Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices From the Grassroots
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The connection between racism and environmental quality...)
The connection between racism and environmental quality is increasingly visible. People of color in urban and rural areas are the most likely victims of industrial dumping, toxic landfills, uranium mining, and dangerous waste incinerators. This groundbreaking anthology grows out of the National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit and brings together leading scholars, environmental leaders, and social justice activists of the emerging environmental justice movement.
Benjamin Chavis is a lifelong political activist, civil rights leader.
Background
Benjamin Franklin Chavis, Jr. , was born in 1948 in Oxford, North Carolina, into a long and distinguished line of preachers. His great-great-grandfather, John Chavis, is considered to be the first black graduate of Princeton University because he graduated from a New Jersey seminary that later became the university. John Chavis, according to Benjamin, was killed in 1938 for teaching black children to read and write.
The first political act of Benjamin Chavis came when he was a wide-eyed 13 year old. On his way home from school each day, Chavis would pass a whites-only library in Oxford, North Carolina. One day, tired of tattered hand-me-downs and desirous of a book with two intact covers on it, he boldly walked into the library. The librarians told him to leave, but he questioned that demand, He asked why. The librarians called his parents, but the incident, like the spunkiness of the boy at its center, could not be calmed, and tempers flared. In a short time, the library was opened to all races. A child's simple act of disobedience and intellectual curiosity had shattered the overt racism of an institution whose sole mission, young Chavis knew, should have been the enrichment of minds-those of blacks and whites.
Education
While in prison, Chavis was frequently escorted in leg irons and handcuffs to Duke University, where he earned a master's degree from the divinity school under a study-release program. A disciplined student-he had taken his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1969 - Chavis dodged the prison's strict, 10 P. M. , lights-out rule by reading his school books in the bathroom, which was lighted all night. Later he received his doctorate in divinity from Howard University.
Career
In 1968-the year of Martin Luther King's assassination, which some observers feel brought an end to the modern civil rights era-Chavis became a field officer for the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. The Commission, organized in 1963 in response to the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the infamous Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing, coordinated racial justice strategies for national and regional organizations and spearheaded community organization and criminal justice campaigns. In February of 1971, Chavis was in Wilmington, North Carolina, to drum up support for a school desegregation lawsuit that had been brought by the NAACP. On a night of racial violence, one of many in a season of escalating tension, Mike's Grocery, a white-owned store in a black part of town, was firebombed. A year later, the Wilmington 10 (as the nine black men, including Chavis, and one white woman came to be known) were convicted of arson and conspiracy and sentenced to a combined total of 282 years in prison, with the lengthiest term, 34 years, slapped on Chavis.
The case immediately garnered worldwide attention and became a celebrated focus of the civil rights movement in the United States. Defense attorneys cited 2, 685 errors in the trial, but appeals were denied, and the convicted agitators went to prison in 1976. A year later, Amnesty International, the human rights watchdog agency, listed the ten as political prisoners. Ironically, the NAACP-the organization that Chavis had joined when he was only 12 years old and would one day head - was seen by some as offering one of the weakest responses to the obviously wrongful convictions.
The Wilmington 10 case took a dramatic turn when three principal prosecution witnesses from the trial admitted they had made up their stories after being pressured by local law enforcement authorities. North Carolina governor James Hunt reduced the sentences but left the convictions intact. Finally in 1980, after Chavis and the other activists had been paroled, a Justice Department investigation led to a federal appellate court's reversal of the convictions. "Our case was a victory for the whole movement, " Chavis noted in Newsweek. "It showed people what is possible. "
In 1983, Chavis returned to the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice as deputy director. (The commission was one of several groups that had championed the release of the Wilmington 10. ) By 1985, Chavis had been elected executive director of the commission and soon emerged as a national figure willing to exercise his preacher's oratory on a wide variety of racial and social justice issues in the United States. He organized gang summits to denounce the skyrocketing violence, high drop-out rate, and rampant drug involvement plaguing America's young people.
During his tenure at the Commission for Racial Justice, Chavis became most associated with the burgeoning environmental movement.
In 1983 Chavis had joined in a protest against the depositing of tons of contaminated soil in rural Warren County, North Carolina, where the population was 75 percent black-the highest concentration of black citizens in the state-and mostly poor. Although the Warren County battle was lost, the protesters succeeded in shelving the state's plans to put another landfill and an incinerator in the area. Coining the term "environmental racism, " Chavis ordered a study that documented the extent of the crisis: three of the five largest toxic waste landfills in the country were in minority neighborhoods. Chavis spared few in his condemnation of this previously overlooked embodiment of racism.
Speaking at the 1987 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, which was attended by activists, professionals, and politicians, Chavis impressed upon conference participants the need to "rescue the environment from the clutches of persons and institutions gone mad with racism and greed, " according to an account in Audubon. The summit cast much needed light on the environmental devastation plaguing minority communities-not only those of African Americans, but of Mexican American farmers, Native Americans, and the indigenous peoples of Alaska.
After the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992, Chavis served as a senior advisor to the transition team studying the departments of Energy, the Interior, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency. Some observers noted that when Bill Clinton named of dozens of African Americans to top administration positions, he depleted the ranks of candidates qualified to fill the position of NAACP executive director, a post that Benjamin Hooks was vacating after 16 years in office. Still, the names under consideration were hardly minor league: Chavis; minister-activist Jesse Jackson; Jewell Jackson McCabe, founder and president of the Coalition of 100 Black Women; and Earl F. Shinhoster, a regional NAACP official. The appointment process began to look like a high-pressure political campaign. In a bizarre twist of events, Chavis was fired by the NAACP's board of directors in 1994.
Achievements
Chavis rose to international prominence as the leader of the Wilmington Ten, civil rights activists who were charged with committing arson. Upon his release from prison, Dr. Chavis returned to the field of civil rights, and he became a Vice President of the National Council of Churches. Chavis became one of the most prominent spokespersons on environmental policy. He overcamed racial injustice and wrongful imprisonment to become a vocal leader in the civil rights movement.
He participated in mainstream national politics, lobbying with other black leaders against U. S. aid to Angolan rebels fighting the Marxist regime of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and serving as the clergy coordinator for the Reverend Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign.
Views
He chastised federal, state, and local governments; the mainstream environmental organizations, which were headed by whites and, in his view, cared more about the integrity of a wetland than the health of a black person; and big businesses that cavalierly promised jobs in impoverished communities in exchange for support of environmentally ruinous industries.
Quotations:
"One of the responsibilities of the civil rights movement is to define the postmodern manifestations of racism".
"We must not only point to overt forms of racism, but also to institutionalized racism. "
Connections
Dr. Chavis was married to the late Martha Rivera Chavis and is the father of eight children.
