48 The New York Reviewof “slums”— that is, the homes of De-
troit’s poorest residents— in the name
of sanitation. Rumors that their “alley
is to be converted into a fashionable
boulevard” led the “colored women
and gentlemen” of one widely deni-
grated neighborhood to hold what the
Detroit Free Press called an “indigna-
tion meeting,” but they could not stop
the demolitions and were displaced.
Factories, especially car factories,
sprang up across Detroit and beyond its
boundaries. By 1929 the world’s largest
factory— Ford Motor Company’s River
Rouge complex, located just southwest
of the city limits— had nearly 100,000
laborers producing more than a million
cars a year. The introduction of moving
assembly lines and automatic equip-
ment increased respiratory hazards for
workers; one technological innovation,
the automatic paint spray gun, made
lead poisoning a common affliction.
Those most affected by air pollution
were Black and immigrant laborers, but
the loudest objections came from white
homeowners. Their demands had led to
the passage of a smoke ordinance back
in 1887, over the complaints of local
industrialists. Yet it soon proved to be
weak and poorly enforced; the city had
no smoke inspectors, and factory own-
ers refused to respond to their workers’
complaints. A slightly stronger smoke
ordinance, passed in 1925, “modestly”
reduced smoke pollution, but Black tu-
berculosis deaths still spiked in the fol-
lowing years.
The disparate racial effects of in-
dustrialization, ghettoization, and low
wages were obvious. In 1927 a massive
fire broke out at an auto plant; seven-
teen of the twenty- one workers who lost
their lives were Black, as were twenty-
three of the twenty- eight who were
severely burned. By 1930 fewer than
8 percent of Detroit’s residents were
Black, but they accounted for nearly 40
percent of tuberculosis deaths. Some
white public health officials claimed
that Black people were “uniquely sus-
ceptible to tuberculosis,” while other
experts argued that “Negroes can stand
more heat and have better stamina on
arduous jobs.” Yet substandard hous-
ing and employment and medical dis-
crimination plainly led to higher rates
of disease and death. Black and immi-
grant workers continued to be shunted
into poorer neighborhoods, where the
water was fouler, and into jobs at which
they breathed dirtier air.
The Depression hit Detroit with sick-
ening force. Demand for automobiles
fell 75 percent between 1929 and 1932,
and almost half of Detroit’s autowork-
ers lost their jobs. The city’s welfare
rolls increased by 5,000 percent in just
four years; by 1931 Detroit had the
highest unemployment rate of the na-
tion’s largest cities. It laid off nine of its
ten smoke inspectors, so air pollution
worsened in spite of the downturn in
manufacturing.
It took federal intervention to halt
the decline. New Deal agencies funded
grand public works and rescued the city
from financial insolvency; they took
over the task of regulating banks and
mortgages, averting financial and fore-
closure crises; they also created tens
of thousands of jobs in Detroit, saving
many workers from destitution and
from having their water turned off. At
the same time, these agencies enforced
policies that entrenched segregation
and management control over workers.
Federal defense spending during WorldWar II further swelled the employment
rolls. Yet after the war ended, the fed-
eral government returned virtually all
oversight to the cities and states.As the nation— and Detroit in par-
ticular— entered a postwar boom, the
city still lacked virtually any enforce-
able environmental regulations. Its
business titans opposed even modest
steps to ameliorate the situation, using
the carrot of philanthropy and the stick
of capital flight to ensure that they
got their way. Suburbanization and
deindustrialization began regardless,
shrinking Detroit’s tax base even as en-
vironmental burdens worsened in the
increasingly Black and brown urban
core. Something had to give.
The most sustained opposition to en-
vironmental injustice in Detroit came
from the city’s labor unions. In the
1920s the Communist- led Auto Work-
ers Union decried “the present capital-
ist system” as responsible for polluted
air and deadly fires. In the 1930s the
less revolutionary United Auto Work-
ers (UAW) organized against lead poi-
soning. In the 1940s and 1950s the UAW
doggedly recruited Black autoworkers,
who in turn challenged their consign-
ment to dirtier, more dangerous jobs.
Yet as Rector points out, the UAW
initially shied away from bolder de-
mands that its leaders deemed counter-
productive. Its organizing efforts won
higher wages and better benefits, but
in exchange the union stopped seeking
access to factories’ medical files or tox-
icological research, dropped calls for
worker participation in factory man-
agement, and purged its most radical
members.
Only in the 1960s did more recog-
nizable environmental justice activism
emerge. After Chrysler opened the
Huber Foundry in 1966— the first large
factory to open in Detroit in a decade—
residents of the working- class commu-
nity where it was built started to speak
out about the dust, dirt, and smoke that
invaded their homes and lungs, and
the UAW pressured municipal officialsto require pollution controls. Workers
launched a similar campaign to “elim-
inate the smoke and poisonous gases”
emitted from Ford’s River Rouge com-
plex, and UAW leaders began hosting
conferences and giving speeches, im-
ploring thousands of members to “go
back to your respective communities as
missionaries in helping us generate and
mobilize and organize a great citizen’s
crusade for clean and pure water.”
The UAW pledged its support for the
federal Air Pollution Act of 1967, and
in the spring of that year it founded a
committee that exhorted community
members to report illegal pollution to
public officials. Two years later, the
UAW’s Conservation and Recreation
Department launched an audacious
organizing drive, working with local
unions to picket, protest, and pressure
officials to achieve “an immediate halt
to the excessive pollution being dumped
into the air and water of downriver
communities by Ford, Great Lakes
Steel, and others.” Days before the
first Earth Day in April 1970, a group
of women— labeled “irate housewives”
by the Detroit News— picketed Great
Lakes Steel’s blast furnaces, telling
the press they wanted to protect their
children from pollution and regulators
were doing nothing about it.Such protests were far from the most
explosive uprisings in American cities
during the 1960s. Civil rights activists
decried the unsanitary conditions of
the overcrowded apartment buildings
in which Black residents were forced
to live; with sit- ins, rent strikes, and di-
rect confrontation, they protested lead
paint, utility shut- offs, rats, bedbugs,
roaches, mold, and the destructive pol-
icy of “urban renewal” (the razing of
the homes of poor people and people
of color). Commissions hastily estab-
lished after major riots— including the
famous uprising in Detroit in 1967—
found that “the crowded and degraded
physical environment of the ghetto
itself,” as Rector puts it, was a major
source of outrage. “While environmen-tal concerns did not cause the rebel-
lions that shook Detroit neighborhoods
and factories between 1965 and 1973,”
Rector concludes, “they contributed to
widespread anger over living and work-
ing conditions and played a direct role
in radicalizing many activists.”
As the 1970s began, rank- and- file
workers became more militant. “Con-
ditions that in earlier years might have
provoked a grievance filing now often be-
came the basis for stopping production,”
Rector writes. And those workers—
radical Black workers, especially—
were borrowing “the language of the
environmental movement to critique
their working conditions, particularly
in foundries.” They decried the UAW’s
insufficient progress in improving safety
inside factories and the water and air
outside, leading the union to belatedly
embrace a push for “full employment”
legislation— a legal guarantee that work-
ers would not have to choose between
economic and environmental justice.
In the mid- 1970s, the UAW’s Conser-
vation and Recreation Department as-
sembled a coalition of hundreds of civil
rights, labor, and environmental orga-
nizations, culminating in the Working
for Environmental and Economic Jus-
tice and Jobs conference in Black Lake,
Michigan, in 1976. “A fundamental un-
derlying premise of the conference was
that racial, economic, and environmen-
tal inequalities were interrelated prob-
lems,” Rector writes. He argues that
the now largely forgotten conference—
which concluded with the singing of
“Solidarity Forever”— was a histori-
cal milestone and evidence that “the
concept of environmental justice was
already circulating in activist spaces”
years before the conventional account
suggests.
This window of radical potential
closed quickly. Between 1950 and 1980,
two thirds of manufacturing jobs disap-
peared in Detroit. In just three years,
between 1979 and 1982, the UAW lost
almost a third of its members, and the
Big Three automakers shuttered doz-
ens of plants. White residents largely
completed their suburban exodus, leav-
ing the city’s poorer majority to live
in dilapidated homes with dangerous
lead- lined pipes. Detroit elected its first
Black mayor, Coleman Young, in 1974,
but he inherited a fiscal crisis, with dem-
olition crews tearing down thousands of
abandoned urban homes even as con-
struction crews erected tens of thou-
sands of houses in the suburbs. Faced
with mounting economic devastation
and antiunion Reaganite conservatism,
the UAW broke with its environmen-
tal partners, abandoned its call for full
employment, and cut the Conservation
and Recreation Department’s staff. Its
coalition with civil rights groups did not
survive the 1980s.
By the time the First National People
of Color Environmental Leadership
Summit met in 1991, Detroit had be-
come the poorest large city in the coun-
try. And though some Detroit activists
attended the summit, Rector notes that
the “economic justice demands made
at Black Lake were strikingly absent,”
which he attributes to “the diminished
role of labor unions in the movement.”
The call for “environmental and eco-
nomic justice and jobs” was now simply
a call for “environmental justice.”Rector might have concluded there,
in the early 1990s, completing a neatWEEDS
The danger of memory is going
to it for respite. Respite risks
entrapment. Don’t debauch
yourself by living
in some former version of yourself
that was more or less naked. Maybe
it felt better then, but you were
not better. You were smaller, as the rain
gauge must fill to the brim
with its full portion of suffering.What can memory be in these terrible times?
Only instruction. Not a dwelling.Or if you must dwell:
The sweet smell of weeds then.
The sweet smell of weeds now.
An endurance. A standoff. A rest.—Diane SeussGordonStern 44 _ 49 .indd 48 5 / 25 / 22 5 : 39 PM