And she was always a very sort of community-minded person. She was involved. She was a schoolteacher and was, you know, the kind of person who had a network of friends and always wanted to know what was going on. And her life changed in a horrible way when Michael was diagnosed with neuroblastoma at three months. And at that time, neuroblastoma was just a terrible diagnosis. And they told Linda that it was less than 50-50 that Michael would reach his first birthday. And, I mean, the Gillicks were so traumatized that they did things like celebrate his first birthday at six months, because they were afraid he wouldn’t actually reach his first birthday. And they actually purchased a coffin for Michael, because if the time came, they didn’t want to have to make that horrible—you know, go through that horrible process. So, it was just the most horrible situation that you could possibly imagine.
And many people, quite understandably, would have turned inward with their grief. But that is not Linda’s way. And what happened was, she would go with Michael to Sloan Kettering or New York Hospital up in New York or to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Philadelphia and get treatment, because Toms River was not yet large enough to have advanced cancer treatment, although there is now. And wherever she would go, she would bump in—it felt like to her that she would bump into other parents and kids from Toms River. And she was the kind of person that started keeping track. And it eventually got to the point where, as your viewers and listeners just saw and heard, she made a map. And this is the kind of thing that happens sometimes, not just in Toms River, but in Woburn, Massachusetts, which people may be familiar with, you know, from the movie and book Civil Action that John Travolta was in. But it’s not just there. Many places, citizen activists start keeping track of cases. In Linda’s case, she was not able to get the attention of the authorities. They told her, "Sorry, we don’t think there’s anything there." Things changed only later, thanks to a whole sort of strange series of events, centering on a nurse at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
AMY GOODMAN: Who?
DAN FAGIN: What she did—her name is Lisa Boornazian. And she was a—at the time, was a young nurse in the pediatric oncology ward. And she, too, as with Linda Gillick, had noticed that there were a lot of people coming to CHOP, as that hospital is called, from Toms River. And that was really strange, because the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is a very famous institution, it attracts children from all over the world, and certainly from all over the region, the Mid-Atlantic region, so why should there be so many kids from Toms River? And that really bothered her. That bothered Lisa. She said something to the doctors. The doctors said, "You know, just—you’re a nurse. Go back to being a nurse. You really—you really don’t know what you’re talking about here. It’s probably just a coincidence." But it really bothered Lisa.
You know, the thing is that when you’re a nurse, a dedicated nurse like Lisa, you really get to know the families and their parents. You spend those long shifts overnight. And when a child dies, you go to the funeral. And she went to a number of funerals in Toms River. And every time she went, she would drive past the chemical plant and say, "Oh, that’s that place that the families were telling me about." So what happened was that it turned out that Lisa’s sister-in-law worked at the EPA. And she was talking to her sister-in-law about this, and her sister-in-law happened to know who to contact within the federal government to try to get something going. And then that person, in turn, contacted the state health department, which said, "OK, we’re actually going to take a look at this." Even that was not the end, because the state health department tried to keep that initial assessment secret.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the New Jersey State Department of Health.
DAN FAGIN: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue with this story after break. Dan Fagin is the newly—new winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. We’re talking about the Ciba-Geigy dye plant outside Toms River. We’ll also learn about what Union Carbide had to do with this. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest is Dan Fagin. He is author of Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. He has just won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. So you told us about the Ciba-Geigy plant. You told us about all the children who were sick in Toms River, getting cancer. What about Union Carbide?
DAN FAGIN: Right. Well, I want to make sure everybody knows that this story is about a lot more than just the chemical plant. And that is, another phenomenon that was happening in New Jersey and other places around the country at that time, in the '60s and ’70s, was illegal dumping, that chemical companies were looking for cheap ways to get rid of their waste, and they often used intermediaries to get rid of their waste, so they wouldn't—so their hands wouldn’t be on it. And that’s what happened in this case. Union Carbide had thousands of barrels from its plant in Bound Brook, New Jersey, that it wanted to get rid of. It didn’t want to spend the money to dispose of the waste properly, so it engaged with a contractor, a very disreputable guy, who ultimately took those barrels and dumped them in the back of a chicken farm.
AMY GOODMAN: Thousands of barrels.
DAN FAGIN: Thousands of barrels. And he—he was so overwhelmed by the work that he would just throw them off the side of his truck, and they would burst on the sandy soil.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And when was this, Dan, and over how long a period?
DAN FAGIN: It was actually over a period of just a few months, but the damage was done. It was in the early '70s. But the damage was done. And a whole ’nother area of groundwater contamination—there was the—there was the groundwater contamination from the chemical plant, which contaminated one set of wells in the ’60s. There was a whole ’nother area of groundwater contamination caused by this illegal dumping. And I should say, too, that the town's thirst for growth played into this, because they kept drilling wells frantically and pumping those wells beyond their capacity. And what they essentially did was slurped up that contamination and distributed it throughout the town, because they were pumping those wells so hard. So that’s what happened.
And ultimately, you know, to sort of tie it back to what was happening with Linda Gillick and other folks in town who thought that there were many kids who were getting cancer, Linda made her map, and she thought that it was something in the water. And she got the state to finally—Lisa Boornazian, the nurse at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, got the state to look into this. But the state did a very sort of primitive calculation that said, "OK, is there more childhood cancer there than we would expect?" And it turns out, yeah, there was a lot more childhood cancer than would be expected based on the demographics of New Jersey. But the state health department didn’t know what to do with that information. They didn’t want to do a full-blown investigation. They thought that would scare people. It would be expensive. So they didn’t. They kept it quiet. But Linda Gillick and other people found out. And there was a huge story in the Newark Star-Ledger in 1996, and then all hell broke loose. And eventually, a serious piece of environmental epidemiology, a case-control study, was done, and it concluded that there were indeed relationships between environmental exposures in town and unusually high rates of childhood cancer. And that’s a very unusual thing to be able to—to be able to make—draw that relationship.
AMY GOODMAN: So talk about how the families banded together and sued.
DAN FAGIN: They didn’t actually sue. It was quite fascinating. I mentioned A Civil Action earlier. So, if anybody’s read or watched A Civil Action, you know that the star of that is a guy named Jan Schlichtmann, an attorney, is quite a character. And he basically lost his shirt, his suit, all of his money, everything he had, pursuing that case in Woburn, Massachusetts. He didn’t want to make that mistake again. He didn’t want to have total warfare. He wanted to initiate a kind of a negotiation, out-of-court negotiation. And he was joined in that by some very able attorneys in Philadelphia: Mark Cuker, Esther Berezofsky and others. And they initiated a very unusual out-of-court process that ended with a settlement, a value—we don’t know the exact amount, but it was certainly over $30 million, well over $30 million, that was divided among 69 families. But the companies, of course, did not admit any kind of liability, because they don’t do that.
AMY GOODMAN: But you’re saying around $30 million, divided by around 70 families. You’re talking about maybe half-a-million dollars for families, some of that much less—of course lawyers get money.
DAN FAGIN: Correct. That’s exactly right. It would be hard to say that those families got what was appropriate, considering what they had gone through.
AMY GOODMAN: How many children died?
DAN FAGIN: You know, it really depends on how you define the cluster, over time and space. But, you know, you could say as many as 40 or 50 died. Out of the 69, a smaller number, but if you define the—
AMY GOODMAN: And adults?
DAN FAGIN: One of the amazing things and sad things about Toms River is that nobody ever really took a comprehensive look at adult cancer. I mean, that’s the big picture here that, you know, maybe we could talk about for a few minutes. And that is, it’s just as matter of luck that we know what happened in Toms River. It was a very flukey series of decisions and individual acts of bravery that got us to the point where we were able to get a decent epidemiological study done. Most of the time, we have no idea.
And that’s the bigger point that I wanted to try to make, and that is that we don’t really do public health surveillance effectively in this country. You know, we spend $80 billion-plus, the intelligence agencies—that’s just the disclosed budget; it doesn’t count the undisclosed budget—and they’re doing data analysis all the time, allegedly to protect us, you know, from bad guys. We don’t—we collect a tremendous amount of environmental and public health data, and we do nothing with it—almost nothing with it. We don’t look for patterns. We don’t analyze those patterns. And that is a terrible tragedy, where people are dying because we do not do effective public health surveillance in this country. And we’re operating on laws that are 50 years old. We’re using science that is almost always conducted by people with the greatest ax to grind—regulatory science, which is conducted either by the chemical companies themselves or the contractors they hire. We’ve got some real systemic problems here, and that was a big reason why I wrote this book.
AMY GOODMAN: We wanted to go back to Michael. He’s in his thirties now.
DAN FAGIN: Yes. He beat the odds.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s astounding, since he had cancer since three months. The tumors in his body are pushing his spine through his skin. They are wrapped around all of his organs, as he describes it. This is Michael Gillick, again, born in 1979 with neuroblastoma, but talking about not so much himself, but what it means when people come together.
MICHAEL GILLICK: No corporation, no politician is bigger than a combined voice of people. When people join together and form their voices into one loud "We’re not going to stand for this," there’s no standing up against that.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Michael Gillick, with hope here. Dan Fagin, what most surprised you in writing this book, Toms River?
DAN FAGIN: I think two things surprised me. Number one, even though I’ve been an environmental reporter for, you know, 25-plus years, I was surprised at the brazenness of the behavior of the companies involved, you know, as late as the '90s, knowing about exposures and responding very inadequately to those. And the second thing is really what Michael was talking about, and that is that I—it's wonderful, and somewhat surprising, although we shouldn’t be surprised, to see a community of people sort of rise to the occasion. And it took a while for that to happen in Toms River, but it did happen. It did happen. And it’s quite inspiring the way that that story unfolded.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you for being with us, Dan Fagin, author of Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. And again, congratulations for winning the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. You can read an excerpt from his book on our website at democracynow.org. He now teaches at New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
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