Uproar at Dancing Rabbit Creek:
Battling Over Race, Class and the Environment
By Colin Crawford
Addison Wesley, 410 pages, $24
Recent events ought to have laid to rest the false choice between jobs and environmental protection, however much conservative politicians still make hay out of the issue. The conservation of old-growth forests in the Northwest in the early 1990s has spurred an economic renaissance, drawing high-tech manufacturers to the clean water needed to make silicon chips, and new residents, entrepreneurs and tourists for the superb quality of life. A torrent of new studies proves the direct link between a clean environment and economic well-being in every state. About $8.5 billion in annual costs of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed clean-air standards are more than offset by as much as $112 billion savings each year from lower medical bills and absenteeism at school and work.
If sacrificing the environment boosted prosperity, you’d think economically depressed communities would extend the welcome mat to polluting industries. The reasons they don’t become painfully clear in “Uproar at Dancing Rabbit Creek: Battling Over Race, Class and the Environment,” Colin Crawford’s vivid chronicle of the five-year battle to build one of the country’s largest hazardous-waste incinerators and dumps in Noxubee County, Mississippi.
“People are poor in the South,” declared one opponent. “Then you just become nothin’ but a glorified catbox!” Noxubee seemed just the place doomed to be a toilet. It ranks as the 53rd poorest county in the U.S.; throughout the 1980s, Mississippi was home to a higher percentage of people in need of food stamps and emergency assistance than any other state, and Noxubee’s percentages were sometimes higher than the state’s by 100 percent. Surely, these dispossessed citizens would leap at the chance to attract hundreds of jobs and a multimillion-dollar payroll.
Considering that many need visual markers to reach their doctors and lawyers’ offices because they cannot read street signs, Noxubee looked like a tempting target. But enough people in Noxubee did not have to be chemical engineers to smell something rotten. Toxic landfills combine a witches’ brew of materials with unknown and unintended consequences. From all indications, humans have yet to devise a leak-proof “bathtub,” as containers are known in the industry’s parlance, thus endangering nearby soil and water supplies.
The quasi-impermeable calcified rock in Alabama and Mississippi prompted one skeptic, whom Crawford cites, to state that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “had run into cracks and crevices, sometimes large enough to drop a bulldozer in.” Too often, Crawford refrains from digging deeply enough to verify such claims.
Nor does he frame the scientific issues in a broader context by exploring the mountains of studies available to give some sense of the number of hazardous-waste sites nationwide or the dangers facing people living near them.
Crawford works on safer ground in his narrow but richly detailed focus on the civil war engulfing Noxubee County. He succeeded in gaining the confidence of all the major players, no mean feat in an area still simmering with ancient racial and economic resentment, where poor white folk distrust the landed white aristocracy and neither appears self-conscious about referring to their neighbors across the tracks with the “N” word. The waste wars pitted one against another across traditional lines, ripping apart, as Crawford describes it, “the county’s fragile social fabric.” A suspicious fire swept through a waste company’s central office. A letter bomb landed in the mailbox of a white, pro-dump politician. The only reporter to seriously cover the dispute was taken off the beat under apparent pressure from advertisers. Sadly, these tales are all too familiar in towns across America riven by environmental conflicts. (Similar incidents occurred in Oregon logging towns at the height of the spotted owl controversy a few years ago.)
All it takes to exacerbate tensions is the sort of rogues’ gallery Crawford brings to life. “Freshly laundered and starched,” Printz Bolin, chief of staff of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), decided to leave his job to return home to improve his own standard of living promoting one of the waste companies, but not before calling from the senator’s office to put the arm on a Noxubee alderman. Regardless of health and safety concerns, Ike Brown, the Democratic boss of Noxubee’s black community and a proponent of the dump site, sought to “break the local white oligopoly’s stranglehold on employment,” Crawford writes, though all but a few of the jobs at the facility required technical skills Brown’s people lacked. “You bring an incinerator in, it might kill all o’ you,” he declares in a classic quote. “Well, I’m dyn’ of starvation! Not in terms of food, but of a lack of opportunity. So I’d rather take my chances, ’cause we all gonna die.”
Crawford’s story is fraught with irony. For example, Brown was the driving force behind the endorsement of the site by the local branch of the NAACP, a position at odds in spirit with almost all other civil rights groups. A resolution it issued turned out to have been heavily edited by one of the waste company’s white lawyers and flacks. The state NAACP severely disciplined the Noxubee branch for funneling $25,000 in legal fees to an embattled white politician and dump backer. That money came from a white corporate mogul whose company had just paid $130 million to settle a racial-discrimination suit and had a million-dollar stake in one of the waste firms.
In the end, a dedicated, grass-roots coalition of blacks and whites triumphed against a pro-dump campaign costing, Crawford estimates, tens of millions of dollars. Bedfellows as improbable as Essie Spencer, a retired black schoolteacher, and Martha Blackwell, scion of one of the county’s oldest and most respected white families, banded together as never before. The political prominence subsequently gained by the county’s blacks now forces whites to treat them as equals.
Crawford argues that the concept of “environmental racism” central to “Uproar at Dancing Rabbit Creek” accounts for what he believes to be American industry’s concentration of its worst detritus in poor black areas. He may be right. But his sparse statistics appear in a vacuum, created by the absence of any discussion of the numbers of whites affected. Moreover, the support of the dump by so many of Noxubee’s blacks complicates racial considerations.
Taking the course of minimum resistance and maximum profit, corporations often collide with both blacks and whites. Crawford’s hopeful message is that blacks and whites share common ground. Neither is so hungry for short-term profits that they’re desperate to take life-and-death chances.
