Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–1954

Copyright © 2017 Sylvia Hood Washington.

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1: Historical And Philosophical Foundations Of Environmental Racism And Environmental Justice

Chapter 1   Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism, And Birth Of The Environmental Leper

Chapter 2   An Archaeology Of The Modern Environmental Justice Movement

Part 2: Packing Them In

Chapter 3   Justice In The Jungle: Immigrants And Environmental Racism In The Back Of The Yards, 1880–1930

Chapter 4   Engineering And Environmental Inequality: The Rise And Fall Of The Notorious Bubbly Creek

Part 3: Broken Promises

Chapter 5   Planning And Environmental Inequalities: Race, Place, And Environmental Health In Chicago

Chapter 6   We Fight Blight: Block Beautiful And The Urban Conservation Movement In Chicago’s Black Belt, 1915–1954

Epilogue: Raisins In The Sun: Postmodern Environmental Justice Struggles In Chicago

Index

Preface

This book began in the early 1990s as I listened to my students of various racial and ethnic backgrounds discuss and debate the notion of environmental racism. Even though over ten years had passed since the birth of the modern Environmental Justice Movement in the early 1980s, many of them were unfamiliar with both the phrase and its implicit connotations. At the heart of their discussions and debate was a claim that many racial and ethnic groups in the United States and across the world, regardless of color, have experienced some type of environmental disenfranchisement because of who they were or how they were identified in a particular society. Black Nigerians in power environmentally disenfranchise other black Nigerians who aren’t in power. Likewise, my memories of the environmental marginalization of my own African American neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, which was aided and abetted by African American political leadership during the Civil Rights movement, reinforce the premise of this book: that environmental racism is not and has never been simply a problem of white versus black or colored versus noncolored. My argument for this study is that environmental racism existed more than two hundred years before the phrase was coined and the phenomenon recognized in the early 1980s with the birth of the modern Environmental Justice Movement. The phenomenon is best understood in American history as the marginalization of nonwhite communities versus white communities, and since the very notion of whiteness has been fluid, so has been the pathology of environmental racism. If policy makers, urban planners, and environmental scholars and activists want to find solutions to environmental inequalities that exist within a geographical space, they must and should reconcile themselves to the historical pattern and practice of racial marginalization that has characterized that space.

I have written this book to elucidate historical patterns of racial and ethnic marginalization of groups and their concomitant environmental marginalization in one of the most polluted geographies in America, Chicago. The phrase packing them in refers to the way in which these populations were forced to exist in deadly high densities because of how they were perceived from both an environmental and social perspective by the larger body politic. This book also shows that each of these community’s abilities to escape or find relief from environmental racism was tied to how and when it was allowed to become more white and/or less of a social or environmental threat to the larger community.

Acknowledgments

There are many to whom I am grateful for encouraging me and supporting me in my research endeavors to complete this work over the last ten years. My husband and friend of several decades, Gary Washington, a Harvard-trained policy planner and sociologist, has had a tremendous impact on the direction and scope of my work. His planning and policy perspectives were and still are critical to framing my research in this area. I appreciate the encouragement of my dissertation committee at Case Western Reserve University to pursue this topic as well as their final comments on the subject.

I am also extremely grateful to the senior environmental historians who graciously read and critiqued my manuscript once it started to evolve from the dissertation phase into a book. I sincerely appreciate the input of Jeffrey Stine, past president of the American Society of Environmental History, who was extremely helpful with both written and verbal critiques of the manuscript. Likewise, the written and verbal comments from Andrew Hurley, of the University of St. Louis, literally reshaped the structure and form of the book’s argument. The honest input and encouragement of John McNeill, of Georgetown University, made the overall book a more lucid and complete environmental justice history. I am also very grateful for the time that senior African American historian Christopher Robin Reed spent in reviewing and critiquing this book in its eleventh hour from a different but just as relevant perspective. I appreciate the time and effort of individuals at the Center for American Places. Their solicitation of peer reviews and their own critique of my dissertation in the early period were critical in shaping the final outline of the book. I am indebted to the many colleagues who gave me honest and critical advice that in the end helped shape the book, but I am especially grateful to Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto, and Northwestern scholars Henry Binford and Allan Schnaiberg.

This book could not have been completed without the research support of Northwestern University’s history department, especially Sarah Maza, and the university’s reference librarians. I am grateful to senior archivist Michael Flug of the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro American History and Literature of the Chicago Public Library, who led me to archival material that had eluded me in previous and frustrated searches. Thanks are due to archivists at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, and to the research staff at the Chicago Historical Society and the Newberry Library. I am also extremely grateful to the Chicago Urban League’s Vice President of Research, Paul Sweet, who personally assisted me in finding relevant archival material from the organization’s on-site archives and gaining access to relevant archival material at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Special Collections; to the Illinois Regional Archives Depository; and to the Metropolitan Sanitary District Archives staff.

Last but not least is my gratitude and appreciation for the patience, cooperation, and support of both my daughters, Sarah and Lauren, who shared their mom with her research and writing efforts.

Introduction

Each individual has his own place; and each place its own individual.

––Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison

I have been conscious, at times, of writing against the prevailing orthodoxies… . Each of these orthodoxies has a certain validity … they tend to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed, by conscious efforts to the making of history.

––E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

Why do a disproportionate percentage of poor, working class, and minority communities continue to suffer from environmental inequalities more than twenty years after the modern Environmental Justice Movement? Those currently involved in discussions about the existence of environmental inequalities tied to race or class prefer to use the phrase environmental justice rather than the potentially defensive phrase of environmental racism.¹

In accordance with philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, I have called the history of environmental injustice discussed in this book the archaeology of environmental racism. It is my goal in this book to explain why environmental racism is a more accurate description of the past and present phenomena even for white communities who suffer from environmental inequalities in the United States. Race, racism, and whiteness have been fluid and changing concepts in the United States since its inception, a fact that has been well established by such scholars as David Roediger, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and Ian F. Haney Lopez.² Environmental racism is a misunderstood concept in desperate need of explanation from a historical perspective because who becomes a victim of racism is contingent upon the changing notions of race. Environmental racism today is a phenomenon improperly portrayed as a struggle between blacks and whites in America. Neither blacks nor whites are part of a monolithic community and neither have been perceived as such in the course of their history in the United States. History reveals that environmental racism has been experienced for decades by people or communities who today are classified as white. Their environmental marginalization occurred because at some point in time they were either considered not white or not part of the mainstream white community; subsequently, they were environmentally disenfranchised. These people typically belonged to what today are defined as various ethnic groups, including Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian, and Appalachian communities. These ethnic groups were rarely, if ever, classified as black; therefore, the argument that African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians are the chief targets of environmental inequalities because they are not white needs to be reexamined. The primary historical difference (from an environmental perspective) between people of color (especially African Americans) and white ethnic groups is that their environmentally marginalized geographical spaces were constructed by more rigid and longer lasting race-based legal decisions and public policies that were sanctioned and endorsed by government at all levels.³

Public policies, laws, and private practices that controlled or influenced where people lived and worked in the United States were tainted by notions of race (or who was nonwhite) for over three hundred years. As a result, these policies and practices played a major role in the development of environmental inequalities in poor and working class communities of particular racial or ethnic background in the United States. This became even more prevalent after the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization of cities in the nineteenth century. The current body of environmental histories and studies explicitly and implicitly argues that the ability to minimize or even thwart environmental assaults upon communities became most effective in the latter half of the twentieth century primarily among middle class whites, and brought lessons learned from previous movements: a knowledge of how the system works, access to a certain amount of scientific expertise, an understanding of how to use the media, and an ability to raise enough funds to maintain viable, albeit lean, organizations.⁴ This book challenges this widely accepted belief by showing that minority and poor ethnic white communities also have a history of effective environmental activism that predates the modern Environmental Justice Movement that began in the 1980s and the white, middle class environmental movement that began in the 1970s.

The underlying premise of this book is that poor, foreign, and racial groups have been and are easily constructed as others––lepers lying outside the body politic of the larger society––and that this construction is directly related to environmental racism. I use Michel Foucault’s concept of others in this study to refer to a large array of environmentally marginalized groups within a society because it overcomes the simplistic dichotomy of white versus black. This construction is facilitated by differences in language or dialect, culture, and socially constructed and ever-changing categories of race and ethnicity. The construction of the other is on a cellular level but can, within the larger society, result in the further conceptualization as a social body requiring discipline, enclosures, and management by a majority. The twentieth century’s Jim Crow laws, restrictive covenants, racial zoning ordinances, and immigration restriction policies are examples of this type of construction and environmental discipline. These groups identified as others were, and still are, forced to live in geographical spaces (communities) within the society that are or are becoming environmentally compromised because of their otherness. Their communities become dumping grounds where waste and toxic material are disproportionately located; apparently, they are the proper place for everything deemed to be undesirable (people and waste). These communities become the ultimate sink for the larger body politic. Historically, normal and healthy people did not choose to live in the geographical locations of the leper colony. They sought to maximize the distance between themselves and the lepers. Similarly, leper colonies were not given the same care and maintenance provided to nonleper colonies. I believe this phenomenon holds true for both social and political lepers; an environmental history of these groups will validate that assumption.

In support of the arguments in this work, Mary Poovey’s seminal history, The Making of a Social Body,⁵ provides an excellent analysis of the emergence of public health policies based upon otherness in nineteenth-century Britain. She argues that these policies could only emerge by defining poor communities in nineteenth-century England, and eventually Great Britain, as being a social body separate from the body politic. This cultural phenomenon was greatly facilitated by public health policies implemented by Great Britain’s famous nineteenth-century sanitarian, Edwin Chadwick, to ameliorate waterborne diseases from urban sewage. Chadwick, a former barrister and self-taught sanitarian, became one of the most influential public health figures in Anglo societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶

Poovey points out that England’s poor had to be constructed as a social body outside the defined body politic so that they could emerge as Foucault’s symbolic leper and therefore justifiably be isolated and removed from the larger body. In this way they could be easily individualized (on a macromolecular level) and subsequently identified as docile bodies subject to forms of discipline that would be of benefit to the society at large.⁷ In this case the discipline would be sanitary education and changes in architectural space in order to optimize water quality and therefore minimize the spread of typhoid and other waterborne diseases. Poovey’s example of sanitation policies is kindred to the environmental policies under study in my research because the sanitation problem of Britain was worst in poor and immigrant communities. These groups would bear an inequitable share of health problems emanating from environmental pollution as result of rapid industrialization and expansion in a limited urban space.

Like Poovey’s poor in Great Britain, Eastern European immigrants and African American migrants in Chicago were constructed as others who were not envisioned as being part of the larger body politic. From 1865 to 1940, the immigrants (mostly white) working in the Chicago packing houses voluntarily formed extremely dense residential communities in the same or closely proximate environs of the Chicago stockyards. This area was highly polluted because of legal and illegal waste disposal practices by industrialists, politicians, landlords, and the city itself. Southern African Americans who came to the area between 1915 and 1954 voluntarily moved (and were later forced) into Chicago’s Black Belt (and eventually Bronzeville). Bronzeville was the name that black Chicagoans used to refer to their primary geographic space of occupation on the city’s South Side.⁸

Both groups were packed into highly degraded environmental spaces because of legal, extralegal, and illegal waste management practices as well as housing policies that were based upon racist and ethnocentric planning policies. Many African American migrants lived in the notorious kitchenette apartments that were firetraps and breeding grounds for tuberculosis and rats. There may have been some Eastern Europeans who lived in kitchenette apartments but these spaces were primarily occupied by black Chicagoan migrants coming into the city during the second migration period. Both groups waged battles to create what today are called sustainable living spaces. They fought to maintain, preserve, or restore the environmental integrity of their new homes and immediate environs.

Another objective of this book is to show that environmentally marginalized groups in the United States have a history of environmental activism that predates the historical emergence of the postmodern Environmental Justice Movement launched in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina, by African Americans who fought unsuccessfully to prevent the disposal of hazardous soil in their communities. Critical to this thematic argument is that the term environmental racism actually embraces what I have termed environmental ethnocentrism. Written histories to date have focused on either individualized or cellular ethnic community development or labor histories. In each case the immigrants, migrants, or minorities have been portrayed as being either unaware of the hazards emanating from environmental pollution and its concomitant diseases; less caring because of a trade-off with higher needs (economic advancement or security); or impotent in ameliorating their situation because of their social and political rank.

These people were aware of pollution and its potential impact on their neighborhoods and––most importantly––their health. They made many attempts to prevent or stop the environmental degradation of their neighborhoods. Although the communities are each examined for different time spans––Back of the Yards from 1865 to the 1930s and Bronzeville from 1865 to 1954––it is clearly evident that each disenfranchised or marginalized societal group (African American migrants and white ethnic immigrants) made active political and legal attempts to ameliorate environmentally oppressive conditions.

The premise of this book reflects my experiences as an African American woman with firsthand exposure to environmental racism. As a historian, I am keenly aware that facts and reality can be distorted by memory over time, but the oral history tradition among people of African descent and other cultures around the world has been and continues to be a powerful tool for transferring the history of their communities across generations as well as a means of obtaining the full and complete history of a geographical and cultural space or place. As the 2002 national project director of a historic environmental justice and health project funded by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Knights of Peter Claver, Inc. (the oldest and largest black Catholic lay organization in the United States), I have had the opportunity to hear the environmental memories of hundreds of black people across the country. Their experiences and memories reinforced my own memories as an African American who grew up in a middle class but racially segregated African American neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s in Cleveland, Ohio. This neighborhood was on the very outskirts of Cleveland and contiguous to Eastern European immigrant (or first generation) neighborhoods. Our neighborhoods shared common environmental spaces that were routinely polluted by the illegal dumping of residential and industrial trash until the 1980s. The African Americans in my community fought against environmental inequalities in an era that predated the modern Environmental Justice Movement. They organized, took political action, and influenced (as much as they could) the environmental conditions of their neighborhood and eventually proved instrumental in preventing another mayoral term for Carl B. Stokes, the first African American mayor of Cleveland, Ohio. The African American citizens of my community believed that this African American mayor was engaged in promoting and executing environmentally racist policies. He, in turn, felt that they were environmental racists who were acting to block the acquisition of sustainable living spaces by less fortunate African Americans who had been spatially confined to the inner city.

This book was also inspired by my professional experiences as an environmental scientist and engineer in the power industry. My relationships with first and second generation Eastern European engineers in the power industry gave me the opportunity to hear their memories about their families’ historical environmental struggles for sustainable communities and healthy work environments in urban America. In the early 1980s, when I was working as the plant environmental engineer at the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company’s Lake Shore coal-fired power plant situated on Lake Erie, I heard a recitation of environmental memories similar to mine from a young Slovenian engineer whom I will call Joe. Joe’s family had immigrated to the United States in the 1960s. As a child he came to the United States to live with an extended family who was residing in Cleveland’s notorious Flats neighborhood, situated near the city’s steel mill industry. Many of Joe’s relatives had suffered the physical indignities of living and working in Cleveland’s steel mills and had lost limbs and suffered overall poor health because of their working conditions prior to the institution and enforcement of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards. Joe told me about his uncles who fell victim to molten steel or highly pressurized steam only to return home to crowded and unsanitary housing. Joe shared his family environmental stories with me because he wanted me to understand that Eastern European immigrants had also been environmentally marginalized because of their race or ethnicity. They struggled to escape their environmental disenfranchisement both on the job and in the neighborhood through hard work and education to provide them with the economic means for escaping to suburban green space.

Unfortunately, these same techniques were, for decades, useless for African American migrants and their offspring (unless they could racially pass for white) because of the visual marker of race creating a more insidious stigma of environmental otherness.

Environmental histories have been written by lay people, nonhistorians, and other social scientists, including such environmental sociologists as Robert Bullard in Dumping in Dixie⁹ or David Pellow in Garbage Wars.¹⁰ Their main emphasis, however, is not in rendering a historical narrative about people, place, and environment so much as making a contemporary analysis of the state and future of the postmodern Environmental Justice Movement. Environmental histories written by professional historians to date have attempted to illustrate the full impacts (both positive and negative) of technologies and technological processes on modern and postmodern societies as a result of the interplay between social, cultural, and political forces. What I have noticed, however, in a large number of these histories is that there is a pervasive silence about the reactions and actions of those who seem to suffer the most and disproportionately from negative environmental impacts: the working class poor and ethnic and minority groups. The vast majority of these histories (with the exception of Andrew Hurley’s Environmental Inequalities) seem to have an implicit underlying assumption that communities that become environmentally disenfranchised are historically helpless and ignorant victims who have suffered from environmental policies because they did not understand or did not attempt to influence them until the Environmental Justice Movement began in Warren County, North Carolina.

Environmental history in the United States has an environmental veil with respect to elucidating the historical perspectives of socially marginalized communities who have experienced environmental inequalities from their own perspectives. This book and my current research is an attempt to lift that veil so that readers can see as well as hear the environmental history of these communities from the perspectives of those who have been environmentally disenfranchised.

This book humbly reflects the beginning of my own research efforts to deconstruct the prevalent historical myth of centuries-long environmental illiteracy, complacency, and inactivity among ethnic and African American communities experiencing both environmental racism and ethnocentrism because they were willing to trade their health and the health of their families for work.

A few key environmental history studies greatly shaped my desire to pursue this type of historical research. They are Andrew Hurley’s Environmental Inequalities, Ted Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England, Jeffrey Stine’s Mixing the Waters, and Joel Tarr’s The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective. Each of these works addressed the interaction of social, political, technological, and cultural decisions that have influenced the environmental integrity of a region or a particular city. All of these histories and most of their contemporary studies have, in my opinion, primarily produced top down environmental histories from the perspectives of those in power––be it political, social, or economic––or those who had access to power. Steinberg’s and Stine’s histories each allude (in varying degrees) to the environmental impacts on the working class and socially disenfranchised groups in American history but never really develop the historical perspective of environmental others about the radical changes in their environmental space, which were, for the most part, negative. Jobs were created for the masses from these changes but their living spaces became highly polluted and unsustainable from a public health perspective.

Nature