AAMU Alumnus Addresses Students During Urban Planning Conference

The “Father of Environmental Justice,” Dr. Robert Bullard, gave a passionate and fiery keynote address at AAMU’s Urban Planning Conference Friday. Bullard, who received his B.S. degree from Alabama A&M University, is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy and founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University.

Bullard is also the first scientist to publish systemic research on the links between race and exposure to pollution. His research played a role in the first lawsuit in the United States to challenge environmental racism using civil rights law, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp. in 1979.

“What we found were a half million Black people in Houston, the largest Black community in any city in the Southern U.S., half a million people, were invisible,” said Bullard. “I had my Research Methods class students do a study, and what we found is five out of five city owned landfills, six out of eight city incinerators and three out of four privately owned landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. Jim crow did that! From the 30's up to 1978, 82 percent of all the garbage dumped in Houston was dumped on Black people, even though Black people only made up 25 percent of the population.”

Bullard said the lawsuit went to trial in 1985, after the case was transferred from the original judge, the Honorable Gabrielle McDonald, a Black woman.

“We lost the case despite all the data we had,” said Bullard. “But we developed a legal theory for using civil rights to challenge environmental racism, and I had to develop the data, do the science, do the studies.” 

Bullard also talked about the spark that led to the environmental justice movement, a protest in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982,  when a small African American community was designated a hazardous waste landfill.

“These were young people saying, ‘No, we don't want to be dumped on,’” said Bullard.
“Dr. Benjamin Chavis coined the term environmental racism. In 1991, Dr. Chavis organized the first People of Color Summit. We went to Washington, we had a thousand people. We marched all the way up to the nation's capital,” he said. “We developed 17 principals of environmental justice. The first principal, that people who are most impacted must speak for themselves, and those who are impacted must have the information so they CAN speak for themselves. It must be user-friendly, it must be written in a way or presented in a way that it makes sense.”

Bullard has testified on hundreds of environmental and civil rights lawsuits over the past three decades, and was at the White House when President Clinton and most recently President Biden signed Executive Orders on environmental justice. 

While in Huntsville, Bullard joined Dr. Elica Moss, research assistant professor in the AAMU Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, to talk to homeowners in Athens who say they have sewage and water drainage problems. 

“My job is to stand with them. I'm still standing and I'm still fighting,” he said. 

Bullard's final message to students was that they must continue the fight, because we still have a long way to go.

“Justice matters, where you live matters, your zip code matters,” said Bullard. “Your zip code is the most potent factor to determine your health and well-being. “African American children have a death rate from Asthma that's eight times that of white children. That's unacceptable.” 

“When we talk about this idea of pollution and race, America is segregated and so is pollution. We have the maps and charts to prove it.”