Celebrating Juneteenth: The Black History of the Environmental Justice Movement

By Erika Pietrzak, June 19 , 2025

Since its inception, Black Americans have been vital to the environmental justice movement in the U.S. This Juneteenth, let us highlight the people who began the movement and all of its achievements throughout the decades.

Source: NRDC

Juneteenth is a holiday to commemorate and celebrate the abolition of slavery in the United States a century and a half ago. Undoubtedly, Black Americans have helped build and greatly contributed to this nation, and that should be celebrated every day. Black Americans have always been, and still are, particularly vital to the environmental justice movement in the United States. This Juneteenth, let us highlight the people who began the movement and the achievements since the first Juneteenth.

The environmental movement is about more than just policy. It tackles the impact of environmental degradation felt by all people, but especially those felt by marginalized groups. Environmental justice (EJ) champions marginalized groups of people who are disproportionately impacted by anthropogenic climate change, and how these climate threats tend to compound over time. People of color are disproportionately more likely to live in polluted communities. Indigenous groups were forced onto infertile land. People with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by life disruptions such as power outages or extreme weather events. Impoverished people experience disproportionate rates of food and water insecurity. The EJ movement champions that “everyone—regardless of race, color, national origin, or income—has the right to the same environmental protections and benefits.” It has long been a movement left out of contemporary science and environmental discourse because of its political implications, but with ever-growing threats from climate change, EJ is more important to discuss now than ever.

The Roots of Environmental Justice

The roots of the EJ movement stem from the mid-1900s. In the early 1960s, Latinx farm workers organized by Cesar Chavez fought for agricultural workplace rights. Chavez led peaceful marches and boycotts, including the “one thousand mile march” in 59 days and more than 15,000 people. In 1967, Black students in Houston took to the streets to oppose a city garbage dump in their community that caused two children’s deaths. The next year, “residents of West Harlem, in New York City, fought unsuccessfully against the siting of a sewage treatment plant in their community.” The Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1,300 Black workers later that year began after two Black sanitation workers were crushed in an avoidable garbage truck accident, illuminating decades-long environmental harm to Black communities. Dr. King delivered his Mountaintop speech to a crowd of striking sanitation workers and supporters the day before his assassination on April 3, 1968. On April 16, 1968, the strikers’ demands were met, and the strike ended.

In 1970, Hazel M. Johnson, known as the “mother of the EJ movement,” founded People For Community Recovery to address tenant issues. Shortly thereafter, she discovered her community of Altgeld Gardens in Chicago had the region's highest cancer rates. This prompted her to investigate further, which lead to the discovery that Altgeld Gardens “‘lay in the center of a 14-square-mile ring of pollution stretching from Chicago’s Southeast Side to Northwest Indiana, housing more than 50 landfills, a chemical incinerator, a water and sewage treatment facility, steel mills, paint factories, scrap yards and abandoned industrial dump sites.” She and her organization subsequently fought against polluters for the Black community’s right to clean water, air, and soil.

Source: Kenan Institute for Ethics

The EJ movement gained momentum on a national scale after the Warren County protests in North Carolina. The protests began in the 1970s after the state’s government decided to store 6,000 truckloads of soil laced with toxic PCBs in the rural, poor, and predominantly Black Warren County, dismissing locals’ concerns about potential drinking water contamination. Many Southern activists agreed with locals’ concerns, attracting Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., Reverend Joseph Lowery, Reverend Leon White, and others to Warren County. When dump trucks headed for the newly constructed hazardous waste facility began to roll in, brave individuals, most of whom were Black, laid down on the road to stop the trucks. This prompted six weeks of marches and nonviolent protests on the streets that resulted in more than 500 arrests.

While the Warren County protests were not successful in preventing truckloads of toxic PCBs from being dumped in the local landfill, the story of ordinary residents who fought so strongly to protect their community “fired the imagination of many across the country who had lived through similar injustices.” The residents did not stop fighting for four years, culminating in a sit-in protest against the toxic landfill in 1982. Eventually, the Warren County protests inspired a new faction within the Civil Rights Movement that saw environmental rights emerge as another branch of their fight for justice.

One of the participants in the Warren County protests was Walter Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s congressional delegate and then-chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Upon his return to Washington, he tasked Congress’ General Accounting Office (known today as the Government Accountability Office or GAO) with determining whether communities of color “suffered disproportionate negative impacts from the siting and construction of hazardous waste landfills within them.” The study was published in 1983, revealing that three-quarters of hazardous waste landfill sites across eight southeastern states were located in primarily low-income communities of color (particularly Black and Latinx communities).

Source: Green Matters

After Warren: Further History

Several studies conducted in the late 1980s and early ’90s increased the credibility of the movement with supporting findings. The studies illuminated the consistent targeting of low-income communities of color by corporations, regulatory agencies, and local planning and zoning boards in locating polluting facilities. In 1987, the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) under the leadership of Dr. Benjamin Chavis published its landmark Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States report. The report found that “race was the single-most important factor in determining where toxic waste facilities were sited in the United States” and that the facilities’ placements were the intentional result of land use policies. These policies impacted approximately 15 million Black Americans. In 1990, the first overarching book on environmental injustice, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, was published by Dr. Robert Bullard, detailing race as a primary factor in the placement of facilities producing toxic waste chemicals.

In 1990, several environmental justice leaders cosigned and sent a widely publicized letter to the ‘Big 10’ environmental groups “accusing them of racial bias in policy development, hiring, and the makeup of their boards, and challenging them to address toxic contamination in the communities and workplaces of people of color and the poor.” Consequently, several environmental organizations developed environmental justice branches, hired more diverse staff, and began considering environmental justice in their decisions.

The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit gathered hundreds of global EJ leaders and produced the "Principles of Environmental Justice" and the "Call to Action." The success and attendance of this summit proved the EJ movement was gaining mainstream attention. The next year, Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Chavis and Dr. Robert Bullard, often called the fathers of the EJ movement, to his natural resources transition team, demonstrating the administration’s commitment to environmental justice.

In the early 2000s, the government began outwardly supporting EJ initiatives with the EPA publicly supporting environmental justice and developing action plans to build a future where “everyone, regardless of race, culture, or income, enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards.” Still, it was not until 2010 that the EPA finally established EJ as an agency-wide priority.

Source: Climate Justice Alliance

Black Americans in Today’s Environmental Movement

Today, Black individuals still champion the EJ movement in many ways. A recent study from Yale University found that 57 percent of Black individuals, compared to 49 percent of White individuals, are concerned about climate change, and, crucially, Black individuals are 14 percent more likely to join a campaign to persuade elected officials to reduce global warming. One of the major hubs of the EJ movement is in Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. These predominantly Black communities have been strategically located by “more than 150 petrochemical plants and oil refineries along the Mississippi River.” Some of these areas report more than 50 times the national average of cancer diagnoses, and residents continue to have access to clean air.

Young Black Americans are pivotal to today’s EJ movement and the greater environmental movement. Students and alumni of historically Black universities established the entirely womxn-led Generation Green. The organization emphasizes community building and amplifies the voices of young Black climate activists. They stress a “framework called Environmental Liberation that pursues a decolonized, regenerative, and autonomous future for Black people.” Similar organizations are doing equally important work, including Young, Gifted, and Green and The Black Hive.

Many national organizations are dedicated to fighting for Black equality in environmental justice. The National Black Environmental Justice Network is a national coalition of organizations dedicated to addressing systemic racism by protecting the natural world and equitable access to it, while pursuing climate solutions and investing in Black communities.

Individuals also make a difference. Jerome Foster II became “the youngest person ever to advise the White House by joining the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council to advise the United States President on how best to advance environmental justice” under the Biden Administration. Simone Adams founded Color My Outdoors, an organization working to address how people of color are “underrepresented and misrepresented in the outdoors.” LaKyla Hodges at the Southern Appalachian Highland Conservancy works to connect communities to nature and contributes alongside Simone Adams to the Coalition for Outdoor Renaming and Education.

Change The Chamber is a nonpartisan coalition of young adults, 100+ student groups across the country, environmental justice and frontline community groups, and other allied organizations.