PHOTO/ACLU
By Lee Rowland, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project and Dennis Parker, Director, ACLU Racial Justice Program
Editor’s note: These are excerpts from a longer article at the website below.
“We all should have the right to clean air and clean water.”
In Uniontown, having the audacity to fight for your fundamental human rights—by saying the exact sentence above—can get you sued for $30 million in federal court by companies seeking to silence their critics.
And that’s exactly what has happened to four Uniontown residents who banded together to create Black Belt Citizens for Health and Justice—a community organization dedicated to fighting pervasive racial and environmental injustice in Uniontown. And now, they are four residents living through the terrifying reality of being sued for millions of dollars by Green Group Holdings and Howling Coyote—the two companies that own the town’s coal ash landfill—in a meritless lawsuit that risks silencing the kind of political advocacy that lies at the core of the First Amendment’s protections.
These four diverse and passionate people— Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis—have crossed longstanding lines of race and class to fight together for human rights in their community.
In Uniontown, seeking health and justice means highlighting a municipal sewage “system” that sprays fecal water onto a field while emaciated cattle graze nearby. It means fighting the suffocating smell of aerated whey that is shot into the sky, making the town reek like putrid processed cheese. It means following the trail of a $4.8 million Department of Agriculture grant that residents feel evaporated without any benefit to the citizens it was intended to help.
Fighting for justice in Uniontown means opposing the trains that roll into town carrying hazardous coal ash to deposit it at the Arrowhead landfill—the very same coal ash that catastrophically leaked out of a Tennessee facility in 2008 and destroyed the surrounding environment before it was hurriedly redirected to Uniontown. It means holding the hands of friends and relatives as they die of cancer.
The type of environmental exploitation that the residents face every day is impossible to explain without taking race into account. The town’s numerous problems reflect an abject failure at every level of government to value residents’—Black residents’—lives and health.
In the lawsuit, Green Group and Howling Coyote claim that by advocating against hazardous waste in their town, Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have engaged in “defamation” that’s harmed them to the tune of $30 million. Fortunately, the First Amendment protects a person’s right to do precisely what they have so bravely done.
We all should have the right to clean air and clean water. Would you say it if you knew a powerful corporation would sue you for (more than) everything you’ve got? No one should have to make that choice.
The ACLU is representing Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis to make sure their voices are not silenced.
Copyright 2016 American Civil Liberties Union. Originally posted by the ACLU at aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/poor-black-polluted-alabama-town-speaking-gets-you-sued.
Reclaim the Earth
By the People’s Tribune
We cannot allow the earth to remain a plaything for profit in the hands of private corporations. There is no guarantee today that we as a species will survive. The environment has become a strategic front of struggle against corporate power and the private ownership of things indispensable to society. There is no way to quantify our demands. This time it’s the Earth itself. We have to reclaim the earth and build a humane economic system worthy of the people who inhabit it.
