Uproar At Dancing Rabbit Creek: The Battle Over Race, Class, And The Environment

A case study in "environmental racism" recounts how a toxic-waste disposal facility polarized a small rural town in Mississippi, pitting poor blacks who wanted the plant against two white housewives who led the movement to stop it.

A blow-by-blow account of a rural southern community's fight to keep toxic waste out of its backyard. First-time author Crawford, an environmental lawyer and advocate, has a charged story to tell, full of complications. One is the strange coalition of forces that sought to bring what was to have been one of the nation's largest toxic-waste facilities to Noxubee County, Miss., whose population is largely black and poor: Big-city hustlers, working in alliance with local entrepreneurs, one of them a black political organizer named Ike Brown, ``the county's Al Sharpton, or its Savonarola, or its Boss Tweed.'' Another is the equally unlikely coalition of forces that gathered to stop the facility from being built: Some of the county's wealthiest white residents, the descendants of plantation owners, as well as its poorest black sharecroppers. Crawford tells the story of their battle exceedingly well; it's a tale that takes fascinating political twists and turns. The opposition forces have helped change the face of local politics, if only at the personal level--``I never imagined I would see Miss Mildred walking down the street with a black person,'' one activist remarks of a doyenne who overcame a lifetime of prejudice to battle the threat to her home. Whether those forces will succeed in keeping the dump out remains to be seen, as the fight moves into the courts. Apart from the fact that toxic-waste dumps are almost certain to leak into the groundwater after a decade or two, Crawford notes that such a dump would be especially ill advised in Noxubee County--with ``some of the nation's best farmland and a future source of our food security.'' An important contribution to the growing literature of environmental degradation and racism, and a fine case study in local politics. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This worthy but labored book details an environmental controversy in a poor, parochial and predominantly black county in east-central Mississippi. Not only were three companies vying to build a large hazardous-waste dump and incinerator there, but the opposition was not the local black community?which might have charged "environmental racism"?but privileged whites. New York lawyer Crawford, who was not a party to the controversy, conscientiously interviewed principals to produce this detailed, fair-minded account. He concentrates on two figures: local black power broker Ike Brown, a slippery but engaging character who got the local NAACP chapter to support one hazardous-waste project as a local economic boost in the absence of other jobs; and environmentalist Martha Blackwell, from a respected white family. The author details the subtlety of political organizing in benighted Noxubee County: while most political decisions were made in segregated white venues, a hazardous-waste company took the revolutionary step of holding meetings in black juke joints and churches. While the chance of a facility being built now is small, Noxubee whites now acknowledge that they must consider black interests and aspirations. The author also observes that we must rethink the process of licensing and regulating such toxic industries.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1983, Hughes Federated Technologies and U.S. Pollution Control, Inc., formed a partnership in order to place a hazardous-waste disposal complex in low-income, predominantly black Noxubee County, Mississippi. The proposed siting was more than controversial; it polarized along racial and economic lines the citizens of Noxubee, who were torn between protection of the environment and the promise of employment. On one level, this work by an environmental lawyer is a sociological inquiry into the "jobs vs. the environment" dilemma. But it is also about environmental justice (EJ) and the politics of hazardous waste in which low-income and minority communities are singled out for the placement of toxic-waste facilities. As a documentary history of a specific incident, this belongs alongside more theoretical works such as Robert Bullard's Unequal Protection (Sierra Club, 1994), Jim Schwab's Deeper Shades of Green (Sierra Club, 1994), and the classic of the EJ movement, the United Church of Christ's Toxic Waste and Race in the United States (UCC, 1987). Highly recommended.?Susan Maret, Univ. of Colorado Lib., Denver
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.