Introduction

The soil in the Mississippi Delta has everything a planter needs. Rooted in shallow soils, elm, cottonwood, and pecan trees line the hilly landscapes of eastern and southern Mississippi. In the bottomland, where the soil is formed by flooding, the endless striations of light and dark colored sediment create moist, rich, and nutrient-dense dirt in which cash crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton thrive. The Mississippi River and all its branches flow over the boundaries of its own banks, flooding the soil and adding new sediment, giving it new life. On the banks of the Mississippi between Coahoma and Sunflower counties, sits Bolivar County and the city of Mound Bayou. Founded in 1887 near Chickasaw burial grounds by a trio of formerly enslaved cousins, Mound Bayou emerged in the Reconstruction era as a burgeoning example of what African American autonomy could become in the dissolution of slavery.¹Joel Nathan Rosen, “Mound Bayou,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, July 11, 2017, https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/mound-bayou/. At its height, Mound Bayou, the “Jewel of the Delta,” housed successful Black businesses, a public school system, and a community-run hospital.²Rosen, “Mound Bayou.” Seen as a safe haven from the physical and political interference of white people and power structures, Mound Bayou fought to maintain its autonomy, eventually succumbing to mismanagement and political in-fighting. By the 1960s, while attention was on the southern United States in the fight for civil rights and political enfranchisement, Mound Bayou, like many other Black towns in the twentieth century, languished under the threat of anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence and economic inequity. While historians often place voting rights at the heart of the civil rights movement, in Mississippi, for Black farmers, sharecroppers, and their families, the gut of the matter was food.

A contribution to critical food studies, Bobby J. Smith II’s 2023 Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, details the role of plantation politics, food scarcity, and Black autonomy across the Delta from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. In addition to thinking about power, equity, and accessibility, Smith’s work deals specifically with the experiences of Black communities in the Delta—places such as Leflore, Sunflower, and North Bolivar counties—and builds on recent scholarship covering the pinnacles and nadirs of the civil rights movement. According to Smith (a professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois), the emphasis of scholarship on voting rights and education in the civil rights era neglects the more fundamental problem of subsistence. The primary critical intervention Smith presents in Food Power Politics is his insistence that the subject of food equity allows readers to “identify social, political, and economic blind spots...at the core of social protest and power struggles” both past and present.³Bobby J. Smith, Food Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 9. Smith aims to “expand the civil rights story” by illustrating how the lack of access to nutritional food and nourishment motivated sharecroppers, farmers, and rural working-class families on the periphery of Black life in the US to “[pave] the way for new articulations of civil rights activism.”⁴Smith, Food Power Politics, 142. Examining food access and equity shifts attention to the environmental and psychological vulnerabilities of Black bodies.

The social, political, and biological aftershocks of the plantation system in and after the era of “King Cotton” are too massive to quantify. As Mikko Saikku reminds us, despite the “great personal fortunes” cultivated across the 19th and 20th centuries through the "biological productivity" of the Mississippi Delta, "[for] most of the people involved in the transformation of the Delta bottomlands, especially black slaves, sharecroppers and agricultural workers, economic gain and social mobility remained severely limited.”⁵Mikko Saikku, "Bioregional Approach to Southern History: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta," Southern Spaces, January 28, 2010, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2010/bioregional-approach-southern-history-yazoo-mississippi-delta/. As a response and challenge to these limitations, Smith constructs the food story of Mississippi by drawing on civil rights era archives and ethnographies. Examining documents from Tougaloo College Civil Rights Collection, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and the Mississippi Council on Human Relations, alongside local newspaper reportage, Smith also draws upon a diverse range of print media and correspondence, including personal letters from civil rights activists such as Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer. He also conducted interviews with activists and agricultural workers active in the 1960s and today in north Bolivar County.

Key to Smith’s analysis are the concepts of food power and emancipatory food power. Food power, most often deployed when describing international wars and political conflict, gestures towards moments where, within “a hierarchical world system” access to food or food related autonomy is “weaponized...as a form of control between nations” to influence outcomes.⁶Smith, Food Power Politics, 2. Food power guides the first two chapters of Smith’s book through an examination of the 1962 Greenwood Food Blockade and the Lewis Grocer Company’s campaign for a federal food stamps program in Mississippi. State and local government, as well as private corporations, wielded food power against Black farmers, sharecroppers, and working-class people to continue the racist inequities of the antebellum plantation system.

The second half of Food Power Politics illustrates emancipatory food power—ways that Black activists, citizens, and farmers restructured the power dynamics imposed on them by the white plantation class through the creation of an autonomous food economy in service to the needs, desire, and tastes of Black rural people. Smith writes extensively about the North Bolivar County Food Cooperative (NBCFC), founded in 1967, and its contemporary iteration, the North Bolivar County Good Food Revolution (NBCGFR), a predominantly youth-led food justice movement that emerged in 2017. Here, the line between food power and emancipatory food power is not conceptual or theoretical. The emancipatory power of Black food autonomy depends on economic independence fueled, in part, through land ownership, as well as food literacy, agricultural education, and the material labor of Black people. While Smith’s project is rooted in the geographies and spatialities of the Delta, it also surveys other places often minimized or misunderstood through standard histories of the civil rights years.

Food Power Politics asks that we consider the space of the plantation not only as a physical landscape of endless rows of cotton stalks but also as spaces constructed by and in service to white social and economic domination over Black people. The attitude of the plantation can be found in the white-owned grocery store as much as in the field. In considering Black women as mothers, planters, laborers, and activists, Smith asks us to consider Black domestic space, represented iconically in the kitchen table, as the launching pad for political revolution.

Debt, Plantations, and Black Hunger: On Food Power

During and after Reconstruction, the sharecropping system continued to support the hierarchy and politics of the plantation ruling class in the Deep South. While millions of formerly enslaved persons flowed north and west during the Great Migration, those who remained had limited options for employment. Many Black farmers and agricultural workers found themselves working for the descendants of former slave masters on the same plantations where their ancestors labored in bondage. Food access was negotiated through small gardens on plots of land leased from plantation owner. These “truck patches” supplied subsistence nourishment. Additionally, many sharecropper households traded homestead goods with other families, creating networks of care and support. Many also depended upon New Deal era federal food programs. Similar to the exploitative credit system that forced Black farmers to lease land and equipment from plantation owners at outrageous interest rates, access to food in Mississippi during the 1960s was deeply entwined with the afterlife of the plantation system. The fiscal and social politics of the plantation era made itself known through the converged interests of plantation owners and private white grocers such as the Lewis Grocer Company, which conspired to suppress Black political and economic autonomy through the twinned threats of food scarcity and political disenfranchisement.

Three factors shaped the proliferation of food-centric oppression for the Black rural and working class in Mississippi during the 1960s: the mechanization of the plantation system, the transition from government-sponsored surplus goods programs to that of the federal Food Stamp Program, and the change in minimum wage laws surrounding farm workers and sharecroppers in the Delta. In the era of “King Cotton,” the means of cultivating and harvesting this cash crop became more dependent on government-leased technology, machinery, and chemicals, and less dependent on manual labor. The sudden decline of job opportunities, the shift from daily to hourly wages for plantation labor, and the emergence of a food stamp system which deepened sharecroppers’ dependence on systems of credit were major forces of oppressive food power wielded over Black farmers and their families by white capitalist elites in the Delta. The triangulation of these events forced sharecroppers and their families into structural over-dependency and debt, creating seemingly inescapable cycles of poverty.

Among these dire systemic restrictions, food scarcity was also strategically deployed by white government officials in LeFlore County through the 1962–1963 Greenwood Food Blockade. The county board of supervisors’ decision to pull out of the federal surplus commodities program, a major food source for Black sharecroppers and farm workers, further spurred food scarcity. Similar strategies of food suppression were deployed in Tennessee in 1960 and in nearby Sunflower County in 1962. These actions aimed not only to starve out the Black rural class and keep them further under the control of credit systems deployed by plantation owners and grocers but also to intimidate the burgeoning rise of Black voter registration taking place across the South. The Food for Freedom program, created by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) just a few weeks after the start of the blockade, addressed the needs of Black people in Greenwood by providing food, aid, and support through local and regional systems of distribution. With the help of local activists, as well as public figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and comedian Dick Gregory, the Food for Freedom program brought attention and material support to those in need and helped to end the blockade in March 1963. In this process, SNCC was able to make a concerted effort to explicitly connect food and activism to highlight the “relationship between food, everyday Black resistance, white supremacy, and state sanctioned violence during the civil rights era.”⁷Smith, Food Power Politics, 42. Smith illustrates in detail how plantation owners and grocers strategically displaced Black food autonomy with debt-centric practices, which forced Black sharecroppers and farmers to depend on the state for access to food. This history is painfully ironic, given the current political rhetoric in Mississippi that centers public welfare programs as a threat, best exemplified by Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves’s (R) refusal to participate in a federally funded program aimed at supporting food access for children in the summer months. Gov. Reeves's rejection of the program, justified by his dedication to not “expand the welfare state,” illustrates how inequitable practices of food power remain active in Mississippi.⁸Gloria Oladipo, “Mississippi Quits Child Food Program amid Republican ‘Welfare State’ Attack,” The Guardian, January 13, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/13/mississippi-child-school-food-program-welfare-state.

Autonomy and/as Collard Greens: On Emancipatory Food Power

The Food for Freedom program is one of three examples of emancipatory food power that Smith highlights in his book. The most expansive is the NBCFC, a Black-owned and operated food cooperative founded in 1967 with the goal of becoming an autonomous food economy in Mississippi. Spearheaded by activist L.C. Dorsey, with the help of other Black mothers and community members, this cooperative began as a garden project for low-income families. At its peak, the NBCFC operated a farming operation across almost 1,500 acres (owned and leased) to cultivate crops for the poorest families in Bolivar. Pushing against the monocrop culture that had rendered many Black sharecroppers jobless, the NBCFC grew crops that would meet nutritional needs: protein-rich nuts, peas and beans, vitamin-dense greens and okra, as well as staple carbohydrates like rice, potatoes, and corn. During the summer, watermelon vines as well as peach orchards and pecan trees were prioritized for local enjoyment. The NBCFC illustrated how Black autonomy functions beyond the strictures of capitalistic profit.

While land acquisition was central to NBCFC’s vision of food autonomy, so were labor practices and education. The cooperative dedicated over 70% of its labor budget to employing local members, bringing jobs to more than three hundred families. It partnered with the Department of Horticulture at Mississippi University alongside agricultural educators from Atlanta University, Iowa State, and Michigan State to offer courses in farm management, soil conservation, and food production. Food literacy was a primary goal of outreach, instructing Black mothers on how to prepare the foods distributed to them through the cooperative in ways that would support the health and wellbeing of the household. Land acquisition, farm production, and agricultural education centered the NBCFC’s vision of emancipatory food power. That workers were able, even for a short period, to labor in a system that would feed and train them to become more self-sufficient—financially and politically—on the land where they lived, worked, and sought to thrive was a radical feat reshaping what freedom could envision.

After five years of operation, the NBCFC began a decline in the 1970s due to leadership infighting, disagreements, and the loss of grant funding. The organization was unable to complete its long-term goals of creating an on-site canning operation for national distribution of NBCFC foods and developing a Black-owned and operated farm supply store that might further offer farmers the opportunity to cultivate their own land without interference from white plantation owners. Still, Smith narrates their journey in this unique and palpable moment. The legacy of the NBCFC is alive in the youth-run North Bolivar County Good Food Revolution (NBCGFR).

The joy of Food Power Politics comes in its gesturing towards civil rights beyond voting and government, in expanding understanding of what Black autonomy can be. The most striking cultural memories of the civil rights era, often exemplified by photographic images of Black bodies in pain and duress, contribute to a taste for spectacle that continues. The exploration of hunger as a threat fueled and facilitated by white supremacy is a subject requiring more attention.

Food Power Politics explores spaces and places often overlooked by civil rights historians. Smith explores the Delta from the soil up, balancing a long history of food injustice, narrating the story with an avid appetite for meticulous detail. If any dimension is slighted, it’s the missed opportunity to fully explore the role of Black women activists and their influence on emancipatory food power. Smith is deft to note that, while Black women were and remain active participants in the NBCFC and NBCGFR, the question of how to emancipate Black people from food scarcity, while also emancipating Black women from the invisible labor of the domestic space, remains underdeveloped. While Smith mentions the work of well-known Black food activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer, and other important figures such as Dorsey, Unita Blackwell, and Marian Wright, he and other food studies scholars should further articulate what a Black Feminist approach to food equity might consist of. Such an endeavor would take seriously how Black women’s material and political labor has been intentionally miscategorized and rhetorically devalued within historical narratives. It would also acknowledge the murky history of Black patriarchal structures that relegate, and obscure, the nurturing networks of care constructed by Black women activists to the realm of the domestic and private. In this, we can better understand how a Black Feminist approach to food equity would address an equity of labor and care within the Black domestic space irrespective of gender, class, or sexuality.

The core aim of Food Power Politics is to construct an alternative history of food power in the Delta, and in that, Smith succeeds. Further, Smith’s text places into perspective the long history of community organizing, direct action, and educational activism that rural and working-class Black Americans have relied on in the face of economic and social dispossession. Instead of debating the legitimacy of trickle-down activism from hyper-visible politicians and celebrities, Smith reminds us that, historically, political victories and social justice reform sprouts from the bottom up.

About the Author

Ariel Lawrence is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Emory University. Her research focuses on Black women-authored lifewriting across multiple genres, and the articulation of ethical reading practices in and beyond the page.

Introduction—Salt Creek and City Nature

To place Salt Creek geographically, imagine the state of Florida. Zoom in to the west central coast,¹This multi-media essay has developed over a long period of time and thanks are due to my home university's Center for Civic Engagement, the Frank E. Duckwall Foundation, the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, and most of all, to my students. Thanks to my comrades at Friends of Salt Creek; my church community at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church (at Salt Creek's headwaters), who have taught me to see my adopted hometown in a new light; to videographer Devin Rice; to Allen Tullos and anonymous readers for Southern Spaces; to Julie Armstrong, Jack Davis, Ray Arsenault, Amanda Hagood, Ray Roa, Chris Meindl, and Jacqueline Hubbard, Esq. then go to St. Petersburg, a midsized city—the second largest in the Tampa Bay area. St. Pete holds down the bottom of Pinellas County, a peninsula upon a peninsula, bracketed by Tampa Bay to the east and the Gulf of Mexico to the west. Water is everywhere.

St. Petersburg has always been two things: a resort town and a product of the segregated South. Known affectionately as the Sunshine City, St. Pete claims the Guinness World Record for sunshine (as a can of local craft beer will tell you, 768 consecutive days). This winter haven boomed in the early twentieth century. White vacationers and retirees flocked here for the weather, often to relax on the green benches (hence the beer) that once lined Central Avenue, the city's main thoroughfare and longtime racial divide. African Americans first migrated here to build the railroad and work the tourist economy, building tight communities over time.

Off the tourist map, Salt Creek remains absent from view, for reasons both geographic and social. Because the water flows in a northeast direction, starting from the middle of Pinellas County then into Tampa Bay, the creek falls off the orderly cadastral map. Avenues go East-West and the streets North-South, while Salt Creek cuts a diagonal course. Most of the creek's banks are culverted, so its "nature" does not adhere to conventional labels of leisurely consumption. Racial divides further hide this fragmented waterway, and the environmental merges with the Sunshine City's flickering, all-too-easily-denied Jim Crow past.

Today only a handful of locals can trace Salt Creek's full course. The best way is to start at the mouth, Bayboro Harbor, just south of the city's previously moribund but now skyrocketing downtown. As one journeys southwest, going upstream, the creek services a working port (properties now eyed for luxury housing). The creek passes under a mangrove cover and empty lots, owned mostly by absentee speculators. The city's sizeable population of street people, who use its shielded banks for shelter, are the principal stakeholders here. Under Fourth Street, a major north-south corridor, Salt Creek opens into mangrove-shrouded Bartlett Pond. Beyond the pond, it crosses under Twenty-Second Avenue South, also a major thoroughfare, before vanishing into a culvert through Harbordale, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Pinellas County. Dammed at the north-south running Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Street (or Ninth Street, to old timers), the channel opens into Lake Maggiore, historically an estuarine body of water, now maintained as fresh. Beyond the lake, finally, Salt Creek splits into several other unnamed sources.

Recovering an urban waterway is no easy task, as it requires travel across both time and space. This tour, "Draining Paradise," attempts to render visible our everyday—yet hidden—lives, where water meets land. Because Salt Creek pays no heed to squared-off boundaries or cornered streets, and because property claims trump natural processes, it suffers neglect. In a city founded upon leisure—moreover, with a disenfranchised working class needed to produce that leisure—what counts as "nature" inevitably falls along social, economic, and racial lines. A continuing legacy of inequity shapes environmental priorities. Yet Salt Creek's history is complicated. Water quality intersects with social structures, though not in any simple or straightforward way. The words and conventions we use to describe natural beauty fill in few gaps, nor do current models of environmental justice fully apply. This aquatic system passes through several different neighborhoods—white and Black, rich and poor, protected and industrialized, through parts of town in clear neglect and others in good health. The social constructs fragment the hydrology until a citizenry can no longer see itself in nature. So how do we teach ourselves to see the parts as one whole? Can we come together as a community by cognitively remapping a forgotten stream? If so, what terms do we use? What's the storyline for a creek that has become a ditch?

I first stumbled upon my problem quite by accident, as an extension of my job as an English professor at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus. I came to USF as a part-time instructor, tasked with developing a course called "Rivers of Florida." For several semesters, I ventured with students in canoes and kayaks onto the state's many spectacular wild and scenic rivers—traveling hours for peak nature experiences amid awesome alligators, long legged wading birds, and floodplains filled with cypress—waving trails of Spanish moss over the slick obsidian water. Despite the beauty of our surroundings, student essays from the "Rivers" classes were mostly pedestrian paeans to the "real Florida" and laments for a vanishing nature. Tired of burning class time and fossil fuels, and bored with cliché writing, I turned to nature close to home—Salt Creek, whose mouth empties right onto our campus.

With little initial support, I threw myself into a curriculum that built nature around the city. The project came to consume my work as teacher, writer-researcher, citizen, and activist. The early stages were marked by confusion and indifference. The problem, from a pedagogical standpoint, starts with semantics. What happens when a stream or creek becomes a culvert or ditch? Why do those words matter? We urban dwellers, who seek out nature close to home, are linguistically bereft: there is no term to describe the successful interface of natural and built environs. Outside cities, we have any number of categories for describing natural landscapes. The "wilderness" and "preserve" define parks, without people; the "georgic" or "bucolic" covers farmland; a "pastoral" is where classical shepherds tended their flock while reflecting upon the corruption in Rome, and today denotes cherished spaces of imagined innocence—like a baseball diamond or the Andy Griffith Show. But nature in the city presents an absence. To address this problem, I set up a classroom model. I founded a fictional group, "Friends of Salt Creek," built a website, and started exploring with my students.²For a timeline see Friends of Salt Creek, Accessed April 11, 2023, https://friendsofsaltcreek.org/; for an example on how the critical terminology overlooks city nature, see survey in Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2012), which is organized around a series of chapter-keywords (pollution, wilderness, apocalypse, dwelling, animal, earth), but no urban terms. Like a generation of environmental humanists, I first recognized the shortcomings of advocacy strategies and literary conventions after reading the edited collection by William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); more recently, I discuss cultural categories of nature writing, and the challenges of teaching city nature, see "City Creeks: Lessons in Sustainable Environmental Discourse from a Florida Boom Town," Spaces in-between: Cultural and Political Perspectives on Environmental Discourse, ed. Mark Luccarelli and Sigurd Bergmann (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2015), 88–101. Using searchable newspaper articles and government documents, we cobbled together a storyline. 

The next step was to theorize. Environmental writer Jenny Price details "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA," a classic re-examination of the least "natural" of all places, the Los Angeles River. On the East coast, meanwhile, landscape architect Ann Whiston Spirn has combined activism, teaching and writing in a recovery of Mill Creek, a buried stream that threads through West Philadelphia before feeding the Schuylkill. These models and others provided a conceptual groundwork. Over time, I accumulated equivalents. A trip to New York City took me to the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site where Walt Whitman once ate oysters. I learned how tourists in London will lay out ten pounds each (five for kids) to slip down the culverted Fleet River, now a covered source but a notorious ditch from the reigns of Queens Elizabeth to Victoria. A sixteenth-century mock epic by Ben Jonson, "On the Famous Voyage," recounts a journey up the filthy Fleet: the open sewer runs foul with "grease, and hair of meazled [leprous] dogs; / The heads, houghs [hocks], entrailes, and hides of hogs."³Jenny Price, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA" (Part 1), Believer 33 (April 1, 2006); Anne Whiston Spirn, "Restoring Mill Creek: Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice and City Planning and Design," Landscape Research 30, no. 3 (2005): 395–413; Ben Jonson, "On the Famous Voyage," in Complete Poetry, ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. (New York: NYU Press, 1963), 72. The same waterway carries away the cannibalistic offal of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, "the demon barber of Fleet Street."  

Patterns came together. Urban waterways offer a Realometer, as Thoreau wrote, places where you stand right to face the facts.⁴Henry David Thoreau describes the "Realometer," distinguished from the "Nilometer" (a gauge to measure the mythologized Nile), in the penultimate paragraph of the chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," from Walden, or A Life in the Woods (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1854). Our city creeks mark charismatic, if uncomfortable points of context between activism and disaster fetish, economics and racial inequity, lost memory and recovery, cool-credibility, and very real marginalization. The more I traveled my own channelized waterway, the more analogs I discovered. Friends and colleagues started volunteering their own favorites. The Chicago River (a graduate school buddy reminds me) previously served as a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. A stunningly illustrated article in the New York Times charts the harrowing impact of sea level rise on this area.⁵Dan Egan, "A Climate Crisis Haunts Chicago's Future. A Battle Between a Great City and a Great Lake," New York Times, July 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/07/climate/chicago-river-lake-michigan.html. A colleague who graduated from Columbia's school of journalism reminded me that vestiges of Minetta Brook flow under Minetta Street in Greenwich Village. My writing partner for a series of #Creekshed essays in our local alt-weekly, Amanda Hagood, sent vacation photos of Ala Wai Canal in Honolulu. Another traveling colleague, a classicist, Facebook messaged me a photo of the vestigial Eridanos, Greece—the literal path to Hades—which runs through Athens' Monastiraki Metro stop. The community relations person on my campus insisted I walk the C&O canal on my next trip to to Washington, D.C. And while researching an academic memoir about her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, my colleague and partner Julie Armstrong traced the entirety of Village Creek—a polluted stream that drains both industrial sites and a neighborhood park where she played as a child.⁶See Thomas Hallock and Amanda Haygood, "#Creekshed Story Map," May 5, 2022, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b664d097ee3e408c8eacf5a424075af8; for more information on the Ala Wai canal, a lagoon off Waikiki that displaced wetlands used by island Natives for fishing and agriculture in Waikiki, see Sophie Cocke, "Ala Wai Canal: Hawaii's Biggest Mistake?," Honolulu Civil Beat, May 20, 2013, https://www.civilbeat.org/2013/05/ala-wai-canal-hawaiis-biggest-mistake/; a display of Minetta Brook, which used to run through the lobby of a hotel-apartment, is no longer operable, though reference can be found at "Minetta Green," NYC Parks, Access April 11, 2023, www.nycgovparks.org/parks/minetta-green/history; Village Creek Environmental Human & Environmental Justice Society, Accessed April 11, 2023, https://villagecreeksociety.org; Julie Buckner Armstrong, "Two Days along Village Creek," Learning from Birmingham: A Journey into History and Home (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023). East Lake was the white working-class neighborhood where Julie grew up. Through the post-civil right's era, it was mostly African American. Because of its increasingly coveted real estate, it became a focal point for the A&E program Flipping Down South.

Why this passion? And why is this work necessary? The recovery of an urban waterway can feel like a very vexed homecoming. Even though social history and economics have shaped our aquatic environs, current land use practices erase the very past that brings value, coherence, justice, and yes, even happiness to our communities. City creeks have a particular way of taking one both to the edges and into the heart of where we now live. We are habituated, as geographer Yi-Fu Tuan reminds us, to link memory and place. Tuan's term, "topophilia," is a well-known coinage for the memories that accrue across space. A crack in the sidewalk carries us back emotionally; a whiff of wisteria fosters connection, and one hopes, concern for a given locale.⁷Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Though simple on the surface, the concept is tough to pin down; topophilia, Tuan reminds us, is not just patriotism, childlike nostalgia, or the marketing copy on a beer can. It means coming to grips with both the pleasures and the problematic.

Take the green bench, which is the name of my local brew of choice, but also a hurtful symbolism. As noted in a recent study of systematic racism in the city, green benches lined the main thoroughfare of Central Avenue from 1916 to 1960. For white residents, these benches were a "symbol of hospitality and place to socialize" on a pleasant winter afternoon; for African Americans, not being allowed to sit there served as an "everyday reminder" of humiliating segregation.⁸Tuan, Topophilia; Ruthmae Sears et al, "Building Bridges & Racial Equity in St. Petersburg Florida" (Tampa: University of South Florida, 2021), 52. City creeks, likewise, sit uneasily in our idea of nature. They do not offer simple recreation or respite. The active search for broken connections instead takes us beneath the placid surface of a city's daily life.

As a white northern transplant, I have learned how a recovered past opens channels for seeing a difficult present. Every metropolitan area holds its own hydrologic history, buried or forgotten. What I offer in this short trip is a lesson in how cities render nature invisible; how what we count as nature is either valued or subject to abuse, and how those decisions follow social lines; and how past, present, and future landscapes intersect. To cross into our fragmented waterways, I must add, requires humility. The divisions rendered in our shaping of the natural world remain. And so the fundamental challenge: to come together, as one community, cleaning our rivers and streams, while at least recognizing—if not starting to heal—the rifts between us.

Bayboro Harbor

Start at Bayboro Harbor, at the campus where I teach. Faculty, staff and students can rent a kayak, paddleboard, sailboat, or canoe at the waterfront office, and here, I typically begin my nature writing classes. Once called "Fiddler's Paradise," for the crabs foraging in the surrounding mangrove and spartina, this former bayou is where Tampa Bay meets Booker and Salt Creeks—two of the major drainage systems for lower Pinellas. The Gulf Coast of Florida has been home to a series of loosely-defined, overlapping cultures, more local polities than "tribes"; these include "archaic" groups, the Weeden Island culture (300CE–1000CE), followed by the Safety Harbor culture (900CE–1500CE), then Tocobaga (the residents of Tampa Bay who most likely met Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century). Florida's first people fished and gathered crustaceans. The refuse from this bounty formed middens and mounds, many of which appear on early postcards from the city. As St. Petersburg boomed through the twentieth century, during the early years of car culture, these shell mounds were looted for road fill. The Indian works, reminders of a successful synthesis of built and natural environs, remain buried under a hospital's out-parcels and parking garages.⁹Robert J. Austin, "'Its Origin Steeped in Mystery': The Sorry Saga of St. Petersburg's Shell Mound Park," The Florida Anthropologist 73, no. 2 (June 2020): 113–39; the ongoing status of Native remains, held at the Smithsonian and elsewhere, including (until recently) my university's anthropology department is reviewed in "Notice of Inventory Completion: Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL," National Archives Federal Register, Sep. 27, 2011; and Gene Demby and Kumari Devarajan, "Skeletons in the Closet," NPR Code Switch, Oct. 13, 2021, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1045518876.

Salt Creek, meanwhile, tells the classic Florida story of transformation and rapine. The waterway formerly known as "Salt Run" drains lower-lying land, never particularly suited for human habitation. Starting in 1908, a group called the Bayboro Investment Company (supported by local boosters, fat with congressional pork) oversaw the harbor's dredging, which continued for several years. Imposing steam-fueled engines churned the roots, sand and gravel over bulwarks, carving a fifteen-foot channel from the shallow bayou, transforming the "marshy waste" into "valuable lands." Both Salt and Booker Creeks were straightened and deepened for the purposes of top-down economic interests: to connect with a rail depot one mile to the north, plus harborage for "pleasure yachts." Where there had been "naught but a marsh, inhabited by undesirable tenants" the St. Petersburg Evening Independent boasted, soon would "arise a beautified landscape occupied by happy homes of mankind." Four years later, with more federal funding, the city cleared frontage for a harbor and marina.¹⁰"The Bayboro Improvements," St. Petersburg (FL) Evening Independent, March 26, 1908, 1; "Deep Water Harbor Ordinance Up Tonight," St. Petersburg (FL) Daily Times, Aug. 14, 1912, 1.

The creek's industrialization had begun. In 1913 the dredgers worked their way further up the channel, yoking the tidal "Salt Run" to Florida's violently enforced economic and social order. As standard histories recount, the area boomed through the first decades of the twentieth century, with a soggy landscape shaped to property developers who then marketed an affordable paradise for white tourists and transplants; this same paradise needed a labor force, and segregation shaped the landscape as much as the pleasures of outdoor leisure. An invisible line along Central had already divided the city into north (white) and south (African American) sides. African Americans moved to St. Petersburg in search of work and the city council sharpened boundaries where people of color could live. A 1931 charter amendment sought "to establish and set apart in said city separate residential limits or districts for White and negro residents." This redlining, impossible to enforce and revised many times, imprinted the city's demographics permanently, shaping everything from voter registration to school funding and supermarket locations.

Has the creek been subject to the same racial violence as Black bodies? It depends on who you ask, though this much is true: segregation in St. Petersburg remains unfinished business. Redlining language remained in the city charter until 1963; through the Jim Crow era, three lynchings were reported in Pinellas County (low for bloody Florida); and various groups such as Pinellas Remembers (which successfully placed an Equal Justice Initiative marker at the site of a 1914 lynching) continue the important, uphill work of healing. Environmental and social histories undoubtedly intertwine—the question is "how?"

From its early boom years, access to nature came through a front and back door. North of Central Avenue, tourists enjoy Instagram-worthy waterfront parks, showcasing urban amenities alongside Tampa Bay. Today, these parks receive the overwhelming bulk of public funding and remain fiercely guarded by a proud citizenry. The adjacent working waterfront to the south was slated for industry, and set on a course for exploitation. Starting in the 1920s, city leaders commissioned engineering studies, supported business and secured federal money to construct an "industrial harbor." Salt Creek housed oil storage tanks (inevitable spills to follow) and just upstream, a dairy and flash-freeze seafood plants. As industry left in the 1970s, the creek would serve as a site for drugs and illegal sex and squatters, and now, for fast food and a Salvation Army support center. Locals recognize the creek (if at all) from a sharply-arched bridge over Third Street known as "Thrill Hill," or as the place where a sleeping homeless woman tumbled off a seawall and lost her arm to an alligator.

Such are the long string of anecdotes—the stories of drug runners and petty crime, childhood kicks, vagrancy and chicken thieves—that populate the creek's history.¹¹City Council minutes were printed in St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Feb. 14, 1931, 2–3; see also "Open Waters in Salt Creek" St. Petersburg (FL) Times, June 16, 1921, 10. Most recently, the city revised building codes to accommodate Miami developers, who schemed to build high-density housing on the flood plain. That bubble having burst, the area remains scraped.¹²"Report of Port Exports Announced by Commission," St. Petersburg (FL) Evening Independent, Sept. 16, 1926, 7; "Dairy Concern Adds to Plant on Salt Creek," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Jan. 1, 1937; "Yacht Basin Boats Face Clampdown," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Feb. 3, 1960; "Salt Creek Squatters Trouble City Again," St. Petersburg (FL) Independent, Aug. 28, 1961; Jack Alexander, "Drug Raids Nab 11," St. Petersburg (FL) Independent, May 18, 1968.

Salt Creek activists suffer fatigue, even disillusionment, from fighting the combined forces of city hall, Jim Crow's intractable legacy, and poor decisions rationalized by free market economics. Two episodes from the past century illustrate the challenges of turning back the tide. The creek's path traces a low-lying area, or swale. In any other scenario, land this vulnerable to flooding would be set aside for parks and greenspace. Every good planner that has studied a topo map has, in fact, reached that conclusion. In the 1920s John Nolen, the preeminent city planner of his generation, prepared St. Petersburg Today, St. Petersburg Tomorrow—a design that would be considered progressive if it were adopted even now.¹³John Nolen, City Planning Report: St. Petersburg Today, St. Petersburg Tomorrow (St. Petersburg, FL: St. Petersburg City Planning Board, 1923), https://friendsofsaltcreek.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/St-Petersburg-Today-St-Petersburg-Tomorrow-1923-Nolen-Plan-1.pdf; St. Petersburg Conceptual Plan (City of St. Petersburg, FL, May 1974), https://friendsofsaltcreek.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Conceptual-Plan-St.-Petersburg-1974.pdf: 31–32. Nolen suggested a parkway, using Salt Creek to connect gulf to bay with a chain of green "around the lower end of the peninsula." Voters rejected the Nolen plan, however, citing the imposition on private property rights as well as Nolen's reluctance to tighten emerging redline laws. One could blame this shortsightedness on the times. Nolen worked in the shadow of the Rosewood massacre, but fifty years later, the city reached the same conclusion.

Dusting off many of John Nolen's ideas, a 1974 Conceptual Plan also proposed a "green open space network," which included the "natural swale" between Tampa and Boca Ciega Bay. In short, a park along the Salt Creek channel.¹⁴R. Bruce Stephenson, Visions of Eden: Environmentalism, Urban Planning, and City Building in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1900–1915 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 65. Neither proposal, almost fifty years apart, made the leap to policy. A common good for the city (sustainable development, equitable access to open space) will lose to private, mostly white interests every time.

In the creek, I confront my own ambivalence towards Florida. I revel in the completely undeserved, over-the-top natural beauty. I also feel overmatched by the state's ugly, obdurate social history. When my own patience runs out, I drop a kayak near the mouth and make a favorite circuit. I enter by the harbor, paddle through the marina, then under the bridges at Third and Fourth Streets, into a hidden wilderness. Past the last dredge line, not far beyond the old trolley bridge, ice cream plant or seafood fast-freeze facility, the docks and crumbling piers give way to a mangrove tangle. Under Thrill Hill, Salt Creek is both wilder and more polluted. The paradox is striking, even in its own way, charismatic. The overlooked canopy serves as a bird sanctuary, where long legged waders roost and nest. Styrofoam and plastic bottles meld with mangrove prop roots. Fecal bacteria levels spike well past acceptable levels. We are still trying to figure out the cause—excrement from the street population, which the city pushed from parks in the tourist center to the poorer southside; guano, which accumulates in the concrete channel because seawalls and dam upstream block the tidal flow; or maybe broken sewer lines.

My route takes me roughly halfway to Lake Maggiore, mostly by industrialized lots left abandoned for speculation. Past the Dollar General and McDonalds, I push through the choking mangroves, then slip under another low-slung bridge at Eighteenth Avenue South. From here the creek opens into Bartlett Pond, a small aperture all but choked off due to overgrowth. I have seen snook roil below the black, murky surface. I've also seen a prize game fish, floating ominously on the surface of the muck. Osprey watch from their nests in the light posts by the athletic fields. Were it not for the hum of traffic, I could be in the 10,000 Islands of the Everglades. Instead I have found Nature in the heart of a city.

This is not where one expects to find a kayak. Citing water quality, Parks and Rec officials have ignored my suggestions to install a put-in off Bartlett Pond. So I engineer my own exit, grabbing the sewer line off a bridge on the opposite side, nudging a gunwale to the shoreline, and throwing my fifty-seven-year-old self onto the muddy bank. From Bartlett Park, I portage back across Fourth Street, past a gas station at the busy intersection of Fourth Street and Twenty-Second Avenue South, back to my once gay and racially-mixed, increasingly gentrified neighborhood. This circuit is not easy, scenic, accessible, or even encouraged. But I find the paddle into every day nature restorative. Wilderness has been erroneously thought of as an escape, rather than as engagement with the here and now. "In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau mused, wandering the clearcuts around Concord. The best wilderness is always close to home.¹⁵Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," The Atlantic, June 1862, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/.

Bartlett Pond

At Bartlett Park, tucked behind Twenty-Second Avenue and Fourth Street, Salt Creek opens into a muddy pool. This little pond adjoins two of St. Petersburg's main thoroughfares, but badly eutrophied and surrounded by mangroves, rarely merits a second look. My wife Julie has lived three blocks away and driven past Bartlett Park for twenty years, but did not know there was actually water behind the brush. A little fishing dock used to provide access on the east side, away from the street and from the park's interior. Vandals, or maybe the homeless on a cold night, burned the outer decking. Repairs to the dock then came slowly and were poorly done. After I called to complain, the parks department blocked off the charred sections, shortening the entire structure.

Environmental racism takes many forms—big and small, from legislation to microaggressions. A perspective at water level renders visible the "slow violence" of local policy, to use Rob Nixon's memorable phrase: the damage "that occurs gradually and out of sight … dispersed across time and space [and] typically not viewed as violence at all." Leisure may not register as a health concern. At least on the surface. But in this city, defined by slow violence, differences in life expectancy across race are measured by decades.¹⁶Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2; Sears et al., "Building Bridges," 123. Hypertension kills, green spaces heal.

St. Petersburg and Pinellas County pride themselves on their parks, yet the allocation of amenities follows a classic script in inequity. A Pinellas County park map is literally a reverse image of racial demographics. Docks served by the county's white residents include ADA-compliant handrails, fish cleaning stations, and overhead shelters to protect visitors from the harsh sun or sudden rain. Residents in south St. Pete's poorer Black neighborhood instead get this charred shell, over an overgrown pond my spouse never even knew existed—where health officials deemed the water unsafe to fish or swim.

Economics and social history shape the landscape, but because the history is forgotten and on-the-ground-economics vanish into everyday life, that landscape is tough to read. Bartlett Park embodies this contradiction. Behind the stump of a dock, tennis balls thwock back and forth at the St. Petersburg Tennis Center. Founded in 1926, the municipal courts are a vestige from the early twentieth century, when the neighborhood afforded vacation cottages for winter residents and renting tourists. The court's location seems anomalous, though like every other chapter of the city's history, it can be explained through the local lodestars of leisure and race. The center serves as a throwback to St. Petersburg's peak years as a populist paradise, when white northerners suffering from cold found relief in the mild climate, bay breezes, the foliage, and sport.

The same boom drew African Americans, mostly from across the South, who came here to work a growing service economy. The zoning measures set out to keep the Black population both accessible and cordoned off; these measures, from the middle third of the past century, limited where Blacks could work, live, and travel after dark. African Americans forged communities in neighborhoods that still resound in local lore—the Deuces, Pepper Town, Gas Plant, Campbell Park, Methodist Town. After the waning of de facto segregation, in the early 1970s, once tight communities fanned out across the southern side of the city.¹⁷Rosalie Peck and Jon Wilson, St. Petersburg's African American Neighborhoods (Charleston: History Press, 2008), 15–18; Sears et al., "Building Bridges," 108. Black families settled in formerly white neighborhoods on the south side of town, including Bartlett Park. White people moved out, abandoning the neighborhoods, then decades later returned to the same sections—displacing Black families who have now lived there for at least a generation.

The contradictions and shifting dynamics across time and space make Salt Creek difficult to explain. Lime green tennis balls lob over the chain link fence, down the sidewalk, and into the watershed. Environment and community relations cannot seem to find the same page. I struggle personally with my own blindness, fumbling with good intentions. After several years of my teaching along this waterway, graduate students culled together a self-produced book called Salt Creek Journal. During an Earth Day celebration at Bartlett Park, I palmed a copy of the paperback to my city council representative. She actually read the book, then convinced me to form a real group with the same name as the pedagogical fiction—Friends of Salt Creek. For several years, pulled into service, I led the group. We defined goals, calling ourselves a community group centered around nature, not so much preservationist. We met small, consistent successes. Foundation money flowed our way, though before we were logistically prepared to take on projects; we had a grant before we had a bank account. For clean ups, environmental groups like Tampa Bay Watch and the Tampa Bay Estuary Program (who do admirable work advocating for marine health) bring enthusiastic white volunteers from outside, though our constant reminder has been to build from within the neighborhood. The local Keep America Beautiful office wants to drop in cypress trees without asking people who live there.

Conventional narratives of environmental justice, Ellen Griffin Spears observes, have "left out many constituencies—women, workers, indigenous populations, people of color, immigrants—and as a result left out the social justice roots of environmental reform." And so we see the broader trends unfold in local arenas. White environmentalists are not "looking at the community," observes Jacqueline Hubbard, an African American attorney whose family has owned a lakeside home in the area for decades; the result "is a lack of communication and trust."¹⁸Ellen Griffith Spears, Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2020), 4; In my informal interview with Jacqueline Hubbard (Sept. 2, 2022), she mentioned the importance of environmentalists reaching out to churches and groups with well-established records in civil rights; my hope as the author of this article, an online tour, is to have a ready-made program for community presentation.

In retrospect, the lesson feels obvious: restoring the environment starts with community. The questions must always start with, "for whom?" For whom are we working? With whom and why? Bartlett Pond brings fault lines into stark relief. After a long period of asking, the city secured external funds to dredge the eutrophied pond. The mostly white Friends of Salt Creek continue to test waters around the park, hoping to locate the sources of fecal bacteria. But why now? Will the dredging serve the neighborhood's current, mostly Black residents? What will dredging a pond mean for those experiencing homelessness? Is "improvement" merely a bellwether of high-end development downstream? And how does one fight back cynicism? During a May Day clean up, an African American fraternity, the Sigma Betas, led a tree-planting effort that involved local teenage boys. When construction in the park cut off an irrigation line, however, the newly planted trees dried up and died. This story is nothing new. Landscape theorist Anne Whiston Spirn recounts similar frustrations with Philadelphia's Mill Creek. She describes how she led eighth graders along the creek's buried course, then asked the teenagers to develop a landscape plan. The students (more familiar with the realities of the streets than an Ivy League professor) refused to believe any plan they implemented would be suggested. "It won't happen," a student told her; "Someone will wreck it."¹⁹Spirn, "Restoring Mill Creek," 404. How do you explain to teenage boys in St. Petersburg, likewise, that the city failed to water plants they put in the ground?

Advocacy puts well intentioned theory to the test. We have to pull out the Thoreauvian "realometer." In our rhetoric and scholarly discourse, one might wax optimistic about bringing together environmental and social justice, building what my local Sierra Club chapter calls a "Black-Green" alliance. But in practice, we learn the hard way, starting by acknowledging the depth of the rift of our divides. We can get the grants but we cannot exact meaningful change. As a white-led group, Friends of Salt Creek seems to have a offered a strategic wedge for easy volunteerism; our group checked the box for "underserved community." Over summer 2021, we drew from a Tampa Bay Estuary Program grant to support an artist in residence program at the local community center. Four artists (two white, two African American) met under a central pavilion, working most closely with kids. The children here are predominantly Black, with many coming from foster homes. White kids go to tennis camp, steps away, taking after-school lessons for $200 per week. Kids from the adjacent Frank Pierce Center are not accustomed to access. The pavilion where we met backs onto the chain-link fences of the neatly rolled courts. At one point, a child passed a gate left open, usually locked, leading to the public court. "Wait," the child asked, "can we go in there?"

The same could be said for the pond. Our entry points to nature are shaped by economics, power, and race. The points of access disclose social boundaries. Where equivalent parks offered sheltered docks and piers, the only dock here is a burnt out stub. The city clears and maintains lakes in other parts of the city, opening code-compliant "windows" through the mangrove; here, the water remains hidden—out of sight and degraded.

This is no accident. Past Bartlett Park, through a hidden gap in the mangroves, Salt Creek cuts diagonally, continuing to run southeast, through one of the poorer parts of the city. Neighborhoods along the creek tumble precipitously from coastal-slash-suburban to impoverished. Median household incomes drop in predictable blocks, as one moves from waterfront from properties along Tampa Bay and west into the city: $78,875 in the mostly white Old Southeast neighborhood, to $44,474 in the Bartlett Park area, to $12,096 in the more African American Harbordale section. A closer analysis provides a much more nuanced intersection of economics and race, not captured by simple caricature, though a trend exists. The city-data website reflects what anyone who lives in St. Petersburg already knows: economics fall along sharp racial lines, effecting in turn, health, access to fresh food, experiences with education and law enforcement, the possibilities of upward mobility, and of course, green space.²⁰"St. Petersburg Florida: Income map, Earnings map, and Wages data," City-Data, Accessed March 31, 2023, https://www.city-data.com/income/income-St.-Petersburg-Florida.html. Structural racism study; see also Sears et al., "Building Bridges," 203-08.

Racial demographics and water quality intersect. At the end of legalized Jim Crow, as African Americans moved into the Harbordale neighborhood, the city let water quality sink. Low oxygen levels during the 1960s resulted in fish kills. Locals likened the smell at low tide to a badly operating sewage plant, the newspaper reported; outsiders (not residents) used the creek as an unlicensed trash pit. The rust colored water tested at almost eight times accepted levels for coliform bacteria. The city was no longer calling this waterway a stream or creek; in newspapers and press conferences the creek was now a "drainage area," or worse, a "ditch."²¹Willard Cox, "Tests Show [Red] 'Tide' Not Cause of Kills," The Evening Independent, July 6, 1965; "A Fishy Smell at Salt Creek," The Evening Independent, May 2, 1966; "Salt Creek Flow Sickly," The Evening Independent, Sept. 14, 1973; Bill Marden, "Trash, Tide A Problem," The Evening Independent, July 16, 1971. Racism did not cause environmental abuse; water quality was abysmal throughout Tampa Bay. A generation of activists, overwhelmingly white, have "saved the bay"—dramatically improving estuarine health. The poorer areas drained by Salt Creek, following script, are the last to see remediation.

Lake Maggiore

Semantics shape stewardship. At MLK (formerly Ninth, a major north-south street), a dam divides Salt Creek from Lake Maggiore. I am now in the middle-bottom part of the Pinellas Peninsula, on what used to be "Salt Lake," an estuarine habitat typical for coastal Florida. The name changed, however, alongside usage. In the 1920s real estate promoters began pitching new developments around a shallow, still tidal estuarine habitat. A fanciful origin story in the St. Petersburg Times provided the much-needed fiction. The newspaper, upholding real estate interests, staked a dubious claim that "Salt Lake" was discovered by Italian buccaneers, who called it "Maggiore" after a similar body of water on the Swiss-Italian border. In an act of rhetorical desalination, the hucksters presented the Italian as the earlier toponym; the sailors had first found fresh water, though mistakenly, the label "Salt Lake" stuck on later maps. Fiction and finances thus conspired to justify a dam. The Times cited a "peculiar condition" (or what the rest of us call tides) that allowed saltwater species to intrude from the bay. In 1930 a more permanent dam was built, making "Maggiore a freshwater lake for bass fishing." It would remain as such, until no one could recall when the brackish lake was part of an estuarine tidal run. By the 1980s the alligators were so pervasive that water skiers chased them off the slalom course. Neither bass nor gators belong in "Salt Lake," of course, as freshwater species have found their invasive niche in this badly translated Alpine lago.²²"Lake Maggiore Believed to be Named by Pirate—To Be a Beautiful Section," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, April 5, 1925; "Lake Maggiore Dam Proposed," St. Petersburg (FL) Independent, Sept. 25, 1930. I am indebted to Jack E. Davis, who grew up on Lake Maggiore and who read a draft of this essay, for the observation about water skiing.

The folly, this not-just-semantic amnesia, has been expensive. Newspapers chronicle a twenty or thirty year cycle of restoration and waste. Eutrophication, fish kill, dredge Crisis, quick fix, repeat. In 1940, ten years after construction of the new dam, the city's Evening Independent would report:

City sanitation crews were burying hundreds of pounds of dead mullet and trout along the eastern shore of Lake Maggiore where they washed up after being killed by what [is] believed to be excessive vegetation gases in the shallow waters of the lake.

The newspaper described a horrific scene. Fish up to two feet long, panting in the grass; sanitation workers removing the rotting carcasses; the city vowing to install a screen to keep saltwater species out of the now-freshwater lake. Again, in 1963, the state game commission concludes that ecologically, the lake has become "old and not conducive to bass reproduction." Fish kills returned in 1968 and 1970, when the city detected chloride, a negatively charged ion that indicated "somehow salt water was getting into" Maggiore. In 1991, the headlines repeat: "Lake Maggiore Sick from Pollution," this time from high concentrations of run-off nitrogen and phosphorous. The following year, sanitation workers hauled off three-hundred pounds of dead menhaden (a coastal and estuarine species), snook, redfish, and yellow fin. Starting in 2004, the city spent two years scraping 1.3 million tons of sediment from the lake bottom. Trucks ran sixteen hours a day, five days a week, transferring the muck to a sod farm and developing area in the swampier part of the county's north end. After high levels of arsenic were detected in the soil, however, the city found itself in a sticky legal battle with the developer who used the fill, eventually settling with a million dollar contamination claim.²³"Tons of Fish Die in Lake Maggiore," The Evening Independent Aug. 1, 1940; "Lake Maggiore: Fight Against Aging," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, June 25, 1971; Sue Landry, "Lake Maggiore Sick from Pollution," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Jan. 16, 1991; "Natural, Normal Fish Kill Hits Lake," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Nov. 2, 1992; Waveney Ann Moore, "Contaminated Soil to Cost St. Petersburg $1 million, 15 Years after Dredging Project," Tampa Bay (FL) Times, April 12, 2019; Southwest Florida Water Management District, "Final Phase of Lake Maggiore Restoration Project in Full Swing," Water Matters, May–June 2005, https://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/blog/watermatters-magazine/11/final-phase-lake-maggiore-restoration-project-full-swing. Despite the added cost, toxicity, and history of repeating problems, officials declared victory. "This project attempts to set back the clock on a long history of water quality problems at Lake Maggiore," the Southwest Florida Water Management District (Swiftmud) triumphantly claimed. The irony is deafening. A plan has been set in place, with no heed for the existing pattern of waste. If the clock was "set back," as Swiftmud boasts, then only for the same problems to repeat.²⁴Water Matters, "Final Phase."

The lake remains awash in contradiction, mismanaged and lexically confused. The dam along MLK seeks to split salt and fresh water. Circle south, past some houses, by a ­­fire station, and a mostly abandoned park. Spin further southwest and much of the land is sheltered by a beloved sanctuary, Boyd Hill Nature Preserve. Along the same tract, adjacent to the preserve, a city dump turns over mulch. At the base of Twenty-Second Street, historically the central corridor for St. Petersburg's African American population, sits a park. The north section fronts Maggiore Shores, originally a white neighborhood, then middle-to-upper-class Black, and today, increasingly white again. Each of the stakeholders holds a claim to the park—some smaller, some larger. Mostly white environmentalists aligned with Boyd Hill argue for removing the dam and restoring the ebb and flow of "Salt Lake." Older home owners in the Maggiore Shores neighborhood (to the north) want cattails around the edges cleared to improve their view; the current water management plan keeps salinity down and serves as flood protection. The only unifying factor is the cattails circling the lake, indicating low water quality. The common denominator is eutrophication; the argument is how to solve the problem. Renamed with a faux history, mispronounced, and managed against its natural flow, this once-tidal lake suffers from being something it is not.

Willow Marsh

On the south shore of the same Lake Maggiore, Salt Creek changes names (again). Then it disappears (again). The precise point of disappearance, ironically, occurs in a beloved nature park, Boyd Hill Nature Preserve, at one of the finest visual prospects in the entire city. A boardwalk on the Willow Marsh Trail faces North, towards downtown. Off in the distance, beyond the lake, cumulus clouds tower over one another, dramatically framing a vast blue horizon and restless skyline. Anhinga roost in a nearby island, and below, any number of species of ducks, moorhen and long-legged waders nudge through spatterdock and duckweed. Common sights are marsh rabbits and alligators, the mother gator often with her yellow-striped young brood. The visitor's map to the preserve marks this particular boardwalk as part of the Willow Marsh Trail, which presumably would make this area "Willow Marsh." Technically, the water forms part of a Salt Creek branch. Trail maps to the preserve, however, do not even mark a stream.

City nature has no place in a "nature preserve." At a point where an urban waterway should be most visible, even celebrated, the comedy of hide-and-seek intensifies. A waterway (now flowing due South) switches names. By the semantically confused lake, it disappears from the map altogether. Why? Because discursive "Nature" and the natural hydrology do not align. Near the Boyd Hill visitors center, hikers have unknowingly crossed Salt Creek. It is the little brook that trickles past an outdoor classroom, by the raptor rehabilitation center, and eventually reaches back to the edge of the nature preserve, where it runs under a chain link fence. Here, the creek becomes a culvert. And with subtle semantic shift, stewardship declines.

The aquatic thread snaps. We lose the connection. In a wealthy suburban neighborhood, the headwaters of Salt Creek runs through a maze of backyard overgrowth, accessible only with permission. To trace the creek now is to trespass. Care falls to individual whim or the conscience of private owners. One particularly zealous environmentalist has dutifully planted native cypress in the bottom, hoping to stabilize the sandy banks and restore habitat; elsewhere, the low-lying area remains mostly a jungle of invasive taro and wild ginger. Further south, where the planner John Nolen proposed a green corridor along the area's natural swale, the St. Petersburg Country Club has engineered the creek's headwaters into a series of water hazards for its golf course. Landscapers mow up to the edges of the artificial ponds along the golf course's back nine.

The hydrology has become impossible to visualize as one piece. Because the waterway is fragmented, no one connects the link from fourteenth fairway to Tampa Bay. Grass clippings run straight into the ditch, Lake Maggiore, into Salt Creek, and eventually into our beloved bay—feeding algae and toxic blooms that have undermined our quality of life, ruined countless fishing trips, and cost the state dearly in tourist revenue.²⁵ The Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council set the loss of tourism revenue for a 2018 red tide bloom at $130.6 million; see The Ripple Effects of Florida Red Tide, (Pinellas Park, FL: Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council, 2019), https://tbrpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-Economic-Ripple-Effects-of-Florida-Red-Tide_unsigned.pdf; A more thorough study set the loss for the same bloom at double the cost, $317 million, see João-Pedro Ferreira, et al. "Impact of Red Tide in Peer-to-Peer Accommodations: A Multi-Regional Input-Output Model," Tourism Economics, March 1, 2022, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548166211068276. The neglected stream passes over a dingy concrete weir, amounting to little more than a one-stroke penalty for golfers and repository for lost Titleists.

Again, the aquatic thread splits. There are actually two larger branches feeding Lake Maggiore, the second no easier to trace. In its western course, the stream feeds a lake from a city tract along Dell Holmes Park. From here, it runs due West down a channel, where it parallels a public golf driving range. Canoes and kayaks rarely paddle this channel. The alligators are unusually large. One could go missing here altogether. If I am to put in at Lake Maggiore, I double check my life preserver.

The unnamed, culverted west branch cuts anonymously across public land. I can paddle upstream, with a city mulch processing plant to the left, and a drop-off site for brush to the right. The stream parallels the east-west running Twenty-Sixth Avenue South. Chain-link divides the landfill and private property, in this case two of the more prosperous historically Black churches in the city—St. Augustine's Episcopal and McCabe United Methodist. The location of these churches, or more accurately their relocation, figures into the last half century of city history. Both congregations served Jim Crow neighborhoods closer to the center of town, the middle class Campbell Park and poorer Gas Plant communities. Both neighborhoods were razed in the 1970s and 80s. Following a national trend, in which federal roads targeted Black areas, Interstate i-175 cut the Campbell Park neighborhood in half, running straight over homes where pillars of the African American community lived.

Ten years later, as if by design, the city razed the Gas Plant in the name of urban renewal, leveling a neighborhood to construct a domed stadium. The Tampa Bay Rays (Raze?) now play in the dome, Tropicana Field. But the team's owners (buttressed by city government and a newspaper that depends upon sports for daily copy) declare the thirty-year-old dome obsolete. Once again, the area awaits real estate redevelopment, with little probable return for the people displaced under the banner of "urban renewal" and promises to "get it right." St. Augustine's Episcopal relocated during the 1970s, moving from property now near the interstate, away from a community that has since scattered, and rebuilding on the rich soil of a former nursery near the head of Salt Creek's long swale.

Lake Eli

Where the creek ends remains an open question. According to an environmentalist friend who lives along the south shores of Lake Maggiore, the creek was historically sheet flow, tracing without record or immediate course through pine flatwoods. If I push a kayak further west, past Lake Eli, I trace the drainage ditch, almost to the churches that run along Twenty-Sixth Avenue. Just north of an arrow-straight culvert alongside the parking lot of McCabe United Methodist, the stream unceremoniously ends. The culvert takes a sharp turn at the boundary of church and city land, then runs north, along a straight ditch to north-south running Twenty-Sixth Street. On the other side of the street, Salt Creek finally disappears into underground maze of sewers. And from there, who knows?

Conclusion—Fragmented Headwaters

McCabe's presence at the headwaters embodies a painful chapter of St. Petersburg's history. The congregation of this century old church coalesced around segregated areas, along the eastern edge of the Gas Plant neighborhood. The congregants built the former church themselves, laying their spiritual home on the Black side of a segregation boundary. The interstate and dome destroyed the old structure, and today, the site is now a nondescript concrete parking garage. The current pastor, Reverend Jana Perkins-Hall, speaks clearly of the betrayal:

Black people got together, during that particular time of economic disenfranchisement, pooled their resources and physically built, brick by brick, this place of worship. They were there for fifty years before they were relocated . . . For what?

Perkins-Hall, though not a native, speaks powerfully on behalf of her parishioners: "So what kind of message does that send — spiritually, emotionally, psychologically — to the people who worked for free? That now, in place of a community they called home, is a parking garage?" There is no historical marker, even though stories continue to tell, "that this was once a place of sacred worship." The dislocation remains an unacknowledged erasure. A more visible reminder would at least acknowledge the hurt.²⁶Jana Perkins-Hall spoke at a community forum about Booker Creek and the Tropicana Field site redevelopment, held at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus on Feb. 15, 2019; see, Anna Maria Lineburger, Kelly Kennedy, and Dyllan Furness, ed., Voices of Booker Creek (St. Petersburg: University of South Florida, 2020), 29–30. Just as the teenage boy said to the Penn professor Anne Whiston Spirn: "someone will wreck it."

McCabe United Methodist Church

At McCabe, the unbaptized remnants of Salt Creek disappear into a sewer line, across from the church, at the corner of Twenty-Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street. It is smack-dab in the middle Pinellas County, just east of the low sand ridge (a relic dune) that divides the peninsula. How and where the waters ran before development remains a question. Early histories and even the occasional map suggest that the outer reaches of Salt Creek mingled with a bayou to the west, possibly trading headwaters from both the swamp and bay' this memory of an earlier hydrology, however, remains repressed.²⁷Walter Fuller, St. Petersburg and Its People (St. Petersburg: Great Outdoors Publishing Co., 1972), 5. The creek might have run straight across, serving as a liquid connector now lost.

Cities that bury their habitats sacrifice a bit of collective soul. Environmentalists in Los Angeles lament the failure to recognize the human, natural, and even cinematic history of the concretized Los Angeles River. Tourists are drawn to the Fleet River. New Yorkers still want to see the waters that bubbled under Minetta Street in lower Manhattan, and my archaeologist-art history friend clearly felt a connection when she stumbled onto the Eriadnos. With sea level rise, social scientists attend to the psychic costs of disappearing landscapes, citing what they call solastagia or "environmental grief."²⁸Ellis Neville and Ashlee Cunsolo. "Hope and Mourning in the Anthropocene: Understanding Ecological Grief," The Conversation, April 4, 2018, https://theconversation.com/hope-and-mourning-in-the-anthropocene-understanding-ecological-grief-88630; Gren Albrecht et al., "Solastagia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change," Australasian psychiatry: Bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 15 (2007); Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville R. Ellis, "Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss," Nature Climate Change 8 no. 3 (2018): 275–281; L.P. Galway , T. Beery, K. Jones-Casey, K. Tasala "Mapping the Solastalgia Literature: A Scoping Review Study." Internal Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16:15 (July 2019). The social-historical context adds another layer. My partner Julie walked Birmingham's Village Creek in an effort to connect place and current-day race relations in this iconic civil rights setting. When I trace Salt Creek, I too seek this connection.

Hydrologic systems carry us into our history. They uncover buried pasts, helping us to explain unhealthy divides. Despite Florida's myths of paradise, we remain disconnected from the natural world, from the past that has built itself around us, from one another. Environmentalism needs community, and we best find community in a city's liquid heart. We need to know where the waters run.

About the Author

Thomas Hallock received his PhD from New York University. He is the author of From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749–1826 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and the co-editor of Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmilian, 2008), William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters and Unpublished Manuscripts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), and Travels on the St. Johns River: John and William Bartram (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2016). He recently published a series of travel and place-based essays that explain why he loves teaching the American literature survey, A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022).

Preface

Digging Our Own Graves, first published in 1987, concluded with an ominous prediction: "Black lung disease awaits the younger generation of coal miners who are now at work underground." Would that I had been wrong! Today, not only do coal miners still suffer from this lethal but preventable lung disease, they do so at younger ages, some even in their thirties, and they are contracting the most advanced form of black lung at the highest rates ever recorded. More than fifty years after the US Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 imposed a respirable dust standard on the coal industry, designed to prevent black lung, why do such carnage and suffering persist? This updated version of the original book seeks answers to that question.

My own introduction to black lung began in the winter of 1971–1972, when I came to West Virginia to work for the Black Lung Association. I was barely twenty years old. Extraordinary political transformations were in the making: coal miners, miners' wives, and widows were challenging powerful institutions that had once commanded their acquiescence—the hierarchy of the United Mine Workers, the coal operators' association, county political machines, and the Social Security Administration.¹The language of "miners' wives and widows" implies that all miners are male. However, since at the least the 1970s, women have worked in the mines, including underground, albeit in small numbers. I use the language of "wives and widows" because most black lung activists use this language in their organizing and their discussion of black lung compensation (e.g., "widows' claims"). For a young college student from the Midwest, these developments in the mountains of West Virginia beckoned with a romantic excitement. Besides, the mountains were my ancestral homeplace; now I could return to them, not on a summer vacation in the backseat of the family car, but on my own.

Working with the older coal miners and impatient young organizers who made up the Black Lung Association at that time was a formative political experience for me. Coming from a long line of southern subsistence farmers and circuit-riding preachers, I was instilled with a righteous, if vague, sense of populism that made me eager to join the struggles of "working people." But neither my political heritage nor my exposure to campus radicals prepared me for what I found in the coalfields of West Virginia: above all, the stark boundaries and clear perceptions of class antagonism. Virtually every coal miner over the age of sixty-five proudly claimed to have "fought in the battle of Blair Mountain with a machine gun" in 1921 to bring the union into southern West Virginia. They were up against the combined forces of coal company guards, the state police, county sheriffs and their deputies, aerial bombers, and, ultimately, the US Army. I was dumbfounded.

Fortunately, it didn't occur to me to write about any of these experiences until my age and the changing times helped to deepen my understanding of what they might mean. In 1978, more than six years after I had first worked for the Black Lung Association, I began the research for a dissertation on the black lung movement. The political atmosphere was altogether different. A reform movement in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) had arisen, succeeded in a special election for leadership of the union, then disintegrated; the black lung movement had seemingly disappeared; and a storm of reaction was sweeping the Appalachian coalfields. The setbacks were frightening, but they made possible a more sober and critical perspective on the earlier period of upheaval.

I began this book as a labor history, asking obvious questions that seemed most important at the time: Why did the movement end this way? What did it accomplish? How did it fail? Who or what was to blame? As I dug deeper into the history of the black lung movement, however, these apparently clear-cut questions about victories and defeats began to seem ambiguous, even misleading. The assessment of whether the movement had succeeded or failed depended a great deal on whose goals were used as the standard of measurement—and goals varied considerably among different participants. Moreover, what the larger political culture defined as the movement's greatest accomplishments often turned out to be mainly symbolic; they represented the visible outcomes of formal processes of reform (the passage of legislation, for example), but in and of themselves did not necessarily signify substantial and lasting change. The simplicity of my original questions faded as the labels of victory and defeat, success and failure, appeared more and more ephemeral. The central analytical problems increasingly seemed to involve the maddening complexity of social change itself, which prevented any person or group from controlling the course or outcomes of this movement.

As I delved further into the reforms sought and controversies engendered by the black lung movement, it became apparent that the movement was more than an important episode of labor resistance. At issue in the struggles over black lung, which have reemerged today, is not only how to prevent the disease or compensate those affected by it but also the very definition of black lung. Frequently, the most ideologically powerful opponents that miners have faced in their successive surges of activism are not coal operators or conservative politicians but physicians. At the center of the black lung controversy has been a profound power struggle between miners and physicians over who will control the definition of this disease.²See Daniel M. Fox and Judith F. Stone, "Black Lung: Miners' Militancy and Medical Uncertainty, 1968–1972," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 54, no. 1 (1980): 43–63, for an early framing of the black lung struggle as between miners and physicians over the definition of disease. Their emphasis on medical uncertainty differs from the analysis in my own article, which came out during the same time period: Barbara Ellen Smith, "Black Lung: The Social Production of Disease," International Journal of Health Services 11, no. 3 (1981): 343–359.

As a result of these and other shifts in emphasis, this book is a hybrid. It draws on diverse theoretical traditions in order to analyze not only the organization and development of the black lung movement, but also the history and conflict that underlie the brutal fact of coal miners' diseased bodies. Beginning with how and why black lung originates in the workplace, this book also explores the medical history of the disease and the conflicting meanings that miners and certain physicians, lawyers, and government administrators invest in black lung.

After moving away to a self-imposed exile some twenty-five years ago, I live once again in West Virginia. Contrasts with the 1970s heyday of working-class activism are evident throughout the rural landscape of abandoned gas stations, rusted coal tipples, and boarded-up union halls. The differences are personal as well: when I interviewed black lung activists in the 1970s, I was the age of their daughters and granddaughters; today, I am eligible for Medicare. As I conducted additional interviews in 2019, mostly with retired coal miners close to my age, their bodies as well as their words spoke the story of black lung disease and the physical toll of hard-labor jobs. Conditioned as a white woman to thinking of my embodiment primarily in terms of gender, I was struck again and again by how the privileges of class have shielded me from harm and become subsumed into my body. This updated and revised book, which includes two new chapters and a moving, evocative photo gallery by Earl Dotter, thus entails not only additional research into medical, legal, and economic materials relevant to black lung, but also historical reckonings both political and personal.

Today, as I write this preface, the power relations that miners experience on the job are dangerously asymmetrical, and their outcomes grim. Coal miners in southern West Virginia, once the stronghold of the UMWA in central Appalachia, where those who crossed a picket line invited ostracism if not assault, now work nonunion. Coal companies, facing shrinking domestic markets and in many instances bankruptcy, force workers, coal communities, and American taxpayers to bear the costs of their decline. Black lung can only be fully understood as part of this historical moment, when resistance, remarkably, persists. Digging Our Own Graves analyzes the dreadful resurgence of black lung within the long history of efforts to legitimate this disease and make it visible, prevent black lung in the workplaces where it is produced, and extend dignity and a measure of justice to those for whom prevention comes too late.

Conclusion: Class Power, Scientific Authority, and State Regulation

Nearly two centuries have passed since Dr. James Gregory opened up the lifeless body of John Hogg and hypothesized a connection between the miner's blackened lungs, his respiratory disability in later life, his occupation, and his death. For a time, physicians in Britain and the United States continued to investigate the relationship between occupational exposures and miners' respiratory distress. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, during a period of tight corporate control in the Appalachian coalfields and an increasingly restrictive scientific understanding of disease, black lung began to disappear from the medical literature of both countries. In the United States, coal miners eventually precipitated renewed medical attention to black lung by winning a union-controlled health care plan for themselves and their families. Even so, coal workers' pneumoconiosis—much less the broader ensemble of illnesses called black lung—was not accepted as a legitimate, occupationally related disease by the medical profession as a whole.³Journalistic and some scientific accounts equate coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) with black lung. However, an essential component of the black lung movement was miners' and their families' struggle to broaden the definition, beyond CWP, of miners' disabling, occupationally related lung disease. Research by physicians and other scientists familiar with and sympathetic to miners and their health has validated this broader definition. See, for example, Edward L. Petsonk, Cecile Rose, and Robert Cohen, "Coal Mine Dust Lung Disease: New Lessons from an Old Exposure," American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 187, no. 11 (2013): 1178–85. Formal recognition required collective political intervention by coal miners themselves.

Even as social and economic factors have impinged on the medical construction of black lung, so have they shaped the actual production of disease. Black lung originates not simply from the physical presence of dust in coal mines, but from the relative power and respective actions of miners and operators, which influence conditions in the workplace. Miners' eventual success in unionization enhanced their collective power in the workplace, but, depending on UMWA leaders' priorities, unionism at times paradoxically undermined miners' capacity to make that workplace healthy and safe. In the years after World War II, the pact between larger operators and the UMWA produced unimpeded mechanization of the production process, high levels of unemployment, forced migration, and occupational death and disability from black lung. However, that industrial collaboration also produced massive rank-and-file upheaval and a successful effort to reform the union. In the present moment, union weakness and miners' lack of bargaining leverage in the workplace, combined with certain operators' endgame maneuvers to extract coal from thinner seams even while pressing for high levels of labor productivity, once again intensify the extent and severity of the disease.

The virulence of black lung today—fifty years after it was supposedly destined for elimination—does not diminish what coal miners, their families, and their allies accomplished in the past. Rather, it attests to the enduring realities of labor exploitation that the black lung movement episodically managed to contest. For its constituents, the movement achieved a unique and unprecedented federal compensation program. Approximately half a million miners and widows have received compensation under the federal black lung program; especially for those ineligible for a pension or other benefits, the monthly payments can mean the difference between destitution and modest survival.⁴This estimate of the number of black lung beneficiaries is extrapolated from data on the number of claims filed each year, changing approval rates, the annual total cost of claims, and, for some years, reports from the administering federal agency. See, for example, Social Security Administration, Annual Statistical Supplement to the Social Security Bulletin, 2016 (Washington, DC, 2017), Table 9. Beneficiaries who are miners and those who are widows, added together, do not equal the total number of miners judged disabled by black lung, as a widow may receive her husband's benefits after his death. Further, the number of beneficiaries is reported each year as a rolling total, and thus cannot be summed. The coronavirus interrupted my efforts to obtain more precise data. As of December 2018, an individual beneficiary is entitled to receive $660/month, which increases up to a maximum of $1,320 for those with three or more dependents. US Department of Labor, Division of Coal Mine Workers' Compensation, "Benefit Rates Under Part C, 1973–2018," accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.dol.gov/owcp/dcmwc/statistics/PastPartCBenefitRates.htm. The respirable dust standard and other disease prevention measures in the US Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 are also attributable to the black lung movement. As one element in a larger upheaval throughout the coalfields, the movement contributed as well to the rank-and-file takeover of the United Mine Workers of America and renewal of union leaders' critical attention to occupational safety and health.

Originally and essentially, however, the black lung movement was a struggle over the recognition and, more implicitly, causation of an occupational disease. What seemed at first a straightforward task— achieving legal inclusion of a "new" dust disease under the workers' compensation system—turned out to be a far more complex undertaking. Miners and other activists learned early on that "black lung," as refracted through the lens of scientific medicine, was quite different from the disease for which they sought recognition, compensation, and prevention. In a struggle that has lasted more than fifty years, activists have persistently challenged physicians, lawyers, and policymakers over the meaning of this disease; at different times, they have been able to replace the restrictive scientific construction of a rarely disabling coal workers' pneumoconiosis with their own definition of "black lung." Although focused on arcane disputes over diagnostic methods, disability standards, legal presumptions, and other issues, this conflict over the definition and causation of black lung is intensely political: it involves the ideological content of medicine's view of disease, including the technical perspective that narrows causation to the inhalation of dust, and the powerful role of physicians in labeling work-related disability as legitimate. On the outcome of such conflict rests financial liability for the coal industry that potentially ranges into billions of dollars. The legacy of black lung activism thus entails unsettling questions about the relationship between scientific and technical knowledge, state regulation, and the exercise of class power.

It should be stressed at the outset that not all physicians subscribe to a narrow or purely technical understanding of black lung: recall the role of three doctors (Buff, Rasmussen, and Wells) in the first black lung mobilization during 1968 to 1969 in West Virginia. Dr. Donald Rasmussen continued to work with and advocate for coal miner patients out of his pulmonary lab in Beckley, West Virginia, for five decades, up until his death in 2015.⁵Sam Roberts, "Dr. Donald L. Rasmussen, Crusader for Miners' Health, Dies at 87," New York Times, August 2, 2015, accessed September 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/health/research/dr-donald-l-rasmussen-crusader-for-coal-miners-health-dies-at-87.html. Rasmussen's mantle now falls on Dr. Robert Cohen, a pulmonologist who directs the occupational lung disease unit at Northwestern University and frequently testifies before Congress on miners' behalf.⁶Dr. Cohen testified during the hearings on black lung, "Breathless and Betrayed." See "What is MHSA Doing to Protect Miners from the Resurgence of Black Lung Disease?" YouTube video, 2:58:39, June 20, 2019, House Committee on Education and Labor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJUDcTf0a_g. Other physicians in the coalfields, such as Drs. Gregory Wagner and Brandon Crum, have devoted much of their professional lives to caring for coal miners with lung disease. After practicing medicine at a clinic on Cabin Creek (West Virginia), Wagner eventually came to direct Respiratory Disease Studies at NIOSH when that agency issued the criteria document that legitimated a broad definition of black lung, inclusive of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and recommended much lower limits on miners' exposure to coal dust and silica.⁷NIOSH, Criteria for a Recommended Standard: Occupational Exposure to Respirable Coal Mine Dust, publication no. 95–106 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1995), xxii, https:// www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/95-106/default.html. Crum, a radiologist—and, not coincidentally, former coal miner—was first to sound the alarm over black lung's escalating severity, which in 2014 he began detecting among his patients in eastern Kentucky. Four years later, the coal-industry-beholden state legislature responded by disqualifying him from reading X-rays for miners' workers' compensation claims.⁸Austyn Gaffney, "As Black Lung Strikes Younger Coal Miners, Kentucky Restricts Medical Benefits," NRDC, September 24, 2018, accessed September 29, 2018, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/black-lung-strikes-younger-coal-miners-kentucky-restricts-medical-benefits.

Apart from such individual physicians' political and medical predispositions, however, there remain epistemological tendencies within scientific medicine that militate against the understanding of disease advanced by black lung activists.⁹This summary of miners' perspectives on the origins of black lung and the role of physicians in advocating a restrictive view of work-related, compensable disease is based on the author's interviews and observations in southern West Virginia at different moments during the past five decades. Within the restrictive medical viewpoint that requires conclusive, scientific proof of occupational causation, black lung is in fact coal workers' pneumoconiosis, a single clinical entity, disabling only in advanced and, even today, relatively rare stages. The disease acquires legitimacy—indeed, effectively comes into existence—only when visible to trained personnel viewing objective diagnostic evidence, that is, X-rays, of an individual miner's lungs. The thousands of miners who believe themselves disabled by black lung yet exhibit no X-ray evidence of advanced CWP might legitimately be considered "disabled"—if the quantitative results of certain tests confirm such a condition. However, the origin of their disability is nonoccupational, above all their own cigarette smoking, or, if nonsmokers, other sources outside the workplace. Although this scientific definition of disease is quite different from physicians' earlier construction of a benign "miners' asthma," the result, in the eyes of many victims, is the same: black lung is trivialized. What many miners view as a collective problem becomes, from the perspective of scientific medicine, individual, quantifiable cases. What they experience as part of the shared social world of coal mining becomes occasional, biological events. What they attribute to their class relationship with the coal operators becomes the product of a single physical agent, dust. In sum, what is collective becomes individual, what is social becomes biological, what is produced by human action becomes the outcome of inert material.

Certain tendencies intrinsic to clinical medical practice are also at stake in the seemingly incommensurable perspectives of miners and certain physicians. Scientific medicine situates disease spatially, within the individual body, and temporally, at the point when signs, symptoms, or other physical alterations develop. Disease is ahistorical as well as asocial; it has no history except a "natural," that is, physical, history. It is said to exist when experienced by the individual and diagnosed by the physician, not at the point when it is being produced. The possibilities for prevention are thus constrained within the very definition of disease.¹⁰Howard S. Berliner and J. Warren Salmon, "The Holistic Health Movement and Scientific Medicine: The Naked and the Dead," Socialist Review 9, no. 1 (January–February 1979): 31–52.

Clinical medicine reflects this understanding of disease on a practical level: individual patients present the physician with their distinctive symptoms and complaints; they appear as random, disconnected "cases," and they are granted therapeutic treatment as individuals. There is no social meaning to disease in the sense of an internal relationship between social relations and the individual experience of ill health; primarily individual behaviors, such as diet, exercise, and smoking habits, command attention. Yet, in quantifying disability and allocating it to occupational or nonoccupational sources, physicians implicitly assess the conditions in which miners have lived and worked all their lives. That most physicians have never been in a coal mine (much less worked in one), and that some have never even been in the coalfields, serves to intensify the conflict between physicians and coal miners, who experience the superior legitimacy automatically granted scientific medical knowledge as a complex and powerful form of social control.

The authority of physicians to pronounce miners "healthy" or "disabled" carries important financial consequences. In the context of federal black lung compensation, doctors' assessments of coal miners' health can be decisive in the award or denial of financial benefits that are allocated in large part according to medical eligibility criteria. Doctors act as gatekeepers in a more generic sense as well: they control access to the "sick role," the sole avenue by which adults may legitimately escape the daily responsibilities of their class, race, and gender.¹¹See Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951). Parsons's conceptualization of the sick role was neither class nor historically specific. For coal miners, as for other workers, the preeminent requirement of their class position is to perform wage labor. Medical criteria for assessing disability (and determining compensation eligibility) that take as the standard for health the functional capacity to work explicitly enforce this requirement. Even if damaged by work, coal miners still must provide medically sanctioned evidence of their "total disability"—i.e., complete inability to continue working—in order to receive financial compensation and legitimate relief from wage labor. In pushing against the limits of this compensation policy, miners and their families implicitly contest not only the ideological authority of physicians to define disease and assess disability; they ultimately threaten the economic power of coal operators by pressing for a broad definition of black lung and relaxed standard of disability that would provide unhealthy miners an alternative to labor in the mines.

This convergence between the restrictive scientific view of black lung and the economic interests of the coal industry is, for many miners and their families, an ultimate source of distrust and conflict with physicians. The narrow definition of disabling black lung as a relatively rare, complicated pneumoconiosis is highly functional to the industry: it circumscribes the scope of occupational lung disease and correspondingly diminishes both the cost of compensation benefits and the importance of prevention. In the context of policy formation, scientific medicine plays a mediating role between the interests of the coal industry and the actions of the state. It facilitates apparent distance between corporate power and public policy, and seems to ground political decision-making in the neutral, technical knowledge of a third party.

The lessons of the protracted struggle over black lung disease encompass both caution and inspiration, loss and hope. In an era of science denialism, when defense of factual truths and scientific knowledge seems obviously necessary, the case of black lung still stands as a warning about the presumed neutrality and appropriate scope of scientific and technical solutions: beware of technical fixes for problems that ultimately derive from economic exploitation and grossly unequal political power. Activists' original quest for redress through the workers' compensation system offers a related caution: the sprawling administrative machinery of the state, which presents the customary, sanctioned route for institutionalizing reform, entails embedded interests that can thwart activists' aims even as it seems to grant their demands. Finally, the long history of black lung suggests that effective prevention of occupational disease, injury, and death ultimately resides in the ever-changing power relations of the workplace and workers' collective, organized capacity to defend themselves. For these and many other reasons, victories are never secure, achieved once and for all; they must be defended, expanded, critiqued, and revised, as black lung activists have doggedly done for some five decades now.

Today, the industry that for more than a century has defined central Appalachia is dying. Those who would chart a post-coal future must grapple with the industry's legacy of incalculable human and environmental destruction, but they would do well to learn from the additional legacy of coal mining families' solidarity and resistance. Ever since the first investors laid claim to the coal of Appalachia, the people of this region have been revolting in various forms against the appropriation of their land, their labor, and even their lives. Those who fought in the black lung movement are both heirs and contributors to this long history of resistance. Today, many miners pay the cost of coal production in the currency of their very breath, but they also continue to resist. Danny Whitt: "We don't never give up. You know when I'll stop? When the last breath leaves my body."¹²Author's interview with Danny Whitt, Matewan, WV, September 4, 2019.

About the Author

Barbara Ellen Smith is professor emerita of women's and gender studies in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Tech. She has been active in and writing about movements for social and economic justice in Appalachia and the US South for more than 45 years. Her recent publications include a co-edited book with Stephen L. Fisher, Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia (University of Illinois, 2012) and Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease (Haymarket Books, 2020).

Water Graves investigates how contemporary writers and artists of the greater Caribbean (such as Jason deCaires Taylor) reinvest sites of racialized violence and environmental degradation—as so many manifestations of "unritual"—with a new sense of the sacred that allows for remembrance and re-humanization. Rituals—be they initiations, funerary rites, or collective acts of remembrance—confer "humanity" on those who practice them and sacredness on the places of these practices. The unritual comprises moments and spaces of desecration. Unritual occurs when rituals are ignored, violently suppressed or obstructed outright, and where so-called "natural" spaces are commodified, exploited, and profaned. Closely appended to Loichot's unritual are the notions of "undead" and "unrest"; the liminal zone of (non)being they demarcate emphasizes the unritual's alienating, unsettling, and dehumanizing effects before and beyond the grave.

Off the coast of Grenada, several meters below the Caribbean surface, stands Jason deCaires Taylor's Vicissitudes. It is an installation of statues which, at first glimpse, shows a group of men and women arranged in a large circle, holding hands as they gaze outward along the ocean floor. The figures bear bright red, pink, and violet protrusions of coral, undulating gossamers of seaweed, and the occasional sea star. The texture and topography of these statues' skin—their pores, wrinkles, and scars—provide the ideal environment for aquatic life to take root and repopulate this portion of ocean floor. Vicissitudes also offers another, more haunting kind of repopulation, this time by the specters of the Triangular Trade: the innumerable captives thrown overboard after dying in transit during the Atlantic crossing and condemned to perish, away from ancestral lands and families that could offer funerary rites or remembrance. As the installation confronts the degradation of coral environments, its underwater surroundings also beckon and materialize the (un)dead of the African Diaspora whose memory—likewise rarefied and threatened—inhabits these statues alongside the coral. Vicissitudes, a monument that explores the creative and memorial agency of Caribbean underwater spaces, serves as one of many objects that Valérie Loichot examines in her book, Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean.

An interdisciplinary exegesis in the fields of Postcolonial Studies, Caribbean Studies, African Diaspora Studies and Ecocriticism, Water Graves investigates objects across many mediums that, like Vicissitudes, work through or heal the effects of unritual. The oeuvre of poet-philosopher Edouard Glissant serves as the opening and the theoretical springboard for the rest of the book. Here, Loichot engages the notion of "relational sacred," which draws heavily from Glissant's concepts of creolization, relaying, and entour or "surroundings."¹As Loichot explains, "Entour signifies for Glissant the whole environment comprising the poem, human and nonhuman animals, vegetation, rocks, lavas, and 'nature' and 'culture.' The latter terms lose meaning since they exist in a continuum, not in a system of opposition" (28). For another in-depth look at Glissant's entour, see Carrie Noland, "Éduoard Glissant: A Poetics of the Entour," in Poetry After Cultural Studies, ed. Heidi R. Bean and Mike Chasar (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 143–172. This "relational sacred"—which extends the expressions of memory or ritual beyond religious confines—informs more specifically how the objects featured in Water Graves's chapters (objects of literature, music, film, visual arts, poetry, and photography) repair the effects of unritual.

Loichot's "Graves for Katrina" examines the work of mourning effected by visual artists in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Featuring the photography of Eric Waters and the paintings and mixed-media exhibitions of Radcliffe Bailey and Epaul Julien, this chapter considers the (mis)use and subversion of frames as devices that circumscribe the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of a work. For instance, Bailey's installation, Windward Coast–West Coast Slave Trade (2009–18)—which is comprised of a large sea-like arrangement of salvaged piano keys from which emerges a lone, "African" head—eschews "framing" within a singular meaning or temporality. By evoking at once the "victims of the Middle Passage, Katrina, or [prophetically] the Haitian Earthquake" Bailey's installation goes beyond the temporal frames that would separate these events (101, 66). These overlapping and recursive temporalities, argues Loichot, prompt spectators to see similar logics of "unritual" at work in all of them, logics that signal the longue-durée effects of racialized slavery whereby Black people remain subject to violence and dehumanization.

As the objects of Bailey, Waters, and Julien spill out of conventional "frames" or conceptual boundaries, Loichot's analysis flows into the murky waters of Katrina and its racial and environmental violence in "Mami Wata the Formidable." Loichot wades through the ethical ambiguity of Kara Walker's exhibit/book, After the Deluge, and Beyoncé's visual album, Lemonade, which represent—and potentially reproduce—the violence of slavery and Katrina. Yet, in this representation and acknowledgement, Walker and Beyoncé—like Mami Wata, the titular voudou figure who grants life and death to those lost at sea—also sanctify the victims of the violence their objects traverse. Through Julia Kristeva's notion of "muck," Loichot shows the creative and "sacred" potential of Walker's and Beyoncé's portrayals of violence as the "abject substance [that] paradoxically—and horrifyingly—becomes the amniotic fluid of a new birth" (112).

"Drowned," delves further into fluid spaces—this time of the ocean floor—via Jason deCaires Taylor's Cancún Underwater Museum and Édouard Duval Carrié's paintings. These works, Loichot contends, project spectators into the space of the drowned while teasing out the links between environmental degradation, those thrown overboard during the Middle Passage, and the migrants who drown while crossing the Mediterranean today. From these underwater spaces of death, "Stone Pillow and Bone Water" turns to the "hard materiality of words" which are likened to the raw material that M. NourbeSe Philip and Natasha Trethewey shape into poetic "graves, stones, or monuments to the neglected, forgotten, or desecrated dead" (177). Loichot details how Philip deconstructs and reshapes the juridical/scientific language implicated in justifying racialized slavery: "As herself both a lawyer and a poet, Philip must rectify the law . . . by giving humanity and sacred back to the victims of the legalized unritual, through her poetic creation. Poetry—poiesis as act of making—relays a faulty even criminal, law" (204).

As the variety of objects featured in Water Graves indicates, Loichot's relational methodology echoes and enacts principles of Édouard Glissant's notion of "Relation," particularly that of "relaying" understood as: "an act of solidarity between those touched by the unritual, such as humans and their hurt ecologies. [Relaying] calls for disciplines like literary and artistic interpretation, history and science, to join forces where they meet the epistemological abyss of the unknown" (19). By bringing the notion of entour­—which implicates so-called "natural" surroundings in "human" creativity and activity—to bear on its analyses, Water Graves effectively broadens the scope of the unritual to include the natural world, underlining connections between racial violence and environmental destruction. One of the strengths of this relational methodology resides in its juxtaposition of disparate objects. These juxtapositions not only highlight the connections among seemingly distinct historical phenomenon; they also bring into conversation creative works that confront the systems responsible for propagating the unritual. The hybrid figures in Beyoncé's Lemonade (lasiwène or the siren) and Jason deCaires Taylor's Vicissitudes, for example, challenge ontological boundaries that condition spaces of racialized violence and environmental degradation—boundaries between life and death, human and coral, sacred and profane, memory and oblivion. Loichot's treatment of these two objects—which come from different entours and mediums—reveals the poetical, creolizing, and memorial potential of underwater spaces in the Greater Caribbean. As Loichot puts it, "[t]he water is thus not a dividing line but a site of passage, flux, communication and confusion between . . . realms" (154).

Though my appraisal of Water Graves remains predominantly laudatory, I will signal two critiques in terms of its methods and conceptual vocabulary. Loichot's powerful juxtapositions showcase the poetic possibilities of creating a network of oeuvres motivated by the desire to heal and move beyond the unritual. But Water Graves's relational approach sometimes sidesteps the paradoxes highlighted by this kind of comparative work. As Shu-mei Shih proposes in her essay "Comparison as Relation," relating ostensibly dissimilar objects allows one to deconstruct boundaries (disciplinary or otherwise) erected by "certain interests" or "the workings of Power" (which Water Graves certainly does).²Shu-mei Shih, "Comparison as Relation," Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Friedman (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 79. Yet, it is equally important, Shih notes, to "evacuate and analyze" how these economic, national, or other interests nevertheless infuse the objects of comparison and their relations.³Shih, 84. That Beyoncé's album (and related concerts) garnered hundreds of millions of dollars within neoliberal capitalism—a socioeconomic system predicated on exploiting women, people of color, and vulnerable workforces in developing countries—constitutes an aporia that Water Graves acknowledges without exploring.⁴As indicated by the Pew Research Center, wage gaps continue to track along gender and racial lines in the U.S. Eileen Patten, "Racial, gender wage gap persists in U.S. despite some progress," Pew Research Center, July 1, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/01/racial-gender-wage-gaps-persist-in-u-s-despite-some-progress/. Though Water Graves recognizes the album's imbrication with capitalist profit—casting Beyoncé as an embodiment of the capitalistic deity Mami Wata—it doesn't investigate how the economic "interests" underwriting her album inflect and/or constrain the work of healing or moving beyond the unritual.⁵bell hooks, "Beyoncé's Lemonade is capitalist money-making at its best," in The Guardian, May 11, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/11/capitalism-of-beyonce-lemonade-album. As bell hooks points out, both Beyoncé and Serena Williams are featured in the album wearing sports clothing, as Beyoncé's sports clothing line—Ivy Park—would appear the same year as Lemonade, thereby walking a fine line between dissident discourse and advertisement. This is not to say that Beyoncé's discourse is invalidated by this antagonism, nor that one can totally disengage from the "workings of Power," particularly in the era of globalization; rather, I mean to emphasize the importance of situating the discourse of a given object within its material conditions and outcomes, especially as these conditions and outcomes often constitute sites of unritual, which complicate our readings of these objects and the ways in which they relate to each other.

My second critique relates to the use of terms historically operationalized in colonial contexts to exclude non-European populations. Although its creolizing methodology works across disciplinary and cultural frameworks, Water Graves employs certain universalizing notions, notably "humanity," whose investment in a colonial epistemological tradition is not always fully interrogated. As the philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter writes in "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/ Freedom," the term "humanity" has historically been invoked to exclude racialized persons from its prerogatives, and has, in fact, depended on the racialized "Other," relegated to a space of unritual in order to mark its boundaries. Indeed, Wynter tracks how the conceptions of "human" and "humanity" came to correspond with "reason" and "rationality" in Renaissance Europe (and continue to do so today), whereas the conditions of "subrationality" and uncivilization were used to characterize colonized populations.⁶Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument" in CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 266, 301. In other words, under the guise of describing the entire "human race," the term "humanity" has come to reify and universalize Western values and ideals. Although Water Graves's introduction construes "humanity" in an inclusive way—proposing that rituals "of the sacred" writ large are "a defining mark of humanity"—the text leaves unattended its watermark of exclusion and eurocentrism (7). The uninterrogated use of "humanity," then, potentially constitutes a discursive site of "unritual"—what Loichot's objects and analysis strive to "heal"—as its eurocentric and exclusionary connotations of so-called "rationality" and "civilization" implicitly accompany its evocation. Explicitly deconstructing the history and usage of "humanity" while signaling a plurality of humanities would not only eliminate the tension created by the colonial baggage of this term, but would also dovetail with Glissant's conception of Relation which rejects universalizing concepts, while insisting on multitudinous humanities.

Water Graves is an important and compelling study for anyone interested in the Caribbean, Afro-Diasporic experiences, colonialism, and slavery, as it engages with the enduring aftereffects of their histories, including how artists reinscribe them with new meanings. Loichot's work merits praise for its epistemological and methodological originality as she extends Glissant's concepts of Relation and relaying. In literary, artistic, and musical objects from across the Caribbean, Loichot skillfully interweaves questions of (post)colonial legacies, environmental degradation, and social justice in order to explore these objects' often unexpected correspondences as well as their tensions. Ultimately, Loichot demonstrates how literary and artistic exegesis "relate" with its artistic objects in ways that not only explore the memory and trauma of the unritual and its resacralization, but that also engage new modalities and transdisciplinary vocabularies for comparing creative works across the broader Caribbean.

About the Author

Aaron Witcher is a PhD Candidate in French and Francophone Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.

After the end of the Civil War, recently freed Black people endeavored to create their own communities. During Reconstruction, and with newfound access to political and economic power, Black towns and institutions emerged wherever Black people lived. Before the end of the Civil War, Union soldiers defeating Confederate soldiers attracted emancipated Black people, who settled near Union encampments. In 1865, and immediately after the end of the Civil War, at a former encampment situated across from the town of Tarboro, North Carolina, and within the floodplain of the Tar River, the land was dubbed Freedom Hill. Twenty years later, a Black community elder named Turner Prince purchased the land, and it was renamed Princeville, the first incorporated Black town in America.¹Joe A. Mobley, "In the Shadow of White Society: Princeville, a Black Town in North Carolina, 1865–1915," North Carolina Historical Review 63, no. 3 (1986): 340–84.

Though Princeville may look like other rural towns in eastern North Carolina, it carries significant histories. Shiloh Landing marks the point along the Tar River where enslaved peopled disembarked into brutal lives of forced labor and captivity. Another riverfront site was later accessed by congregants of local churches, arriving in white-robed processions to perform baptismal ceremonies. Princeville, from its infrastructure to its buildings and landscapes, was self-built by Black residents. Many residents were engaged in the timber and mill industries and located their businesses and homes close to the Tar River, built on stilts to help them survive frequent flooding. Powell Park now marks this area and its emotionally charged history—five major floods inundated the town in the twentieth century. Hurricane Matthew ravaged the town in 2016. Princeville's endurance to rebuild in the face of these devastations has made it especially remarkable.

Princeville was socially as well as environmentally vulnerable, due to racism and the sustained threat of white supremacist violence from nearby communities. Despite these risks, Princeville's population continued to grow, and does so to this day. As an indicator of the place attachment expressed by residents, the town's population increased after the rebuilding periods that followed numerous floods.

Like Princeville, the town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, also came about by untraditional circumstances. It originated from the enslaved African community of Davis Bend, Mississippi, which was created, in the 1820s, by slave-plantation owner Joseph Davis as a "model" slave community on a plantation. By the standards of America's Peculiar Institution, Davis provided a relatively high level of social, health, and economic care, as well as independence, to Davis Bend's inhabitants. Although still enslaved, residents benefited from dental and health care, opened and ran merchant businesses, and were spared overt domination from overseers. After the Civil War and the collapse of cotton prices, Davis Bend failed, and its residents relocated to the Mississippi Delta bottomlands to found Mound Bayou in 1887. The town earned regional notoriety for its numerous Black owned businesses and organizations, as well as for its tradition of protecting Black people's voting rights amid racial violence. The relative success of the town earned accolades from Booker T. Washington, who called it a model of "thrift and self-government."²Melissa Block, "Here's What's Become of a Historic All-Black Town in the Mississippi Delta," Our Land, National Public Radio, March 8, 2017, www.npr.org/2017/03/08/515814287/heres-whats -become-of-a-historic-all-black-town-in-the-mississippi-delta.

Mound Bayou suffered from declining cotton prices and an uptick in Jim Crow–era oppression. The town distinguished itself, however, by providing safe harbor for Black people seeking modest political and economic independence. Serving as a key organizing ground for the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, Mound Bayou attracted interest from prominent civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers. Regional boycotts, in 1952, of service stations and restrooms refusing to serve Black people were organized in Mound Bayou.³Peter Brown, "Strike City, Mississippi," Anarchy 7, no. 2 (1967): 33–37. And, in 1955, the town served as a safe harbor when Black reporters came to Mississippi to cover Emmett Till's murder trial.⁴Olive Arnold Adams, Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till (Mound Bayou: Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership, 1956). Mound Bayou continues to exist today, though it grapples with the numerous contemporary challenges facing rural southern towns, including population decline and reduced economic opportunities.

Eatonville, Florida, also founded by Black Americans in 1887, represents not only the historical significance of free Black towns but also the contemporary roles Black landscape architects can play in their protection and growth. Eatonville emerged from the lack of human rights protections afforded to Black Americans in the post-Reconstruction era. Named after a white landowner, Joseph Eaton, who was willing to sell land to Black people, the town was originally located on just over one hundred acres in what is now known as Greater Orlando.⁵United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, "National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Eatonville Historic District," September 9, 1997, https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/e5fa60c5-551d-41d3-bbef-2a52ff3a7b0b. Eatonville was a fully developed town featuring a bustling business district, churches, and one of the largest schools for Black Americans in the region.

Eatonville rose to national recognition due to the writings of one of its most famous residents, Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's groundbreaking Harlem Renaissance novel presenting unvarnished writing about everyday life in the Black South, was set in Eatonville and other nearby Black towns. Later, Club Eaton was a popular performance and layover spot for a wide array of Black entertainers.⁶United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, "National Register of Historic Places Registration Form."

In the late twentieth century, Eatonville was declining, and Orlando's growth was endangering its remaining historic fabric. Everett L. Fly, a Black architect and landscape architect based in San Antonio, Texas, partnered with Eatonville to generate community development guidelines drawing inspiration from Hurston's literary descriptions of the community's character. Furthermore, Fly partnered with Eatonville to launch a Zora Neale Hurston festival. The annual festival extended the visibility of Eatonville's heritage and provided a revenue source to fund future community improvements. In 1988, Eatonville's Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Eatonville today exists as a town made up of historic pockets intermixed with contemporary development. The town continues to fight for visibility and preservation in the face of Orlando's tourism-driven economic growth.

About the Author

Kofi Boone, FASLA is a professor of landscape architecture at North Carolina State University's College of Design. Boone works at the overlap between landscape architecture and environmental justice with specializations in democratic design, digital media, and interpreting cultural landscapes. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Conservation Network and the Landscape Architecture Foundation.

Review

For more than twenty years, scholars have sought in article after book after conference paper to expand the timeline, reach, and definition of environmental concern and activism. This uncoordinated but multi-pronged effort has given us a fuller sense of activism that emerges from and addresses larger social and economic inequalities. What we call environmental justice is finally getting a full and complete history.

What has yet to be done, until now, is to bring that broader story together with the more traditional history of the environmental movement. Ellen Griffith Spears has accomplished that in her important new history, Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945. In this tightly argued volume, Spears provides the first work that truly synthesizes the different strands of environmentalism, giving them equal narrative and analytical weight. This book represents the culmination of a generation of scholarship on environmentalism that sought to expand our narrative in order to consider environmentalism as a "field of movements" (5) that brings together actors, organizations and institutions from a variety of backgrounds at the local, regional, and national level. The field of movements concept allows Spears to consider the mainstream organizations such as the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council on comparable footing with grassroots movements, working to weave all strands of activism into the synthesis. She also includes developments in the history of science and public health, especially in ecology and toxicology, as well as the regulatory responses by the federal government. These are important not only to provide background and context, but also because the often-contested terrain of scientific knowledge and expertise is so central to understanding the movement. Rethinking the American Environmental Movement also engages larger structural changes within the US economy and society, such as mass suburbanization in the 1950s and deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s.

Although the title of the book promises an emphasis on the post-World War II era, the first chapter is a robust examination of "Antecedents" to the modern movement. Where, for instance, traditional histories examined conservationism and perhaps Progressive Era smokestack regulation, Spears discusses resistance to slavery, and pre-Civil War public health debates, in addition to the emergence of nature preservation. This builds on important recent work in nineteenth-century environmental history, such as Catherine McNeur's Taming Manhattan and Carl Zimring's Clean and White, and buttresses the argument for long durée connections between social justice and the environment.¹Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City, Reprint edition (Harvard University Press, 2017); Carl A. Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).

The core of Spears's book centers on the postwar period, which she ably covers while also introducing lesser known developments. For example, any book of this nature has to discuss Rachel Carson, and Rethinking devotes one of its largest section to this groundbreaking author. But instead of putting Carson on a pedestal, where she often sits in public memory, Spears places her in context, showing how she was building on and amplifying the work of grassroots activists and scientists. Americans had been raising concerns about the ecological and public health effects of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) soon after World War II. This accelerated into a series of lawsuits filed by New York based conservationists protesting the indiscriminate spraying of DDT in the late 1950s. The legal action failed, but the activists caught the attention of Carson, who began investigating the impact of DDT across the country. That research culminated in the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, and Spears ably delineates how and why this book was so important. It was not just an expose about the dangers of chemical spraying; Carson helped bridge the old conservation era to more contemporary concerns about human health, and she "crystallized the recognition that humans were fundamentally altering the environment" (83).

Just as significant as this rethinking of Silent Spring and pesticide activism is what comes before it: a short but important consideration of urban environmental concerns during the 1950s—especially the National Urban League's "fight blight" and block club campaigns that targeted neighborhood cleanup, rats, empty lots, and community health. Spears examines urban activism by African American and other minority populations in more detail later, but by putting this section right before the discussion of Carson, she makes a valuable narrative intervention. Justice-focused activism by minority communities was occurring at the same time that more well-known parts of the movement were emerging, buttressing the argument that these strands of environmentalism are deserving of a longer history, and were not just a product of the environmental justice movement of the 1980s.

In addition to making sure that urban and minority neighborhoods and populations are firmly part of the narrative, Spears gives significant weight to the decades after 1980. This allows her to cover the conservative reaction to environmentalism during the Reagan administration and afterwards, but also climate activism, and recent environmental justice conflicts such as poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Rethinking is especially strong on climate activism, representing an important shift over the past decade. The final chapter provides background on concerns over anthropogenic climate change (a subject that has figured in every United Nations environmental since 1972) and the international negotiations and treaties over the limitations of carbon and greenhouse gases in the 1990s. Spears includes a special section on the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016. Because the pipeline violated indigenous rights, was a threat to the water supply of the Standing Rock Reservation, and would also allow for the cheaper transportation of fossil fuels, Spears argues that the NO DAPL protests were a great example of "an intersectional grassroots movement linking indigenous rights, climate change, and water protection" (213).

By the end of the Rethinking, readers may feel a little overwhelmed by the field of movements approach, as Spears jumps, for example, from climate activism, to green jobs, food justice, religious work on climate change, and to standalone discussions of Flint and Standing Rock, all in the second half of the last chapter. Critics could argue that this "big-tent" conceptualization risks diluting what they would classify as an environmental movement, but this is the value of Spears's approach. She convincingly shows how environmentalism has never been one particular set of activists or institutions, but a diverse set of organizations, scientists, firebrands and regulatory bodies that have always been in conversation, conflict or coalition with each other. This broad coverage helps readers understand many implicit and explicit connections. And coverage is one of the goals of this kind of book, which seeks to introduce a topic to a broader audience. This makes Rethinking especially admirable. It places activism centered upon injustice and inequality on equal footing with more commonly known parts of the movement. As someone who teaches the history of environmentalism, I believe this is vitally important. Most students begin with strong preconceived notions about environmentalism (Birkenstocks, tofu) that prove tough to dislodge.

This field-of-movements framework does raise a broader question within environmentalist writing and the narrative we tend to tell. Lurking beneath the surface of many histories of environmentalism is the conflict between the movement's different strands, particularly between environmental justice organizations, radical wilderness groups, and the mainstream "nationals." Spears does not shy away from these tensions, showing how radical factions emerged partly in opposition to the perceived "business friendly" policies of groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, and how grassroots organizations have long been critical of the overwhelming white, middle-class staffing and policy orientation of well-funded national groups based in Washington, DC.

Rethinking lacks an exploration of the roots of these tensions. This is primarily because of the strictures on the length of such a synthetic book—and that there are not yet enough strong critical histories of the mainstream strands of environmentalism. The discussions of the close relationship between corporations and large national groups are a case in point. Spears draws on the work of journalist Mark Dowie, especially his groundbreaking 1995 book, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Dowie was one of the first vocal critics of this relationship, but this book is now a quarter-century old, and there really hasn't been any work that goes beyond his primarily surface level, muckraking analysis.²Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996).

We need more work that takes the connections between corporations and major, national environmental groups at face value, and attempts to understand their roots and trajectories—and their lack of attention to people and geographies of color. One of Spears's primary concerns is the "multiple ways in which the color lines drawn in U.S. society have hampered environmental reform movements" (4). But as strong as it is in exploring the grassroots activism by people of color, Rethinking doesn't explore the color lines that existed in environmental organizations; why they were reluctant, for decades, to address the concerns of marginalized groups, or even make their professional staffs more diverse. This is not because Spears does not want to explore these problems. It's simply that the literature is not there. The white privilege of US environmentalism has only really been critiqued at the margins. We lack a full accounting of its development and impact, particularly on the continual escalation of environmental injustice and inequality.

What are the reasons for these deficiencies, at least within US environmental history? The most obvious arguments would be that the field, or at least the powerful and influential within the field, were for decades overwhelmingly white, male, and middle class, and had a vested interest in a set of narratives about American environmental reform. Perhaps more importantly, there was also a reluctance to attack or even critique these narratives. Not only did generations of scholars have so much invested in these heroes, but also because to many of us, environmentalism has maintained a certain moral certitude as a progressive politics.³The core "heroes" come from the wilderness and early conservation movements. See, for example, Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University, 1996 [1965]); Aldo Leopold A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (London: Oxford University Press, 1949). To tar it with racism, and corporate greed, especially in a post-Civil Rights, neoliberal America, could undermine the whole project.

Finally, scholars are beginning to get over that reluctance. New work by Jennifer Thomson, Paul Sabin and Keith Woodhouse, for example, digs into environmentalism to understand its flaws, contradictions and their ramifications.⁴Paul Sabin, "Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order," Law and History Review 33, no. 4 (November 2015): 965–1003; Jennifer Thomson, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health. (University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Keith Makoto Woodhouse, The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). They move beyond a celebratory narrative to embed the environmental movement within the larger political and social developments of the past half-century. Outside the discipline of history, scholars such as David Pellow, Lisa Sun-Hee Park, and Dorceta Taylor have cast critical judgment on the movement, especially when understanding race in environmental politics.⁵Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David N. Pellow, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America's Eden, (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Durham, NC: Duke University Books, 2016). All of this work is important, but we need more.

Telling a more critical, less rosy story is important because a strong, inclusive and self-reflective, environmental movement is more important now than ever. Writing movement history is always political, especially when the social movements remain ongoing and their success more urgent. With Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945, Ellen Spears has done admirable work in expanding our conception and understanding of the movement's varied streams.

About the Author

Robert Gioielli is an associate professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and the author of Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014). Find him on Twitter at @robgioielli.

Video and Essay

Ossabaw Island is a barrier island on the Georgia coast. The island, which trends northeast–southwest, is about 14.5 kilometers (9 miles) long and 10.5 kilometers (6.6 miles) wide. It is located between latitudes 31° 49.5' and 31° 43.2' N. Of the Georgia barrier islands, Ossabaw is the most geologically unusual. Like the major Georgia islands south of it—Cumberland, Jekyll, St. Simons, Sapelo, and St. Catherines—Ossabaw is a composite island, in which sediments from Pleistocene and Holocene shorelines are directly adjacent or superimposed. However, sediments of the Pleistocene (Silver Bluff) and Holocene shorelines on Ossabaw split near its southern portion, with the Pleistocene trending north–south and the Holocene trending northeast–southwest. The modern shoreline, which formed only in the past few thousand years, wraps around the southern and northeastern corners of the island.

Ecosystems on Ossabaw include salt marshes, maritime forests, beaches, and a few freshwater ponds. Salt marshes are widespread west of Ossabaw, but also occupy much of the middle and eastern parts of the island between sediments of the Pleistocene and Holocene shorelines, dividing its maritime forests. The climate of Ossabaw is temperate to subtropical, with temperatures ranging from an average high of 32° C (90° F) in the summer to 10° C (50° F) in the winter. Average rainfall is about 50 centimeters (20 inches) per year, with most precipitation during the hurricane season (May–September). Hurricanes have rarely affected the Georgia barrier islands until recently, when Ossabaw was hit by Hurricane Matthew (2016), then later Hurricane Irma (2017). Hurricane Matthew, in particular, uprooted many of the older live oaks on the island and otherwise dramatically altered its landscape.

Although Ossabaw is often labeled as "pristine," humans have transformed its landscapes for at least 4,000 years. Its human history is similar to that of its island neighbor, St. Catherines, beginning with Native Americans (the Guale). The Guale had occupied Ossabaw since about 2000 BCE, but European colonization began when the Spanish arrived in the late sixteenth century. A lasting remnant of Spanish colonization on Ossabaw is the presence of feral hogs, some of which are linked to Spanish stock. This relatively large population of hogs has disrupted or otherwise altered ecosystems throughout the island.

The British took control of Ossabaw in the 1730s, by which time the Guale had mostly moved inland or suffered near extinction under the pressure of colonization. Early treaties reserved Ossabaw as hunting and fishing ground for the Creek people until 1758. The British also began enslaving African people for their plantation economy, and in the late eighteenth century American settlers continued using enslaved people as laborers for growing cotton and indigo. Most inland ecosystems of Ossabaw, especially the maritime forests and salt marshes, were altered considerably by this agriculture. Following the American Civil War, a significant population of African Americans stayed on the island, but most moved to the mainland after the Sea Island Hurricane of 1893. Many of their descendants today comprise the Gullah-Geechee community in Pin Point, Georgia.

Through the early to late twentieth century, Ossabaw's ownership changed several times, but the island remained largely undeveloped and sparsely inhabited. The last private owners were members of the Torrey family, starting with Dr. Henry Norton Torrey and Nell Ford Torrey, and ending with their daughter, Eleanor Torrey ("Sandy") West. The Torreys oversaw the building of a large home for themselves, as well as hunting lodges, a beach house, and unpaved roads. In 1961, after Sandy West inherited the island, she and her husband Clifford West began the Ossabaw Island Project. This project brought luminaries of the arts and sciences to the island as a retreat center for study and discussion; notable participants included composer Aaron Copeland, writers Ralph Ellison, Margaret Atwood, and Annie Dillard, as well as ecologist Eugene Odum. This creative initiative also resulted in the Genesis Project, which focused more on the natural sciences and hosted scientists for on-site studies of and education about the archaeology, ecology, and geology of the island.

In 1978, Sandy West sold Ossabaw to the state of Georgia to establish it as the state's first heritage preserve, and it has been managed since by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The Ossabaw Island Foundation was established afterwards as a non-profit organization working with DNR to encourage educational, cultural, and scientific programs on the island. Sandy West continued living on the island until just recently; at the time of this writing (January 2020), she was living in nearby Savannah, Georgia, and had just celebrated her 107^th birthday.

This Ossabaw flyover video provides a visual sample of the many interconnections between natural and human histories on Ossabaw. Featuring sweeping aerial views and audio annotations explaining the island's varied environmental features, this video is organized around four sequential but overlapping themes: fauna, flora, landscapes, and human structures.

Acknowledgment

Thanks to the Ossabaw Island Foundation for their support on this piece.

About the Authors

Anthony "Tony" Martin is a professor of practice in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University. His publications include Life Traces of the Georgia Coast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

Steve Bransford is the senior video producer at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. His documentary feature film The Well-Placed Weed is available on the PBS website and app.

Michael Page is lecturer in Geospatial Sciences and Technology at Emory University.

Leotie Hakkila is an MPH student at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University.

Anandi S. Knuppel is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Lawrence University.

Essay

In a 2017 essay, National Museum of African American History and Culture director Lonnie Bunch noted that, like much of black history, environmental activism by people of color is often "forgotten" or "hidden in plain sight." Bunch, now director of the Smithsonian Institution, labeled this movement work unacknowledged environmentalism. Environmental reform campaigns led by people of color and other marginalized groups include not only land struggles by formerly enslaved people and by Native Americans, but also agricultural movements and the class-based mobilizations of populist agrarians. Chicano farmworker fights against poisonous pesticides are environmental battles, as are African American civil rights campaigns for equal access to recreational areas and to safe spaces in cities.¹Lonnie G. Bunch III, "Black and Green: The Forgotten Commitment to Sustainability," in Living in the Anthropocene: The Earth in the Age of Humans, eds. W. John Kress and Jeffrey K. Stine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, in association with Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017), 83–86, 86.

Recovering this history acknowledges that people of color and the poor have shared the passion for wilderness and the natural world that motivates preservationists. In the early twentieth century, for example, African American women and men hiked Niagara Falls and cycled in Yellowstone. George Washington Carver, as we know from historian Mark Hersey's 2011 study, explicitly cast his research and practice of agroecology in terms of conservation.²Mark D. Hersey, My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

However, the benefits of environmental citizenship are not and have not been distributed equally. People of color have fought to participate in the enjoyment of nature and the benefits to health those activities offered. "[T]he color line in any guise was inherently environmental," explains historian Mark Fiege. The spatial configuration of cities and towns, reservation boundaries, Jim Crow segregation on either side of the Mason-Dixon line, the contemporary policing of racialized spaces—all can be understood not only as battle lines in freedom struggles but also as unacknowledged elements of urban ecology, a denial of mobility, a constraint on access to space. "The criminalization of urban space," as scholar Yohuru Williams explains, increasingly has been recognized as a question of environmental justice.³Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 320; Robert S. Emmett, Cultivating Environmental Justice: A Literary History of U.S. Garden Writing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 5; Yohuru R. Williams, Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 115.

The environmental justice paradigm that emerged in the 1980s expands our understanding of what issues and concerns count as environmentalism. Native American groups lobby to redress exploitation of uranium miners. Organizations such as the Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) identified environmental concerns not on the agenda of mainstream groups such as the need for rat eradication and demand for "community control" in urban areas. In their call for self-determination, black nationalists took up the slogan, "Free the Land."⁴Alondra Nelson, "The Longue Durée of Black Lives Matter," American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 10 (2016): 1734–1737, https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303422; Russell Rickford, "'We Can't Grow Food on All This Concrete': The Land Question, Agrarianism, and Black Nationalist Thought in the Late 1960s and 1970s," Journal of American History 103, no. 4 (March 2017): 956–980, 957.

Social justice environmentalists have sought not just the inclusion of people of color in the history and practice of conservationism, but a fundamental reorientation of the American environmental movement's concerns and aims. Calling for equal treatment of communities of color and for full participation by marginalized social groups in environmental decision-making, environmental justice proponents emphasize questions of power and rights. Scholars have often described campaigns so rooted in broader social justice movements that they were not recognized as environmentalism. Excluded groups link their appreciation of nature and desire for healthy surroundings to a broader vision of social justice inseparable from full social and political rights.

Stimulated in part by this reorientation, new histories of environmentalism and, to a certain extent, the movement itself have begun confronting the more complex and difficult elements of the conservation movement's past. From its beginnings, conservationism echoed the nation's conflicts over race and inequality. Several prominent early conservationists were also eugenicists. White supremacy and nativism—hostility toward immigrants—were integral to the way many early conservationists understood their work. These ideas infused (and continue to infuse) debates about overpopulation, immigration, and resource policy.⁵Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 24; Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne, Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 246; Ben Zuckerman, "Nothing Racist About It," Globe and Mail, January 28, 2004, theglobeandmail.com/opinion/nothing-racist-about-it/article741382/.

The early campaigns for wilderness preservation are now understood not only as preserving public lands and limiting habitat destruction but also as a race-making project, defining who could enjoy the full rights of citizenship. As historian Carolyn Finney and others have argued, the designation of national parks and wilderness areas often created "white spaces" by displacing native populations and excluding racial minorities.⁶Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Miles A. Powell, Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, 2nd ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). Nevertheless, a strong, identifiable thread of social justice thought and action runs through US movements for environmental reform. Individuals involved in environmental causes have often participated in actions to oppose racial injustice, eliminate poverty, and achieve gender equality. Such alliances have been essential to the success of the environmental movement.

Struggles over segregated space that highlighted injustices offer some of the clearest examples of unacknowledged environmentalism. When the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) campaigned to desegregate the bus system and open jobs to black citizens in Alabama's capital city, five of the organization's eight primary demands presaged environmental justice themes. Laid out in a flyer entitled "Negroes' Most Urgent Needs," the MIA's concerns included "Negro Representation on the Parks and Recreation Board," "Sub-division for housing," "Congested areas, with inadequate or no fireplugs," "Lack of sewage disposals makes it necessary to resort to out-door privies, which is a health hazard," and, "Narrow streets, lack of curbing, unpaved streets in some sections."⁷"Negroes' Most Urgent Needs," Inez Jessie Baskin Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama, as displayed at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/voices/id/2019. All are urban matters that would today be regarded as environmental concerns.

African American activists were often first to join forces with other people of color facing environmental threats. For example, in 1966, comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory was jailed in Washington state for participating in a "fish-in" held by the Nisqually Indians and other tribes to protest restrictions on native fishing rights. Inspired by civil rights sit-ins and organized by the Survival of the American Indian Society, these protests at Frank's Landing in Puget Sound sought to prevent overfishing by commercial fisheries and to restore native treaty rights to fish in the region's bays and streams. At issue were the tribes' ecological heritage and livelihoods, as well as treaty rights and tribal sovereignty. Dr. King telegraphed his support. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) endorsed the effort; the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU provided legal assistance.⁸Telegram from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers, Civil and Human Rights Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, on view March 14, 2015; "Gregory and Wife Guilty in Indian Fishing Protests," New York Times, December 2, 1966, 69; Charles F. Wilkinson, Messages from Frank's Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 55–56; U.S. v. Washington, 384 F. Supp. 312 (W.D. Wash. 1974), aff'd 520 F. 2d 676 (9^th Cir. 1975). One of the most important cases in American Indian law, the decision upheld the tribes' rights to an equitable portion of the catch and co-management of the fish stocks in the Puget Sound watershed and nearby offshore waters. The Court's holding was reaffirmed in 2018. See Zultán Grossman, Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 37–63; and John Eligon, "'This Ruling Gives Us Hope': Supreme Court Sides with Tribe in Salmon Case," New York Times, June 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/us/washington-salmon-culverts-supreme-court.html.

An upsurge in environmental concern in the 1960s drew inspiration and tactics from civil rights organizing. Organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) modeled their work on the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. And, a newly elected cadre of African American elected officials built alliances that helped bring attention to the ecological crisis and advance environmental reform.

Following a path pursued successfully by civil rights advocates, environmentalists turned increasingly to the federal government as guarantor of rights. Working with allies in Congress, environmentalists erected a new framework of environmental law in less than a generation, much of it during the Nixon administration. A series of telegenic disasters proved instrumental in eliciting change.

In January 1969, just days after President Richard M. Nixon took office, a blowout at a Union Oil rig spewed oil into California's Santa Barbara estuary. Six months later, in Cleveland, Ohio, the Cuyahoga River, which flowed past the city before dumping its contents into Lake Erie, caught fire. Oil slicks and industrial wastes from innumerable factories and refineries upstream had left the water so polluted that fires had become a frequent occurrence. This particular fire brought the city's mayor to the scene and with him the national press. Cleveland's mayor in 1969 was Carl Stokes, the first African American elected to head a large US city. Not just Cleveland, but the nation faced "a crisis in the urban environment," said Stokes, "a crisis of immense proportions." With the burning river as his backdrop, Stokes linked racial progress and anti-pollution measures.⁹David Stradling and Richard Stradling, Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 146, 79, 194.

Public outcry over the Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga fire pressured Congress to act, passing the National Environmental Policy Act, which President Nixon signed on January 1, 1970. NEPA did not create the EPA, as some assume; that was accomplished by an executive order approved by Congress later that year. The law did establish the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to advise the President. NEPA also gave citizens valuable tools for addressing environmental problems, mandating public participation in the permitting process. Any proposal for a large development would require an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the likely ecological impact as well as alternative proposals—say, fewer units, fewer trees destroyed, or substitute drainage plans. Developers and the permitting agencies were not required to choose the alternative with the least impact, but the new procedures gave environmental advocates a forum for raising objections and additional time for mobilizing opposition to particularly devastating projects. Considered one of the nation's most effective environmental laws, NEPA has been "emulated in various degrees by almost half the states and by an estimated 80 or more countries abroad."¹⁰John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 58; Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 180; Lynton Caldwell, "Implementing NEPA: A Non-Technical Political Task," in Environmental Policy and NEPA: Past, Present, and Future, eds. Ray Clark and Larry W. Canter (Boca Raton, FL: St. Lucie Press, 1997), 25–50, 37.

Postscript

NEPA's longstanding requirements for public participation in environmental policymaking are being directly targeted by the Trump administration. In January 2020, the Trump EPA proposed new rules that would set tight time limits on environmental assessments, limit the types of projects required to complete a full EIS, and effectively exclude consideration of a proposed project's indirect and cumulative effects on climate. Vulnerable communities could be disproportionately harmed by these regulatory changes. Reversing such policies will require even more robust coalitions than those that resulted in the passage of environmental laws in the first place.

About the Author

Ellen Griffith Spears is an associate professor in the interdisciplinary New College and the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. She is author of the award-winning Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Review

Open Cameron B. Strang's Frontiers of Science and you will encounter a fascinating frontispiece that receives no mention in the remarkable study that follows. The image is perhaps too easy for readers to bypass, particularly because modern reproduction obscures some of the details of this image, originally produced as a copperplate engraving in the mid-1770s. Yet it is worth pausing to examine the frontispiece closely because it visually manifests Strang's masterful argument that the local spaces and populations of the Gulf South borderlands—Strang's name for an area that includes today's Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—were central to early American knowledge production.

At first glance the image appears to be a familiar allegory of Europe's conquest of the Americas. It centers on an American Indian who kneels before an enthroned Minerva—Roman goddess of wisdom, warfare, arts, trade, strategy, and commerce—and proffers a partially unscrolled map. Scenes of indigenous people offering maps to the colonizer populate the vast literature of European colonization. Referring to this particular image, among other similar ones, Martin Brückner observes that such "ceremonies of submission" are a visual convention that performed dangerous cultural work: they encouraged viewers to imagine the violence of empire as "the voluntary surrender of America by Native Americans."¹Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and Omohundro Institute, 2006), 72–73. Yet close inspection of the frontispiece discloses a different story. This image does not narrate European conquest of the Americas, but rather Anglo-American fascination with a very particular part of North America: the Gulf South borderlands upon which Strang's study focuses—a space variously named and claimed by multiple imperial powers (including Spain, France, Britain and, starting in the 1790s, the United States), numerous Indian nations and confederacies (including the Natchez, Apalachee, Guale, Timucua, Calusa, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Upper Creek, Lower Creek, and Seminole), Africans both free and enslaved, and various groups of pirates and adventurers.

The frontispiece contains a wealth of specific detail about the lands, waters, and variegated populations of these southeastern borderlands. At lower right a smiling cherub uses a compass to inspect a navigational chart that, upon close examination, displays the Gulf of Mexico bordered by a sliver of land marked "Florida." To the lower left of the engraving, a bearded river god sits atop an anchor between two casks pouring forth streams of water. The casks are marked "Mississippi" and "ombech," respectively, signifying the Mississippi River and the Tombechbee River, an antiquated or alternate name for the Tombigbee River, which runs through present-day Mississippi and Alabama.²Arthur S. Marks, "Joining the Past to the Present: William Rush's Emblematic Statuary at Fairmount," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 157, no. 2 (2013): 190. And the American Indian kneeling before Minerva most likely represents one of the particular Indian tribes inhabiting the Gulf South, for this frontispiece was created by Bernard Romans for his 1775 A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, the first natural history of the Floridas—an area then comprising present-day Florida and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—to be published in North America.³For more on this work and its publication, see Kathryn E. Holland Braund, ed., A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). The Dutch-Anglo-American Romans—like many of the other largely forgotten figures whose stories Strang tells so vividly—turned his local knowledge of the Gulf South to personal and public profit. Romans was a savvy adventurer and polymath who sensed an emerging fervor among the Anglo northeast elite for information about the soil, plants, geography, waters, and people of the southeastern reaches of the continent, and he pays homage to that fervor in his frontispiece. Against Minerva's throne leans a large shield marked "SPQA," likely signifying "Senate and People of the American Republic," rendering the goddess an allegorical figure for Americans in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other northeastern cities where Romans found financial support for his work among an impressive list of subscribers eager to know of the Gulf South.⁴Both Marks and Braund suggest that the shield's marking signifies this. For more on the publication and circulation of Romans's work, see Braund, A Concise Natural History.

"Since the nineteenth century," Strang tells us, "historians of the early United States have portrayed spaces beyond the Anglo East (and especially the Northeast) as zones of ignorance with no place in America's intellectual history, much less the history of science" (7). Historians of the Gulf South borderlands in particular found evidence for this portrayal in the writings of early French, Spanish, and Anglo observers who emphasized the "mental incapacity" and "backwardness" of the region's populations, along with the poverty of its lands when compared to more fertile spaces on the continent (7). Yet, for Strang, this familiar story of early American intellectual history began to lose explanatory power when he made a series of archival discoveries that ultimately convinced him that encounters in the southeastern borderlands in fact produced forms and networks of natural knowledge that mattered both within and well beyond the region. The resulting study deftly analyzes a range of neglected or underexamined materials—including letters, journals, military reports, hydrographical charts, geological and boundary surveys, guides to commerce and agriculture, periodical essays, natural histories, and Indian and European maps—that document a thriving intellectual life in the southeastern borderlands and the effects of that life on the meaning, production, circulation, and application of natural knowledge in the empires and nations competing for this space, namely Spain, France, Britain, and (starting in the 1790s) the United States (13–14).

Each of Strang's seven substantial chapters is organized around a set of related case studies of locals who advanced science itself by learning to "navigate and manipulate" a Gulf South "world of rapidly shifting power relations" (5). A brief sampling of these studies affirms that we can no longer think only, or even first, of Anglos living along the Atlantic seaboard when we consider early American knowledge production and circulation (6). For example, we learn of an enslaved native cartographer, a Tawasa man named Lamhatty, whose local geographic knowledge of Florida's Gulf coast enabled his British captors to understand the region when they forced him to produce a map, upon which Lamhatty also chose to document the violence of imperial expansion (53–57). We also learn of a Creek Indian called Yaolaychi, whose mineralogical knowledge of the area around St. Augustine inspired a Spanish expedition in search of precious metals—a quest whose outcome Yaolaychi then shaped by telling vivid stories of a fearsome beast, or "Monster Lizard" (104–110). Turning to the development of astronomy in the Gulf South, Strang introduces Mississippi planter and astronomer William Dunbar, who used the observatory on his Natchez plantation—likely with the help of enslaved people—to produce astronomical knowledge that proved essential to the federal government's mapping of the Mississippi Valley (151–152). And in a chapter on slavery and geology, Frontiers of Science reveals the story of an enslaved shell collector in Alabama who located shells for Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, where scientists used conchology to understand the age, history, and future of the earth (248).

These and other accounts of Indians, Africans, and Europeans who leveraged local knowledge for different personal ends, and in response to different imperial pressures, call upon us to shift our framework for studying the history of knowledge in early America in several ways. First and foremost, these case studies demand a spatial and demographic shift: like Jane Landers's Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, Kathleen DuVal's Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, and Alejandra Dubcovsky's Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South, Frontiers of Science affirms that we must look south to fully understand that a range of variegated landscapes and populations have shaped the history of North America at every turn. This spatial and demographic shift necessitates a chronological shift in our history of early American knowledge. For one, we can no longer consider that history solely in relation to the context of British colonialism, for science and empire entwined in the Gulf South for nearly three hundred years prior to US founding and continued to do so long after Britain's thirteen colonies became the first United States.

Finally, and provocatively, Strang's work demands at least two epistemological shifts. First, we must expand our definitions of what counts as "natural knowledge," "science," and "scientific practice." At its broadest level, this book usefully reminds us that science in early North America was not the professionalized disciplined that it would start to become during the late nineteenth century, but rather a capacious practice that engaged a broad and interested public in places far beyond academic or other institutional spaces. In this way, Strang's study joins others that widen the scope of early American knowledge-making, including Susan Scott Parrish's American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, Laura Dassow Walls's Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, and Britt Rusert's Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. And Strang productively amplifies the scope of these studies by considering multiple cultures—Indian, African, Anglo, French, and Spanish—across a timespan of more than three centuries (1500–1850).

Second, Frontiers of Science also demands that we recognize the constitutive role of imperial violence in the production of scientific knowledge in North America. For empire occasioned the interactions—many of them forced—among an astonishing array of materials, practices, and practitioners that scientific advancement required. Indian captivity facilitated British cartography (53–57). US expansion sponsored ethnography by making black and Indian bodies available to white "experts" (225). And plantation slavery enabled specimen collection and observation that proved essential to geological research (245). Likewise, the production of scientific knowledge did not always lead to freedom—especially for the producers. For example, whereas Yaolaychi's storytelling increased his status among Spanish officials and impeded their access to local mineral resources (104–116), Lamhatty's mapmaking facilitated British slave trading (61), and many Africans with natural and spiritual expertise risked imprisonment and death for their knowledge (97).

Widely varying effects resulted from the entwining of empire and science in the Gulf South across multiple centuries, yet Strang's skillful illumination of these effects upends any assessment that the continent's borderlands lack "a meaningful history of knowledge" (131). That assessment, Strang recognizes in the epilogue, has present-day effects: it risks producing "a narrow vision of America's cultural past" that can then be used "to justify ongoing exclusion and inequality" (344). A perspective on the Gulf South as somehow backward, separate, and expendable perhaps manifests most publicly these days in environmental disasters that result directly from the uneven distribution of federal resources to the South more broadly. If the humanities are useful for showing us that the past is "still part of the present with implications for the future," as Dominick LaCapra explains, then we need more studies like Frontiers of Science that recover a more inclusive early American history.⁵Dominick LaCapra, Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 165.

About the Author

Michele Navakas is an associate professor of English at Miami University of Ohio where she teaches early American literature, culture, and environment. She is the author of Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), which won the 2019 Rembert Patrick Award and the 2019 Stetson Kennedy Award from the Florida Historical Society. She is currently at work on a cultural history of coral and politics in early America.

Introduction

The catfish didn't miss the current. They'd never known it. They lapped the pond all day like pace cars. At feeding time, they thrashed for their share of pellets. The farmers bred them for size and taste and texture and profit. They swam around in that little man-made lake and waited for the chopping block and the flash-frozen package. Their bodies were bullion. There were others of them, wild ones, who lived in the open waters of the river to the west. They sometimes got caught on the trotlines of grizzled river rats. Mostly they grew big as they pleased and swam deep into the crevices of the underwater earth. Fisherman told stories. "Whiskers big as bullwhips." They saw fleeting visions of this barnacled ghost ship. If you caught and ate it, they said, you'd gain all the wisdom of a century. It was part whale. Too big for the line. You could tell by the waves it made breaching the surface.

A white plantation owner in Money, Mississippi, pointed a shotgun at his father's head and threatened to blow it off, Ed Scott Jr. told me in 2013. This happened in the 1920s, when Scott was a boy. Three decades before the murder of Emmett Till put Money on all the wrong maps. The death threat was because Scott's father—who had brought his wife and children to the Delta in 1919—dreamed of being a black landowner instead of a sharecropper.

Ed Scott Jr. and I sat together in the cool-dark A/C. I sat on a stool, he reclined in an electric wheelchair. It was my first visit with him. He recounted more to me, of his tours in World War II ducking Nazi sniper fire with General Patton. How his return home to racism in Mississippi was, as James Baldwin wrote, like "a certain hope had died."¹James Baldwin, "Letter from a Region in My Mind," New Yorker, November 17, 1962, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind.

"[The people back home] didn't care about us no way," Scott said, speaking of whites' reception of black veterans. "They didn't want to see you with that uniform on back then. I was proud of that uniform, but I wasn't proud of Mississippi. Wasn't proud of Mississippi at all."

On the plight of the black soldier, Baldwin writes that he was "almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do."²Baldwin, "Letter from a Region." After the war, Ed Scott stayed on the farm to help his father, who had then amassed hundreds of acres of Delta farmland. Scott's dream was not that the work wouldn't be ugly, or hard, or even menial. But that it would be his own work. That he would be his own master.

Scott made miracles in the cotton field, not far from Fannie Lou Hamer's visionary Freedom Farm. He carried food, prepared by his wife Edna and their children, to civil rights marchers and followed Dr. King to Selma and across the storied Edmund Pettus Bridge. He cleared a million dollars in rice in 1978. In 1983, at the height of his climb, Scott became the first ever non-white owner and operator of a catfish plant in the nation's history. It was a dream fulfilled. It was an act of necessary resistance against an industry, a government, and a society whose very identities seemed predicated on the subservience of black laborers.

"My motto is don't stop chasing your dream," Scott liked to say. "And that was my dream. To grow these catfish. Which I did."

From that first meeting with Ed Scott in 2013, I knew I wanted to write a book about his life. Over the course of the next several years, I would interview Scott, his family, his contemporaries, his lawyer. The Scott odyssey is now told in the pages of Catfish Dream: Ed Scott's Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta (University of Georgia Press, Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place series).

Ed Scott was not alone on the journey. He modeled himself after his father, Edward Scott Sr., a sharecropper-turned-landowner who brought the family from Alabama to Mississippi in 1919. (When Scott's mother, Juanita, pleaded to Edward Senior for a return home, away from Mississippi meanness, Edward Senior replied, resolutely, "I believe I could stay in Hell one year if I knew I could move out the next.") Ed Scott took the reins of the farm and joined forces with his wife, Edna Ruth Scott, whose own father was a community organizer and prodigious farmer in nearby Mound Bayou. He partnered with his siblings and children and extended family and neighbors—including the group of black women nicknamed "the Dependables" who served as his catfish special forces. The Scotts' roots run deep. They believe in legacy and namesake.

"You never know why God let that last child be named Edward," said Rose Marie Scott-Pegues, Ed Scott's eldest daughter. "He was more like his father than any of [the other] children. [His] thing is, 'I don't want you to sell any of my land. Ever.' And I'm looking at this a million years from now. . . . This land will still be Scotts' land.

I exited the Scott home after my first visit with the Scotts, into the Delta heat as if from a sheltered cave. The orator's cadence had slowed and warped time. It had felt like days, or decades, or all time. As I drove away, these are the things I was thinking about.

1990

Worms ain't got no feets. A page in a handmade book. A caption to a hand-scrawled illustration. An earthworm with four legs and Converse. Drawn by Annette, my afternoon babysitter, a high school senior, a young black woman who chewed her gum only until the sugar ran out. This in blink-and-you'll-miss-it Shaw, Mississippi, not far from where I would later sit with Ed Scott and hear him unfurl his tale. Out of the dirt and onto the page, through the dreamy veil of imagination, the worm with feets came. My first acknowledgement of mythmaking.

What does the Delta grow? Cotton, yes, the empire of it. The stalks like phalanxed soldiers and the bolls their thorny white heads. Propagated in postcards and genre paintings as widely as it was ginned and shipped. That is to say, all over the globe. Then rice, which Comet and Uncle Ben's came down to bid on. It, mostly white, too. Soybeans came. And corn. More than you could haul. Then catfish; out of the muddy river and into the aerated pond. But Mississippi's fertile crescent grows more than its commodities. It spawns paradox and polemic. Starkness and cacophony. Plenty and need. And of course, black and white.

My childhood home backed up to the Shaw High School practice field. For most of the hours of the day, it was quiet, until the band marched out to play. They stomped the earth and cut divots in the grass with their heels and rattled my existence. To me, their appearance was alchemy. Like rolling thunder shaped into flesh and bone. Fulfilling the latent potential of the field.

Other things the Delta grew then and still does. One-of-a-kind stores, forever "un-chained," with esoteric signs. Autocrats, plutocrats, democrats. Ramblers and gamblers. Day laborers, night laborers, nightcrawlers. Cottonmouths. Plantation houses on Indian Mounds. Jukes. Blues. Open roads. Dark and lonely cells. Government assistance. Government neglect. Lots not yet vacant but long past occupied. Ribs, bibs, bibles. Sunday dinner. Roadside eats. Potato logs on a hot tray under a heat lamp. Lessons. Teachers. Strong women—mothers and daughters, activists and administrators—who hold it all together. It spawns proximity, to the sinful roots of the nation and to graveyards and to ghosts. And also distance, an elusive recalcitrance to ever being pinned down or fully made sense of or tied neatly together. Undone shoelaces swinging on a tuba player in a marching band stampede. The notion that worms ain't got no feets coupled with the inkling that in the Delta, they probably do.

I was thinking about these things on the day after I first spoke with Ed Scott. Because in 1990, when my eyes were opening to the whole wide world, the Scotts were fighting it just a few counties away. Using a catfish as a club and barely hanging on. And I'd had no idea.

2013

Ed Scott's grandson, Daniel Scott, took me through the ruins of the catfish plant. It had opened in 1983 to fanfare with a ribbon cutting and music and a contest to see which of the workers could hand-filet fish the fastest. Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce Jim Buck Ross looked on in his cowboy hat. He later said in a press release that "an operation with this early success is certainly a credit to our people, creating new employment at a time it is most needed."³"Mississippi Boasts First Black-owned Catfish Plant in U.S.," Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce press release, March 3, 1983.

This plant shouldn't have existed. It had been an old tractor shed, and Scott built his crowning achievement atop the bones after the local white processor refused to sell him stock so that he could process his crop like all the other farmers. When he found this out, he set up a tour of that Indianola, Mississippi plant. On the way through, the tour guide asked Scott whether he had stock in the plant or a relationship with any live haulers who would take his fish. "Nope," Scott said.

"Well, what the hell you going to do with your fish, eat 'em?!"

"Something like that," Scott told the man. "I'm down here now seeing what you're doing. I'm going to clean my own fish."

To tour the plant was to be forced to imagine what was and what might have been. Paint had faded, beams had fallen. An old television sat on the floor beneath a ceiling that was no more. Handwashing and "employees only" signs refused to budge, even while the rest of the building slowly reverted back to Delta wild. The plant closed around 1990, surviving even after the government foreclosed on the land and snatched the fish from the ponds. And in tandem with the white-dominated industry, the government constricted the flow of catfish that Scott had been buying, cash, to process and take to market himself. The plant closed at a time when national chains like McDonald's and Church's Chicken were experimenting with catfish on the menu. There was great promise for the Scotts nationally, coupled with great resistance against them locally. Under the pressure, the Scotts lasted for as long, and longer, than anyone could have imagined.

"And it was real sad because people was trying to get him out of business," said plant worker Lillie Watson-Price. "Oftentime he didn't get the finances that he need to continue to grow his own fish. . . . So what he started doing is buying the fish. Or getting it on credit. And that only lasts for so long. And they would come, and bring the fish and bring the fish and bring the fish. It was good, for a while. . . ."

"Watch your step, too," Daniel Scott told me on the way through the plant site. "That was like a storage room. That was the break room. They would change clothes, the workers."

Daniel recalled his time at the plant as a teenager. He was working the skinning line and lost a fingernail. Snatched right off. Another time, he nearly cut off his finger on the bandsaw. If I could have gone back to 1990, in the plant's final days, I would have seen the Dependables processing tens of thousands of pounds of fish a day. I would have heard them laughing, seen them grinning, felt their pride at working a dignified job, however odious and blood-soaked it may have been. The workers were almost exclusively African American, as they were at the other processing plants. There, carpal tunnel and sexual assault was rampant. But here, Scott's workers prospered. I could have peeked around a corner and seen them joshing between shifts, throwing cubes of ice, concealed in their pockets, at each other's backsides. At lunchtime, I would have walked a hundred feet across the gravel parking lot to the Scotts' home to eat, where Edna Scott had opened her own kitchen and cafeteria to feed the workers and surrounding farmers with fried fish and the bounty from her garden patch.

James Baldwin, reluctant optimist, spoke about the gap between dreams and reality. "Until the moment comes, when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact . . . that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country—until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream."⁴James Baldwin, Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley, the Cambridge Union Society, Cambridge, UK, February 18, 1965, broadcast by the National Educational Television Network, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOCZOHQ7fCE.

When I was small, I heard much about problematic patriarchs. They littered my history books and struck smart poses. In civics class, we studied rhetorical structure and theoretical justice. I heard tell of trickle-down economics and bootstraps. There was an absence. All the people left out of this scheme.

Within the unfair system, there are outliers like the Scotts who make strides against the odds. Their summits are worth celebrating, even as they remind us that such climbs are precarious. They illustrate what the American dream should mean. A parcel of land, hard won, that endures across the generations. An enterprise, built through collaboration, with wealth that flows outward and downstream. A system made not solely by patriarchs but by extended families who share in the labors and define their collective futures.

"Those bees are back," said Daniel Scott, pointing to the rafters of the disintegrating processing plant. "You hear them. I thought they was gone. It's crazy, ain't it? How time will do shit?"

Ed and Edna Scott's children—especially Isaac Scott and Willena Scott-White—have restored the lost acreage, gone for thirty years to unjust foreclosure. The overgrown fields have been disked and re-planted with rice and soybeans, steadfast crops of twenty-first century Mississippi. Isaac Scott, who learned to farm from his father, now employs GPS on his combine. Willena Scott-White has plans for the Delta Farmers Museum and Cultural Learning Center in Mound Bayou to keep the stories of black farmers alive. The Scotts taught me that America's story is still being written, and all are authors of it.

Though many of the Scotts have passed on, the land remains. Near the ruins of the plant, a handful of gravestones occupy a shaded plot, in various degrees of wear. Edward Senior is buried here. He died in 1957 but looked on as his son made history. Ed Scott and Edna Scott, who passed in 2015 and 2016, are buried here too. The family cemetery is well-manicured and regularly visited. The pioneers who rest in the earth are rooted still. On Scott family land. Always, Scott family land.

About the Author

Julian Rankin is the founding director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the recipient of the Southern Foodways Alliance's first annual residency at Rivendell Writers' Colony.