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Hard Asphalt and Heavy Metals: Urban Environmentalism in Postwar America

A Dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of History

of the College of Arts and Sciences

2008

Robert R. Gioielli

M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2004 B.A., University of South Carolina, 1999

Committee Chair: Professor David Stradling

Abstract

Hard Asphalt and Heavy Metals: Urban Environmentalism in Postwar America

By Robert R. Gioielli

After World War Two, American cities began to break down. Their housing and industrial infrastructure fell into disrepair, and efforts to improve cities, including urban renewal and highway construction projects, only exacerbated the existing problems, destroying neighborhoods and increasing pollution. All of these problems exposed city residents to a unique set of environmental problems. By the 1960s many of them responded to this environmental breakdown with a series of dynamic local social movements. For almost a decade, residents of scores of cities, especially in the East and

Midwest, forced local leaders to ameliorate the impact of a variety of local environmental problems. This dissertation provides case studies of three of these local movements. In St.

Louis, the rapid decline of the city’s housing stock exposed poor, predominantly African

American city children to toxic levels of lead paint. A group of dedicated residents and social workers raised awareness about the issue, and pushed the city to enact and enforce a lead ordinance. In Baltimore, a coalition of African Americans and blue collar whites formed the Movement Against Destruction to fight the construction of the local highway system and articulate an environmental critique of the highway planning and construction process. In Chicago, the Citizen’s Action Program (CAP) fought the local Democratic machine for five years over a variety of issues, including air pollution and highway construction. CAP’s core constituency were ethnic, blue collar homeowners from the

iii

city’s out neighborhoods who used pollution issues as an entry point into local political activism.

Together, these studies are part of the hidden history of postwar environmental activism. Popular and academic research focuses on wilderness areas and national parks, and activism by a few national elites or middle class suburban groups. But by focusing on local issues and the malapportionment of environmental hazards and amenities, urban activism represents one of the major strains of the postwar environmental movement. It provided key connections to other social movements, particularly the African American

Freedom Struggle, and was a precursor to the contemporary environmental justice movement.

Acknowledgements

Ideally, advanced graduate study is a journey of personal intellectual growth done in the company of a supportive community of scholars. This was my experience at the

University of Cincinnati. David Stradling was the model of a graduate advisor. In additional to providing cogent critiques and ideas for numerous drafts, he encouraged my relatively unorthodox views on environmental activism, and helped focus my often expansive prose. Nikki Taylor came relatively late to my graduate career, but helped me see urban and environmental history from a new perspective. Andrew Hurley, from the

University of Missouri St. Louis, provided key advice at every stage of the project, and has challenged me to think critically but also broadly. Other faculty members from the

Department of History have served as an exemplary model of not only intellectual engagement but also committed professionalism, both in and outside of the classroom.

Thanks especially to John Alexander, Wendy Kline, Tracy Teslow, Chris Phillips, Wayne

Durrill, Barbara Ramusack, Martin Francis, Maura O’Connor and Isaac Campos. Fellow graduate students, especially Dan Glenn, Aaron Cowan, Steve Rockenbach, Bill

Bergman, Krista Sigler and David Merkowitz, helped create a stimulating, challenging and appropriately ridiculous environment that helped me grow personally as well as intellectually.

Assistance from numerous librarians and archivists was vital to the success of this project. Thomas Hollowak at the University of Baltimore, the staff at the Washington

University Archives, Zelli Fischetti and Doris Wesley at the Western Historical

Manuscript Collection – St. Louis and Mary Diaz at the Department of Special

Collections at the University of Illinois Chicago were of particular assistance. The

Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati provided generous funding in the form of research and travel grants and a dissertation fellowship. Other funding was provided by the Department of History, the Indian Hill High School Alumni

Association, and the University of Cincinnati Graduate Student Governance Association.

Friends and family members also provided tremendous amounts of support and companionship. My parents, Bill and Louise Gioielli, and my sister Katie and brother

Casey provided encouragement at every stage of my graduate career. Kass Kovalcheck,

Judson and Heather Drennan, Lolita Huckaby, Jennifer Stanley, Adam Snyder, Jon

Sojkowski, and Brooks Williams provided much needed laughs and distractions from the grind of academia all throughout the research and writing process. Emily and Eric

Carlisle and Nirav Kapadia provided couches, cold beer and warm hospitality during numerous trips to Baltimore. Bill and Marci McCombs are the best in-laws a husband could ask for, and the other members of the McCombs clan, including Ben, Karen and

Meri, have been equally supportive.

Final thanks goes to my wife Emily. For the six years, she has kept me honest, pulled me out of funks, intrepidly explained my topic to people who asked “What is

Rob’s dissertation about?” when neither she, nor I, really knew the answer to the question, and constantly provided both advice and laughs. I could not have done completed this project, nor can I imagine my future, without her.

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Acknowledgements v

Introduction 1

Chapter One The Break Down of the City 25

Chapter Two Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities: 60 St. Louis and the Fight Against Lead Poisoning

Chapter Three The Knee in the Groin Approach: 101 Chicago and the Citizen’s Action Program

Chapter Four We Must Destroy You to Save You: 149 Baltimore’s Freeway Revolt

Epilogue Justice and Environmentalism in the 1970s 195

Bibliography 205

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Introduction

“Environmentalist circles are very white. I feel like a chocolate chip in most meetings. Many of them are dealing with wilderness and polar bears and we are trying to cope with our neighborhoods and communities.” 1

Majora Carter

Social worker Carolyn Burrow’s patients at a St. Louis community health center were exhibiting an increased amount of anxiety and stress in the early 1970s. The

decrepit state of “environmental conditions” including “poor plumbing, falling plaster,

lack of adequate play areas, overcrowded housing, and high-rise apartments and projects”

was causing this mental strain, Burrows wrote in a local magazine. She diagnosed these

“environmental illnesses” as being caused by “environmental racism.”2 Many scholars

credit the 1987 report Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, one of the founding

documents of the environmental justice movement, with coining the phrase

“environmental racism.”3 But Burrow and a number of social workers and activists were

using the term in 1970s St. Louis to describe a variety of problems – particularly

substandard housing and childhood lead poisoning – that afflicted the city’s African

American population. Environmental justice advocates have always argued that their

movement has a heritage in the earlier period of the African American Freedom Struggle,

and this quote reveals a direct link. It is possible to say that environmental justice

originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when urban residents and activists across the

1 Melissa Harris-Lacewell, “How the Bronx Turned Green,” TheRoot.com, 22 April 2008. Carter, the founder of Sustainable South Bronx, was interviewed by Harris-Lacewell for an article about African Americans in the environmental movement. 2 Carolyn Burrow, “Environmental Racism,” Proud, 1, No. 10, December 1970. 3 United Church of Christ, Commission for Racial Justice. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: Public Data Access, 1987).

United States began to organize around a variety of problems, including highway

construction and urban renewal, air pollution, and substandard housing and childhood

lead poisoning.

This dissertation documents that early environmental organizing by urban,

working class and African American communities, but does not simply seek to show the

origins of the environmental justice movement. This organizing was part of a long

tradition of environmental activism by city residents, and an important part of the early

environmental movement. This project recenters the focus of early environmental

activism clearly on American cities during the period known as the “urban crisis” to show

that African Americans and other urbanites had a clear environmental agenda, one that

existed well before the environmental justice movement. Environmental justice is not a

subaltern response to the mainstream environmental movement, but an attempt to reassert

the priorities of social justice and equality that were present in the movement from the

beginning, forged in the crucible of the urban crisis.

Environmental historians have grossly neglected the history of the environmental

movement. Over the past quarter century, environmental history has grown into a vibrant

and exciting subfield, but has yet to fully examine the social movement from which it

sprung. Much of the local activism in the 1960s and 1970s, at the dawn of the contemporary environmental movement, was not happening in suburbs, led by the

relatively affluent, but was occurring in cities, led by minorities and the poor, or blue collar whites. Across the country, in almost every major American city, there was a rich vein of environmental activism that historians have yet to describe or explain. This

dissertation tells the story of that activism, and places it within the narrative of the

modern American environmental movement.

After World War Two, three distinct strands of environmental thought and protest

developed in the United States: 1) A response to an increase in the use and sophistication

of technology, 2) The rise of a consumer society and its resulting shift in demand for

resources and amenities and 3) the reaction to the malapportionment of environmental

hazards and increase in environmental inequity. All of these have origins and antecedents

from the first half of the twentieth century, but they developed out of the distinct

economic, political and social conditions of the postwar era. They often overlap, and are

at times antagonistic towards each other. They are also still developing. The recent surge

in environmental activism has its roots in all three of these different strains.

The first strand, the response to technology, rises almost directly out of World

War Two. As part of the war effort, the United States government, in concert with scores of private corporations and research institutions, developed a number of advanced weapons and technological devices. In addition to the atomic bomb, research funding also went into the development of pesticides, plastics and other synthetic materials, biological

and chemical weaponry, jet propulsion, and other transportation technology. After the

war, corporations sought to transfer these new technologies into marketable consumer

products, and the federal government continued its generous research funding as part of

the Cold War weapons buildup.4

By the 1950s, American’s started to experience the impact of this fundamental shift in the use and sophistication of technology. Corporations were using compounds

4 Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

and processes that had not existed a decade ago for a broad variety of applications, even

though both experts and laymen had little understanding of their long-term effects on

both humans and the natural world. Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner became the

country’s best-known critics of these technological advances. In Silent Spring, Carson

explained how the sudden increase in the use of pesticides, especially DDT, harmed the

natural world and human health. Commoner, a research biologist, helped the country

understand the effects of nuclear power and above ground nuclear testing. Although both

were important thinkers and activists, Carson and Commoner were also the public face of

broader national movements. The numerous local efforts to curtail the spraying of DDT

and other pesticides during the 1950s partially inspired Carson’s work. Commoner came

out of the information movement, where scientists worked with laymen to better educate

the public about nuclear power, weaponry, and a host of other postwar technological advances.5

This emerging critique of the technological society grew out of, but also appealed

to, the country’s growing postwar middle class. As the Americans became more

educated, affluent and employed in the service, as opposed to the production, economy,

they became more interested in preserving and enhancing environmental amenities, and

limiting environmental impacts, which made them open to the critique of technology

from people like Carson and Commoner. The shifting priorities of this consumer society

provoked the second strain of environmental thought and protest: a broad attempt by the

5 Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007); Mark H. Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Kelly Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Thomas Wellock, Critical Masses : opposition to nuclear power in California, 1958-1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

expanding middle class to both create and preserve environmental amenities. This concern played into more traditional conservationist goals like wilderness preservation.

Attempts to preserve rural and wild lands began in the Progressive era, when these lands shifted from being places of production to places of consumption, particularly for hunting, camping and other forms of wilderness recreation. This consumer constituency boomed in the postwar era, and groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society tapped into the large number of people who were interested in limiting development and preserving wild areas, particularly in the West, for recreational use.6 This consumerist impulse also played into anti-pollution activism, as the expanding middle class began to lobby for clean air, clean water and other environmental amenities. The crossover with concerns about technology was significant. 7 As Adam Rome has shown, early sprawl activism was both an effort to preserve the promise of a postwar, consumer oriented suburbia, and a critique of the power of homebuilding technology to radically alter rural landscapes.8

6 On the origins of wilderness preservation, see Stephen R. Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). As conservation relates to consumerism, see Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). During the interwar period, the founders of the Wilderness Society were interested in protecting wild lands from overconsumption, promoting a more sustainable – wilderness hiking – but still powerful consumptive behavior. See Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). On wilderness preservation in the postwar era, see Mark W. T. Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). 7 On air and water pollution activism see Scott Hamilton Dewey, Don’t Breathe the Air: Air Pollution and U.S. Environmental Politics, 1945-1970 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); James Lewis Longhurst, “ ‘Don’t Hold Your Breath, Fight for It!’ Women’s Activism and Citizen Standing in Pittsburgh and the United States, 1965--1975” (Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, 2004); William McGucken, Biodegradable: Detergents and the Environment (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991). Lizabeth Cohen includes environmental activism in the range of consumer oriented activism that emerged in the late 1960s. See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). 8 Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Most histories of the postwar environmental movement emphasize the

consumerist strain of activism. In Beauty, Health and Permanence, Samuel and Barbara

Hays argue that the expanding middle class created a critical mass of people concerned

with environmental amenities like clean air, water and open space. According to the

Hays’, who based their research on a vast collection of pamphlets and newsletters, the

environmental movement had its origins in postwar suburbia, which moderated activist

tendencies. Environmentalists were primarily progressive, seeking to preserve and

enhance the current state of affairs. Other work has focused on activism by students,

scientists and middle-class women, but still paints a relatively homogeneous portrait:

Environmentalists are white, middle-class, educated, live in suburbia or other affluent

areas, and are concerned broadly about technology and access to environmental

amenities.9

But over the past twenty years, the emergence of the environmental justice

movement has challenged this homogeneous portrait. In communities across the country,

African Americans, Hispanics, blue collar whites and other disadvantaged racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups have fought against what they believe are the malapportionment of environmental hazards and amenities and general environmental inequities. The early movement focused on the siting of toxic waste dumps and chemical plants, but recently activists have expanded their agenda to a variety of other issues, including a critique urban land use patterns and access to transportation. To its initial

9 Samuel P. Hays and Barbara D. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Robert Lifset, “Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism, 1962--1980” (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2005); Longhurst, ““Don’t Hold Your Breath, Fight for It!” Women’s Activism and Citizen Standing in Pittsburgh and the United States, 1965--1975”; McGucken, Biodegradable: Detergents and the Environment; Adam Rome, ““Give Earth a Chance”: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” The Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (2003).

chroniclers, environmental justice had strong antecedents in the Civil Rights Movement, but its progeny as an environmental movement was murkier. Activists and their scholarly advocates tended to argue that was an almost spontaneous response to the suppression of a social justice agenda by traditional environmental groups.10 In response, environmental historians have argued that concerns about social justice and malapportionment of environmental hazards, especially in urban areas, had been present in environmental activism since the Progressive era.11 Sociologist Robert Gottlieb fleshed out this idea in

Forcing the Spring, showing how environmental activism by women, the working class and racial and ethnic minorities had been present throughout the twentieth century United

States. But Gottlieb’s attempt to come to terms with environmental justice, historically, was impressionistic and teleological, skimming off known activists and thinkers from the past century and tracing how their ideas serve as the foundation for the “transformation of the environmental movement.” Recent studies of environmental justice have followed a similar methodology, looking for antecedents, but still focusing on present day activism.

This has the effect of giving environmental justice a heritage, rather than a history, and continuing to ghettoize activism by poor, minority and working class groups.12

10 Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Eileen Maura McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, Pcbs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 11 Martin V. Melosi, “Environmental Justice, Political Agenda Setting, and the Myths of History,” Journal of Policy History 12, no. 1 (2000). 12 Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005); Examples of work by sociologists include David N. Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge.: MIT Press, 2002); Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865-1954 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005). African American environmental history has begun to receive more attention recently, but work still focuses on black experiences in the rural South. See D. Glave Dianne, “A Garden So Brilliant with Colors, So Original in Its Design’: Rural African American Women, Gardening, Progressive Reform, and the Foundation of an African American Environmental Perspective,” Environmental History 8, no. 3 (2003); Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll, To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,

Environmental justice does not just have a heritage, but a deep history in the

postwar era. It is one of the three major strains of postwar environmental activism, and has been the most neglected by historians. The reaction against the malapportionment of

environmental resources did not begin in the 1980s, but a generation earlier, when

numerous groups began to notice the impact of environmental inequity on the local level.

This happened all over the country, and urban residents felt these inequities most

severely, as American cities were drained of their capital, and a variety of private and

public policies, on the national and local level, combined to remap the American

metropolis by class and race. People, corporations and jobs flew out of older, industrial

cities in the Northeast and Midwest to suburban areas and new cities in the South and

West. A variety of processes, including deindustrialization, federal housing and

transportation policy, white hostility to civil rights reform, and the limits of the liberal,

New Deal state, created sharp divisions in many American cities. A majority of racial

minorities, primarily African Americans, were consigned to live in central areas, which

were marked by poverty, joblessness and crime. Outlying suburban areas became more

successful, affluent, overwhelmingly white and hostile to the inner city poor.13

2006); Mark D. Hersey, ““My Work Is That of Conservation”: The Environmental Vision of George Washington Carver” (Ph.D., The University of Kansas, 2006); Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 13 The spatialization of class and race is a major theme of the history of the postwar American city. See especially Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); Kevin Michael Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Many of these works focus on the specific conditions of the postwar metropolis. David Freund argues that the creation of white suburbs was a state policy that originated in the 1920s and 1930s. See David M. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

This new metropolitan landscape, with sharp divisions between race, class and the

availability of capital, also created unequal access to environmental amenities and

hazards. When corporations abandoned the city, they left behind the decaying

infrastructure of a breakneck growth and rapid industrialization. Urban leaders tried to

remake the city, with various renewal and development projects, for the postindustrial

age. But to the remaining residents, these projects just caused more damage, or reinforced

how local and national leaders had let many urban neighborhoods decay. By the end of

the 1960s, these problems became too much to bear for many urban residents, provoking

a wave of activism by those who had no choice, whether because of racial segregation,

discrimination, or lack of housing and job opportunities, but to remain in the city.

These conditions made the American city the crucible for the social justice strain

of postwar environmental activism, but environmental historians have generally ignored

it. The only book to look exclusively at urban environmental protest is Andrew Hurley’s

Environmental Inequalities. This study of Gary, Indiana was the first to explore how a

variety of local and national forces unfairly distributed environmental hazards and

amenities in the postwar era, drawing a spirited response from a diverse array of activist

coalitions.14 But instead of sparking future research, many historians have let

Environmental Inequalities stand alone as an example of how environmental hazards were unfairly distributed in industrial cities. This is unfortunate, because although Gary was representative of many of the processes that American cities were subjected to in the postwar era, it was also unique. In particular, U.S. Steel held an enormous amount of control over the apportionment of environmental hazards and amenities, particularly

14 Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

relating to air pollution and toxic waste dumps. This means that the story of Gary is as

much the story of U.S. Steel, its corporate decisions and the fortunes of the American

steel industry in the postwar era, as it is the story of the environmental experience in

American cities.

To assess that experience properly, a broader, comparative view is necessary. This

study focuses on America’s industrial heartland in the Northeast and Midwest. The cities

examined are relatively large, with a diverse array of political, economic and

environmental conditions. Although each declined both relatively and absolutely in the

postwar era, they did so at different rates, and for different reasons. Within these cities, this project examines how groups on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale perceived and acted upon their environmental position. Most historians, intellectuals and observers have said that members of this lower group were not the originators of the postwar environmental movement. During the early 1970s, contemporary commentators agreed.

For example, many black activists, both radicals and moderates, argued that the “ecology

movement”, although important in theory, would not address the actual environmental

problems that African Americans encountered, and would only serve to distract the white

middle class from the problems of the ghetto. Joyce Ladner and Walter Stafford

addressed this issue in an April 1970 issue of The Black Scholar. “While the problem of

environmental control probably takes a heavier toll on the lives of blacks than middle-

class whites, it still remains a secondary issue when measured against the less than

$3,000 median family income upon which many blacks must survive.” 15

15 Joyce and Walter W. Stafford Ladner, “Black Repression in the Cities,” The Black Scholar 1, no. 6 (1970): 39-52. Ladner and Stafford also discuss the Earth Day protest where San Jose State College Students buried a new car to protest pollution and consumerism, and black students counter-protested, arguing that the car could have benefited a poor black family.

But these national attitudes belie the reality of activism on the local level. In cities

across the country, social workers, professional activists, community leaders and

everyday residents were starting to respond to specific set of environmental problems.

The following three case studies each discuss a different city and a different

environmental problem. But they were chosen because they are representative of the

larger pattern, and they display a number of common themes. The first is that the urban

crisis was not just a cultural, social, rhetorical or now, historical concept, but an environmental reality. The American city was breaking down, and the attendant social problems and dislocations were partially a result of that breakdown. This will be the main focus of the first chapter, but will be evident in each story. The postwar American city was not a gleaming metropolis of technological wonder, but an aging dinosaur that had been left behind in the postwar economic boom, instead of spearheading it. Because of the increasing spatial segregation of the American metropolis by race and class, poor, working class and minority groups bore the brunt of the breakdown of the city.

The specific type of decline that each city faced plays into the second theme, which is that during the early 1970s, environmentalism was as much a local phenomenon as a national movement, and was broadly integrated into other types of social movements. In fact, there is a need to separate environmental activism from the environmental movement. The environmental movement was partially a media construction that focused on national issues, symbolic, heavily publicized environmental problems, and the shifting energies of an activist student population. But environmental activism was often disconnected from this emerging national movement. Local groups sometimes borrowed their rhetoric or tactics from national organizations, but more often

than not they were concerned with local problems. Many of these movements and activists were well known in their own communities, and their efforts have been well documented. But most were not considered part of the environmental movement.

Broadly, they have been lumped in with the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, including civil rights and Black Power organizations, community boards organized as part of the

“War on Poverty,” and groups that came together as part of the “ethnic revival” in blue- collar, predominantly Roman Catholic neighborhoods.16

The best way to understand these movements is not within the context of their own cities, but by pulling them apart and comparing them with each other. Only then are a remarkable number of similarities visible. In almost every large city in America, especially in the Midwest and the Northeast, activism and community organizing during the 1960s and 1970s was concerned with a variety of environmental issues. By going into detail about three of these movements, this dissertation shows how the third strain of postwar environmentalism worked. Two important characteristics are worth noting. First,

16 Scholarship on urban activism has flourished in recent years, particularly related to Black Power and other forms of African American organizing. See Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Clarence E. Lang, “Community and Resistance in the Gateway City: Black National Consciousness, Working-Class Formation, and Social Movements in St. Louis, Missouri, 1941-- 1964” (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004); Wendell E. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). Other work has begun to tease out the contributions of various forms of welfare organizing, often related to the War on Poverty. See Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Kent B. Germany, New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Laurie B. Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Community organizing by urban ethnics – Poles, Jews, Italians, etc. – is also starting to garner attention. See Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); John D. Skrentney and Thomas Sugrue, “The White Ethnic Strategy,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

all of the movements discussed in this study, and other nationwide, relied on gaining

access to technical knowledge. As Hurley has argued, this hurdle limited environmental

protest by poor and minority groups in the 1970s. Middle class and affluent activists had

access to expert knowledge through friends, family members and other formal and

informal, social and professional networks. This knowledge was vital in helping them mount sustained and successful protest campaigns. By gaining access to expert knowledge about lead poisoning, highway construction and air pollution, the groups in this study were able to speak with authority about problems that many of them felt viscerally, bridging the gap between their lived experience and the technocratic focus of the modern state.17

Secondly, these three case studies show how urban environmental activism was

often intimately tied together with other, seemingly unconnected social justice concerns.

At a public hearing about highway construction, Baltimorean Charles Curtis might talk about how highway condemnation has turned his neighborhood into a boarded up wasteland. In the very next sentence he will lament how almost none of the highway construction jobs are going to African Americans. These statements are not contradictory.

To him, the highway represents a number of injustices, some of which are environmental, and others that have to do with political disenfranchisement and employment

discrimination. The interwoven nature of these concerns meant that for many urban

residents, environmental activism was often an entry or exit point from other activism.

During the early 1960s, Ivory Perry was one of St. Louis’s many civil rights activists

concerned with jobs and voting rights. By the end of his activist career a decade later, he

17 Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980, 172-73.

was tightly focused on lead poisoning, trying to reverse the toxic burden that

discrimination had levied on the city’s most innocent residents. Conversely, many

Chicagoans came to the Campaign Against Pollution because they were concerned about

the dirty air in the their backyards. But they ended up committed to a citywide movement

that challenged the local political machine on a variety of issues, from pollution and

highway construction to property taxes and redlining.

The heterogeneity of the environmental movement – its relation to other types of

activism – relates to the final theme, which is that environmental politics are constructed

socially as well as spatially. Environmentalists, and some historians, tend to see environmental politics as essentialist; an unchanging set of mores and values that people will begin to believe in once they reach a certain level of intellectual development. But environmental values always depend on a person’s social, cultural and economic outlook.

This difference in perspective is well known to scholars in agrarian studies. The peasant has a different relationship to the village common lands than the local nobleman, or the colonial government. The same is true in modern cities. The resident of a certain neighborhood sees their street, its parks and buildings differently than the mayor or urban renewal authority.

This dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first, “The Breakdown of the

City” provides an overview of the physical deterioration of American cities in the postwar period, and the development of localized social movements in response to a host of environmental problems. The three case studies that follow – one each on St. Louis,

Chicago and Baltimore – show how local movements developed in response to specific environmental problems, within the context of the social and political conditions of each

city. But each of these cities is also exemplary of a specific set of economic and demographic problems that American cities faced in the postwar period.

Rapid Loss of Population and Capital: St. Louis

St. Louis’s childhood lead poisoning problem occurred within the context of the city’s rapid demographic and structural collapse. Although it was once one of the country’s major cities, St. Louis’s growth leveled off after the Civil War, but it maintained a diverse commercial and manufacturing economy into the twentieth century, and was the home to the 1904 World’s Fair. After World War Two, there was explosive growth in a succession of suburbs, and companies like Monsanto, McDonnell-Douglas and research centers like Washington University helped buoy the region during the transition to a high-tech, service oriented economy. But for the city itself, the decades after 1945 were devastating. Its population declined by half between 1950 and 1990, losing 230,000 people in the 1950s and 1960s alone. St. Louis’s rapid depopulation occurred from a number of factors, including deindustrialization, industrial relocation, and racial conflict. The city’s housing stock was also very old, and the city was relatively small. The fixed boundary, created when the city officially ceded itself from St. Louis

County in 1876, meant that St. Louis missed out on the waves of annexations that most cities went through in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Most of the city’s residential areas had been built up by 1900, whereas cities as diverse as Cincinnati,

Baltimore, New York and Chicago were still developing new land as late as the 1950s.

During the postwar housing boom, most of the region’s new construction was suburban areas. City leaders responded to this competition with an extensive urban renewal plan that focused on rebuilding the city center, clearing land for industry, and housing the

city’s poorest residents. But despite some successes in the 1950s, St. Louis was still hemorrhaging people and capital in the 1960s. New immigrants offset some of these population losses, but many migrants were poor African Americans from the rural south.

Lacking job skills and education, they came to St. Louis and encountered a rigidly segregated manufacturing base. St. Louis’s city government was ill-equipped to handle all of these changes. An aldermanic system and a weak mayor combined to produce an achingly slow, and often corrupt bureaucracy. Separated from the county, the city lacked the tools to raise additional monies as its tax base fled to greener pastures.18

Thus, despite Mayor A.J. Cervantes’s boosterish attitude, by the 1970s St. Louis was rapidly falling apart. During this decade the city ran severe budget shortfalls, lacking funds to provide even the most basic services. Racism and discrimination confined most of the region’s African American poor to live within the city limits, placing a severe drain on municipal budgets. The federal government had subsidized many social service programs during the 1960s, but in the 1970s the Nixon administration started replacing

Great Society programs with direct grants to cities and states. St. Louis officials elected to use these grants on big downtown projects like a new convention center, instead of shoring up existing infrastructure and basic services. These developments ultimately did little to help the city has a whole, creating a successful core of downtown investment, while the rest of the city, especially the African-America north side, suffered a slow rot.19

18 Joseph Heathcott and Maire Agnes Murphy, “Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940-1980.” Journal of Urban History 31, no. 2 (2005); Henry, #424]; James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998); Lana Stein, St. Louis Politics: The Triumph of Tradition (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002). 19Henry J. Schmandt et al., Federal Aid to St. Louis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1983).

Like all failing cities, St. Louis experienced its sharp decline on a variety of fronts: Racial conflict, lack of jobs, poor services, and increasing hostility from suburban governments and their residents. The city’s remaining residents, particularly African

Americans, felt the problems most acutely in the area of housing. The towering Pruitt-

Igoe housing project, built to international acclaim in the 1950s, was quickly falling apart. The project had been built with federal and local subsidies, but had to “pay its own way” in terms of maintenance and upkeep. To subsidize the rent of the city’s poorest residents, city leaders deferred maintenance, and Pruitt-Igoe quickly became as run down as some of the city’s worst neighborhoods. Outside of the public housing projects, options for poor people were not much better. The postwar population crush had created a speculative market in St. Louis apartments during the early 1950s that collapsed a decade later. Many apartments were in the hands of investors who had little interest in upkeep or collecting rents, management of many of the buildings fell to holding companies. As population plummeted, St. Louis found itself with an oversupply of cheap housing, and so the holding companies had a hard time finding steady renters. This, plus the transitory nature of the poor population, created a disincentive for upkeep and maintenance. Many of the city’s apartment buildings and rentals fell into a dangerous state of disrepair, the consequences of which were born by the city’s most vulnerable residents, its children, in the form of lead poisoning.

By the early 1970s, a small group of dedicated social workers and activists would help rally much of the city to the cause of childhood lead poisoning. They organized sit- ins, conferences, protests, petition drives and raised money for large-scale testing programs. This activism led to revisions of the city’s building codes and more vigorous

enforcement via a permanent lead poisoning prevention program. But by identifying lead poisoning as a major problem, lead activists only accomplished part of their overall goal.

For many of them, the lead activism was just one part of a general critique of the urban environment. The increased risk of childhood lead poisoning was representative of how segregation and discrimination forced many poor, black St. Louisans to live in deplorable conditions. For these activists, the goal was not simply testing and treating children, but a general overall improvement of the urban environment that eliminated the risk of childhood lead poisoning and a host of other public health problems.

Keeping Pace with Economic Change: Baltimore

Although it did not go through any sort of growth spurt, in the immediate postwar period Baltimore managed to avoid the rapid demographic collapse of cities like St.

Louis. By 1970, Maryland’s metropolis had lost less than five percent of its 1950 population, compared to St. Louis’s twenty-eight percent. This was due to a variety of factors, but primarily because the city was large and had room to grow, and effectively retained its manufacturing and transportation jobs. Like St. Louis, Baltimore seceded from the county of Baltimore in 1851, making it a separate and independent city, its own county. Unlike St. Louis, Baltimore retained the right to annex land, gaining its present boundaries in 1918, doubling its size to almost eighty square miles. This large amount of developable land helped Baltimore retain population in the postwar era, but so did its relative economic success. Although few major American corporations were headquartered in Baltimore, it was the quintessential “branch-plant” city, with large factories for scores of important companies, including General Motors, Western Electric

(the production arm of AT&T) and Martin Aviation. The biggest plant was Sparrows

Point, the sprawling, integrated mill and shipyard run by Bethlehem Steel, and the city

port was an important anchor. Cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati had lost much of their

status as transportation hubs in the switch from river to rail, but oceangoing vessels still

shipped a large amount of goods. Baltimore’s economy and population would not begin

to suffer until the 1980s, when many of its factories closed, and its port lost business in

the switch to containerization.20

This short-term retention of population did not mean that Baltimore’s political

and corporate leaders were confident about their city’s prospects. Their primary postwar goal was upgrading the city’s nineteenth century infrastructure. This included tearing up old neighborhoods and replacing them with modern housing, highways and office

buildings. Baltimore’s first major urban renewal project was Charles Center, which

cleared out 33 acres of old buildings downtown and replaced them with a mixed-use

complex of offices, shops, apartments and civic structures. This provided a springboard,

leaders hoped, for Baltimore to reposition itself in a new, service oriented economy. But

they still saw the city’s industries as the core of the economy. This led to efforts to

upgrade the port and provide better surface transportation connections, especially via an

expressway. From the 1950s through to the 1970s, Baltimore’s business leaders saw the

highway system as serving their dual interests – getting workers and shoppers to and

from downtown, and providing freight access for trucks to plant and port facilities in the

southern and eastern parts of town.

20 W. Edward Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West; Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Mark Reutter, Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

As in many American cities, postwar Baltimore’s business leaders formed a

coalition to plan for, promote and preserve urban growth. The Greater Baltimore

Committee was not a chamber of commerce, but an exclusive club, open only to those

who trafficked in the city’s most well-heeled boardrooms. Its members were responsible

for much of the planning and raising of funds for Charles Center, and would be

instrumental in the Inner Harbor project during the early 1980s, the major symbol of the city’s postwar renaissance. The GBC’s members believed that only through strong, assertive planning could Baltimore keep pace with the postwar economy. They commissioned planners, economists and lobbyists to pressure city leaders about projects that would benefit their individual, collective and corporate interests. The committee’s staff members were also constantly doing research to find out how similar renewal, reconstruction and transportation projects worked in other cities. This work reflected the pressure that many mid-sized American cities felt in the postwar period to keep pace with economic growth. Baltimore’s corporate leaders knew that no matter the strength of their

current manufacturing sector, they were not well positioned to keep pace with larger

cities like Chicago and Sun Belt cities like Atlanta or Phoenix.21

But the vision that the GBC and the city’s political leaders had for Baltimore clashed with the sentiments of many city residents. The old, row house neighborhoods that planners saw as slums were home to close-knit communities of poor and working

class people. During the 1950s and 1960s, city leaders tore many of these neighborhoods

apart in the name of progress, and many other communities were threatened.

Condemnation, land clearance and construction delays for highway construction had left

many areas, especially on the African American west side, strewn with vacant lots and

21 John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).

abandoned homes. The city gave black homeowners and renters meager compensation

packages, and they had few options when it came to replacement housing. This

discontent coalesced in 1968, when a coalition of African Americans, civil rights activists

and historic preservationists formed the Movement Against Destruction, a group

dedicated to stopping construction of the city’s proposed highway system. They soon joined forces with a group of blue-collar whites from the Southeast side and formed a powerful critique of the highway’s ability to destroy the urban environment.

Transition to a Service Economy: Chicago

Chicago faced the post World War Two period as a quickly aging giant with a severe housing crisis. By the early 1950s, new construction, especially in the suburbs, opened up the housing market for many Chicagoans, but not African Americans, who instead tried to settle all-white areas within the city limits. But whites pushed back.

Historian Arnold Hirsch has described the decade from the end of the 1940s through the

1950s as the “era of hidden violence.” Thousands of minor incidents occurred throughout

Chicago, as African Americans attempted to purchase or rent homes in all-white areas.

There were also a number of larger riots against black homebuyers, all tacitly approved by Chicago authorities.22 The response to this housing pressure was a massive public

housing program that sought to keep African Americans in a set of prescribed

neighborhoods on the South and West side. City leaders designed the programs to aid downtown real estate and business interests who wanted to clear out the ring of “blight”

around the central city to encourage economic development, moving the displaced into

22 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; Arnold R. Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953-1966,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995).

public housing. Richard M. Daley’s accession to the mayor’s office only accelerated this

building boom. Harnessing the power of the Democratic political machine, his

knowledge of municipal finance, and the eager cooperation of corporate leaders, Daley

placed his bets on the physical rebuilding of the Loop and keeping the business interests

there happy. Building projects included expressways, a new civic center, a convention

center, a new airport and a new campus for the University of Illinois.23

In the space of ten years, national publications held Chicago up as a model for

possibilities of urban renewal. But the success of this building program, and its viability

as a model for other cities, leaves out two important factors. First, Daley was able to

accomplish all of the projects relatively quickly. He had virtually absolute control of the

board of aldermen, the complete cooperation of most major landowners, and legislative

support from the Republican controlled state government, which gave him the financial

tools he needed to raise construction money. The other factor in the city’s success is its

relative size and position within the economy. Chicago was home to numerous Fortune

500 companies, including many banks and financial institutions that kept the city well positioned in the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy. Like New York,

Chicago was able to weather the problems of the postwar city simply because of its size and diversity of its economy. 24

Part of Daley’s acumen was in recognizing where Chicago’s current and future

economic strengths lay. Like many Midwestern cities, Chicago began slowly

23 George Rosen, Decision-Making Chicago-Style: The Genesis of a University of Illinois Campus (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Carolyn Eastwood, Near West Side Stories: Struggles for Community in Chicago’s Maxwell Street Neighborhood (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2002); Ira Berkow, Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977). 24 Barbara Marsh, A Corporate Tragedy: The Agony of International Harvester Company (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985); Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle.

deindustrializing in the postwar period. Old, multi-story factories were out of date, and

these old loft districts were the target for many urban renewal projects. But many

factories, especially in the city’s newer industrial districts on the far Western and

Southern sides of the city, were still going full tilt. Despite Chicago’s success in

revamping its physical infrastructure for a new, service based economy during the 1960s

and 1970s, it was still heavily dependent on manufacturing. This was a transitional

period, when Chicago went from being the “hog butcher to the world” to the “city that

works.” Many of the city’s residents were caught in the crux of that transition. Daley and

other city leaders were concerned with appeasing downtown interests and property

owners, but they knew that manufacturers were still an important part of the tax base, and

thus were loath to impart heavy pollution controls. In the postwar period many of these

businesses were doing very well, especially the steel industry, and were running their

aging factories at full capacity.

During the 1970s, this booming manufacturing economy collided with a shift in

city demographics. The postwar expansion of the middle class benefited thousands of

white Chicagoans, who moved from central city neighborhoods to outlying districts

closer to the city border. But the trappings of material success hid a deep anxiety about

their political and socioeconomic status. They might own their own homes, but they still

held blue-collar jobs, were angry at the Daley machine for ignoring their support for

years, and lived in some of the cities dirtiest neighborhoods. In the early 1970s, many of these communities rallied around the issue of air pollution and other urban environmental issues, including highway construction. Their citywide organization, the Citizens Action

Program, was shortlived, but was an important example of how city residents often used environmental issues to express their dissatisfaction with local government.

###

Urban environmental activism in postwar American was not unique to these three cities. Every city that felt the postwar economic and social dislocations known as the urban crisis had a group of residents who organized around issues that were broadly environmental, whether as obvious as air pollution or as unique as urban renewal and highway construction. Studying and understanding this activism accomplishes two important goals. First, it shows how the urban crisis was not just a set of social and economic problems, or a cultural construction, but a lived experience. Children ate lead paint and died, families saw their neighborhoods bulldozed for highways. This experience needs to be considered as one of the contributing factors to the broader unrest and activism in the postwar American city. Secondly this activism is the primary link between the broader movements for social justice in postwar America, particularly the

African American Freedom Struggle, and the environmental movement. For more than a decade, historians have argued that concerns over environmental inequality did not begin with the environmental justice movement in the late 1980s. But until now, there has been no evidence of the importance of this activism to postwar environmentalism. These stories show that urban activism is a vital part of a more inclusive narrative of the postwar environmental movement. A short epilogue will discuss this issue and possibilities for future research.

Chapter One

The Break Down of the City

In the 1920s, Clarence Stein predicted what would happen to American cities after the Second World War: They would fall apart. “Inadequate housing facilities, inadequate water supplies, inadequate sewage, inadequate streets and inadequate transportation - these are but the larger and more obvious ills that derive from the congestion of population.” The cultural, economic and social breakdown of cities has been well chronicled. But Stein had a different breakdown in mind, one that has been almost completely ignored by American historians: the city’s environmental breakdown.

This falling apart had many facets, some of which are inherent to cities, others that were encouraged by local and national urban policy. Some were real environmental problems, while others were the result of changes in environmental perception. “They are enough,

however, to show that the great city, as a place to live and work in, breaks down

miserably; that it is perpetually breaking down; and that it will continue to do so as long

as the pressure of population within a limited area remains.” 1

According to Stein, the city was breaking down all around him. It had too many people, stacked too high in dirty tenements, and streets clogged by a sea of cars and horses. The solution was decentralization, the breaking up of vast urban resources and resettling them across the countryside. Only by creating smaller cities could the country preserve its social, cultural, economic and environmental health. This was the vision of

Stein and other members of the Regional Planning Association of America, a loose

organization of architects, planners and intellectuals who came together in the 1920s to

1 Clarence Stein, “Dinosaur Cities,” The Survey 54, no. 3 (1925).

try to posit a new vision for American settlement. They saw their idea adopted briefly by

the federal government in the 1930s, with public housing programs and the Greenbelt

towns of the Resettlement Administration in Maryland, Ohio and Wisconsin. Overall, the

regional vision of the RPAA – of spreading out urban settlements into smaller, viable

units to make better use of natural resources, containing enough people for cultural

ferment, not too many as to cause social conflict, and enriching the body and soul as

much as the pocketbook – became a footnote in urban history to be discussed by planning

historians and urbanists. But what they were responding to, the problems of the congested

city, were commonly acknowledged by all urban observers and experts during the 1920s.2

But starting in the 1940s and accelerating into the 1950s, the nature of America’s urban problems changed. Cities no longer suffered because they were overcrowded; they suffered because they were falling apart. In the 1920s the city was a shiny new car that everyone wanted to drive. By the 1950s, it was a rusted out jalopy that sat neglected in the driveway. A host of forces began to overtake American cities. Contemporary critics and present-day scholars continue to dub the result of these forces, collectively, as the

“urban crisis,” the apparent meltdown of cities in the late 1960s, when race riots and white flight fundamentally remade the American metropolis. Over the past twenty-five years, historians have begun to piece together the background of this crisis. According to these studies, the urban crisis resulted primarily from increased African-American migration to cities, hardening segregation and discrimination at the workplace and in the housing market, and a gradual loss of employment opportunities due to deindustrialization over the course of the postwar period. Vigorous and sustained civil

2 Carl Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976).

and human rights activism, from the 1940s onward, gradually opened up housing and job

opportunities for African-Americans. Blacks made significant gains in the 1970s, just as deindustrialization, disinvestment and decentralization accelerated, leaving African-

Americans with the booby prize of the obsolete central city.3

This work explains the hardening of structural racism, the decline of the great

industrial cities, growth of the suburbs, and tectonic shifts in national politics. But they

only address one aspect of the urban crisis, specifically the racial and cultural turn that it

took over the course of the 1960s, and the economic problems that lay beneath that shift.

By looking at what the crisis became, historians have largely ignored its physical

manifestations. Before it was ever a racial or class problem, the urban crisis, as Robert

Beauregard has argued, was an environmental one. Housing and infrastructure were deteriorating, encouraging blight and slums, bringing down property values and

discouraging investment in the city. Over the course of the 1950s, concerns about racism and concentrated poverty overtook these environmental concerns and, by the 1960s, the urban crisis was defined as a variety of social and economic problems. But throughout this period, urban residents continued to experience those environmental problems. Thus, urban environmental activism did not spring unexpectedly from other protest movements.

It was not part of “the sixties” or “Black Power.” It was built deep into the experience of urban residents in the postwar period, and found an outlet in the late 1960s and early

1970s.4

3 These conclusions come primarily from Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996) 4 Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (New York: Routledge, 2003), 175.

The American city had always presented residents, government officials and

reformers with a variety of environmental problems. But the nature of those problems

began to change in the 1920s. To the preceding generation, overcrowding and breakneck

growth had overwhelmed urban infrastructure. Now, people and capital were heading to

the suburbs and later, to new cities in the South and West. By the end of the Depression,

capital growth, in terms of factories and housing construction, was stronger in outlying

areas than in central cities. Property owners and merchants knew that once people started

to live and work on the outskirts of cities, they would have no need to shop or do

business downtown. This fear sparked a series of efforts to “save” the American city that

has continued, more or less unabated, for the past fifty years.5 Contemporary urban observers commented on these efforts constantly, but historians are only now beginning to place them in their proper context. This includes seeing them as efforts to remake the urban environment. Some were what we traditionally consider environmental issues, primarily reducing air and water pollution. Others had to do with the built environment,

and its supposed effects on development and growth. This meant clearing out old

buildings and neighborhoods, and replacing them with newer structures. Urban leaders

also retrofitted cities with new infrastructure, primarily highways, to encourage growth.

All of these efforts reflected the belief that the city was an aging, dirty, decrepit

“dinosaur” that had to be remade in order to compete with suburbs and outlying areas, as well as newer cities in the Southern and Western parts of the country.

5 Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Fight Blight

During the 1920s, planners, social workers and other urban observers began to

notice a land use pattern in older American cities. As industrial production and residential

living spread farther out, into the corners of the city and the suburbs, the central city was

becoming less attractive to investors. Downtown areas were becoming even more

specialized, focusing on retail and office space. Real estate immediately outside of downtown had been appealing to manufacturers and residents because of its central location. But with improved transportation options, anyone who could afford it was moving farther out, and manufacturers were seeking larger plots of land for newer, single-story factories. The old loft spaces in the central city were no longer attractive for advanced, assembly line manufacturing. But landowners were still keeping prices high,

holding out for an upswing in the urban real estate market that would make their property

valuable again. This had a number of negative side effects. Figuring that the property

would eventually be torn down for another use, landlords saw little incentive to upgrade

their buildings, making few repairs and deferring maintenance. Some just tore them

down, and rented out the space as a parking lot, making just enough money to pay the

property taxes. Others milked their properties for as much rent as possible, taking

advantage of populations, primarily African-Americans, which had few other real estate

options, and were willing to pay inflated prices for substandard dwellings. Apartments and homes were subdivided ad-infinitum, into studios and efficiencies, further dragging

down the condition of buildings.6

6 Mabel Louise Walker and Henry Wright, Urban Blight and Slums (Cambridge: Harvard university press, 1938), 3-8.

People would eventually call this process blight. It was different from slums in that blight was a process, where slums were places. When owners overvalue property to

the point where “it is not profitable to make or maintain improvements,” it starts to

become blighted, Mabel Walker wrote in Urban Blight and Slums, the standard text on

the subject in the 1940s. Blighted areas were not necessarily slums, but, if not dealt with

in an appropriate manner, they would become slums. Most importantly, since blighted

areas were close to more valuable areas and stable communities, they threatened the

entire city. “Disease and crime fester and spread out from these sore centers, endangering

the entire community and placing a heavy financial burden on the taxpayers,” Walker

concluded.7 Blight was an economic problem that manifested itself environmentally.

Properties became “fire traps and disease incubators,” but as long as there were enough poor to crowd into them, landlords could demand higher land prices. According to reformers like Walker, part of the problem with blight was housing. If there was no demand for inexpensive quarters, than the buildings would fall completely out of use.

Thus housing needed to be provided for the poor and working class so they were not forced to crowd into substandard dwellings. Creation of a true public housing program was one-half of the solution to blight. The other half was fixing the broken down buildings. Although reformers and politicians recognized that blight was an economic problem, over the next twenty years, they chose an environmental solution: urban renewal.

The best know attempt to reverse blight was slum clearance, the aspect of urban renewal where city agencies bulldozed neighborhoods to make way for public housing

7 Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950; Henry Wright, “Rehabilitation of Blighted Areas,” in Urban Blight and Slums, ed. Mabel Louise Walker (Cambridge: Harvard university press, 1938).

projects, corporate office towers, new manufacturing districts, university campuses and even luxury high rises. But there was another aspect of urban renewal: conservation. The more destructive versions of urban renewal have superseded conservation in our historical consciousness. But in the 1940s, reformers considered it just as important a strategy as large-scale reconstruction. The goal of conservation was to remake the urban environment piece by piece, by helping homeowners and residents renovate their homes, and clean up their streets and neighborhoods. Conservation was almost forgotten by the

1960s, but in the 1970s neighborhood groups that wanted to preserve property values, increase investment, and prevent racial turnover revived the idea of renovation and rehabilitation. The faith in conservation to sustain property values and make neighborhoods healthy was a faith in the power of the urban environment. If streets were clean, the city picked up the garbage, plumbing was indoors, and owners made physical repairs, than a community would be more attractive, more families would want to live there, and it would be a stable asset to the city. Cities could accomplish these goals through rigid code enforcement, and working with neighborhoods so that homeowners and landlords saw the benefits of rehabilitation, and agreed to fix up their properties and maintain them. 8

8 On urban renewal as slum clearance, see Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer; a Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962 (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1964); Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers; Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962); Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985. On conservation, see Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Suleman Osman describes the often contentious line between gentrification and neighborhood revitalization. See Suleiman Yusuf Osman, “The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Postindustrialization and Race in South Brooklyn, 1950--1980” (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2006). On the Progressive attitude that a good environment made a good community, see M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).

One of the best-known conservation projects in the country was in Baltimore. In

the early 1950s, a group of reformers convinced the city to fund a targeted code

enforcement effort for a neighborhood on the east side. Racially mixed in the 1940s, the

community had become largely African-American by the next decade, with a

predominance of blue-collar families, split between homeowners and renters. While the

city rigidly enforced the housing code in the target area, non-profit groups would educate

homeowners and landlords about maintenance and rehabilitation. To assist the poorest

residents, reformers created a fund, Fight-Blight, Inc., to give out small loans and grants.

Despite some initial successes, the city ran up against the stronger forces of the urban

housing market. Targeting one neighborhood seemed like a good idea, but residential

turnover was affecting the entire city. The middle class African-Americans who had

anchored the neighborhood were moving out to neighborhoods whites were vacating.

Working-class families upgrading from the worst neighborhoods, and poor, rural blacks

from the South were replacing them. Some homeowners bought into conservation, but

others argued that there was little incentive to invest as long as landlords subdivided their

properties to milk the segregated housing market. Those who took out loans to make

repairs were often hustled by contractors who exploited the guarantees provided by the

Federal Housing Administration. Homeowners paid the inflated estimates with loan

money, and then the work was subcontracted at cut rates to shoddy repairmen.9

In Baltimore and other cities, conservation was a top down program that dealt with the urban problems of a previous generation, not the issues facing the current one.

During the 1950s, cities were in need of low-cost and well-maintained housing for the

9 Martin Millspaugh and Vivian Gurney Breckenfeld, The Human Side of Urban Renewal; a Study of the Attitude Changes, Produced by Neighborhood Rehabilitation (Baltimore: Fight-Blight, 1958).

increasing African-American population. The limited public housing projects were means and mores tested, and so rising demand pressed upon the “blighted” areas, undoing the efforts at code enforcement and rehabilitation. Some reformers blamed community apathy and indifference, but they failed to examine the whole city, and the myriad levels of discrimination that African-American families faced in trying to attain decent housing.

Certain white communities embraced conservation as a way to prevent racial turnover.

They believed that maintaining their neighborhoods would keep property values high, making them less desirable to African-Americans, particularly poor blacks. But other than code enforcement programs, many cities saw little value in the conservation aspect of urban renewal. It was piecemeal and did not seem to be dealing with the current problems of the city, specifically the ailing urban economy.10

Although urban economies grew during the 1950s, they lagged far behind the explosive growth in the suburbs and the Sun Belt. In this changing environment, reformers did not see blighted areas as a threat to cities – they were actively dragging them down. This change in perspective caused a change in strategy. Previously, planners and politicians saw conservation, slum clearance and public housing as tools that they could use to upgrade the urban environment. Applying them deftly and carefully, they could remake and upgrade the city’s landscape, simultaneously buoying the economy and providing healthy, sanitary residences. But over the course of the 1950s, conservation and public housing were abandoned. Under the new paradigm, old neighborhoods needed to be cleared out, and replaced with new structures to help the ailing urban economy.11

10 On using conservation as a strategy to prevent racial turnover, see Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side. 11 Richard M. Flanagan, “The Housing Act of 1954: The Sea Change in National Urban Policy,” Urban Affairs Review v33, no. 2 (1997).

Urban Renewal and Public Housing

Urban renewal and reconstruction were international phenomena that occurred for a variety of reasons. In the postwar United States, the stated goal was economic competitiveness, but the rational was primarily environmental. Urban leaders envisioned reconstruction projects as a way to keep their cities competitive in the postwar era. By clearing out poor neighborhoods with older housing stock and run-down warehouse districts, they could replace them with the infrastructure of a modern and successful city, including office and industrial parks, space for research universities, high-rise housing projects, and later on, large-scale tourism draws like convention centers and sports stadiums. By clearing out the old, decaying districts, and replacing them with clean, modern buildings, the city would remain economically competitive. The model for many of these projects was Pittsburgh. During the 1940s, the Steel City’s leaders realized that the future of their metropolis was not in heavy industry, but a knowledge-based economy.

They needed to reform the city in order to make it more conducive to the white-collar world. A series of projects cleared out old neighborhoods, making room for new office complexes and an expansion of the University of Pittsburgh. Following Pittsburgh’s example, other cities cleared out areas in or surrounding downtown to offer space for new businesses. The rational was that businesses could find better, cheaper land in suburban and outlying areas, and only if state and local government’s got involved, in the form of redevelopment authorities, could large enough parcels be assembled to make room for new factories and offices.12

12 Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933-1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Joseph Heathcott and Maire Agnes Murphy, “Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning, and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940-1980.,”

In addition to building highways and clearing space for business and commercial

development, the other major goal of urban renewal was housing. In most American

cities, replacement housing for those displaced from “renewed” neighborhoods was in the

form of high-rise, super block housing projects. Inspired by modernist designs that had

been popular since the 1920s, these homes were intended to provide clean, safe domiciles

with more open space. They were supposed to solve the environmental problems of

blighted, slum housing that were harming city residents and, more importantly, harming

property values in the central city. Although the federal government gave subsidies for

the construction of public housing in the United States, they were designed for working

families. Rents had to pay for all maintenance costs. But they eventually became magnets

for the city’s poorest residents, who were unable to pay the rents needed to keep the

buildings in working order. This led to massive problems with vandalism and deferred

maintenance, leaving newer projects in a decrepit state only a decade after cities built

them.13 The original goal of housing reformers had been to provide for workers who could not afford decent housing in urban areas. But these workers, who would become the newest members of America’s middle class in the postwar era, found housing opportunities in other areas. The postwar boom in the suburbs, financed by highway construction and government backed mortgages, opened up housing across the metropolitan area. Those who could afford it moved farther out, opening up city

Journal of Urban History 31, no. 2 (2005); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985. 13 Stephen Burghardt, Tenants and the Urban Housing Crisis (Dexter, Mich.: New Press, 1972); Joseph Heathcott, “The City Remade: Public Housing and the Urban Landscape in St. Louis, 1900-1960”; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960; Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).

neighborhoods for both whites and African-Americans. This left the very poor, who found themselves partitioned off in housing projects that local governments could not afford to maintain.14

All of these rebuilding projects, aimed at reviving Midwestern and Northeastern

cities as economic engines, occurred between 1945 and 1965. Combined with efforts at

pollution control, they mark a prolonged attempt to remake the image and aesthetic of

these cities for a new and different type of economy. Up through the nineteenth century,

American cities were where people met to buy and sell goods, whether locally or to

distant markets. Gradually, they also became places where people also produced those

things. This production economy created a new and different city, unlike anything anyone

had ever seen. It was teeming with people, livestock, goods, and factories, each spewing their own form of waste. Cities had always presented a unique environmental problem, but the industrial city chewed up resources and spit out goods and waste at a previously unknown scale. But just as urban engineers were beginning to get a hold on the industrial city’s environmental problems, especially the use of air and water resources, the demands of the American economy changed. Cities would no longer be places of building, but places of consuming. And the city of production posed a number of environmental problems to the city of consumption. Its housing was cramped and ill-kept, its roads were too clogged and narrow, and its buildings were old and decaying. Its poor were too

14 David M. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

visible and its skies were too dirty. The consumer city required a different environment, and so much of the remaining industrial city had to be bulldozed and reworked.15

Highways

When viewed holistically, postwar urban renewal was an attempt by urban leaders

to retrofit the infrastructure of cities for the physical demands of economic growth. One

of the most complicated aspects of this retrofit was reconciling cities built for the horse

and buggy to the automobile. As car use skyrocketed during the 1920s and 1930s, cities,

and especially downtowns, found themselves overrun with cars on old, narrow streets.

Starting in the 1920s, planners and engineers argued vigorously about how to handle

traffic. Design the city around the automobile, planners argued, making roads smaller and

slower in cities, connecting to larger, interurban roadways. The car would become an

important part of the urban transportation network, but would not supplant mass transit.

Engineers championed traffic service, moving as many cars as possible as fast as

possible, virtually regardless of the consequences. After a series of battles, the

engineering vision won out. From the 1940s through to the 1970s, the primary

consideration for the construction of roadways would be how many cars they could

move. Business leaders and politicians were the primary boosters of this policy. They

15 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); Joel A. Tarr, Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004); Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1996). On consumption remaking cities, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 2003); Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

wanted to get shoppers and workers downtown, and give trucks access to older industrial districts.16

The limited access freeway was the answer to these needs. With no traffic stops and the ability to get on and off at speed, many important policy makers saw the freeway as the future of American motoring. Freeways played a prominent role in the renewal and reconstruction plans that many cities commissioned in the 1940s. As the primary method of high-speed automobile movement, urban experts considered highways essential in helping cities remain competitive in the postwar era. Cities began to construct urban freeways in the 1950s, but they were expensive. With pressure increasing on the federal government to solve the road funding problem, engineers, planners, business leaders and politicians engaged in a spirited discussion during the 1940s and 1950s about what roads

Congress should fund and how they should divvy up the money. Congress answered this question in 1956, with the passage of the Interstate Highway Act. For the next twenty years, the federal government agreed to fund construction of a limited access highway network across the country, using a new excise tax on gasoline. States would build the roads to federal specifications, and they had to link major urban centers. The rationale for the system was Cold War Defense. A nationwide system would allow for the smooth transport of goods and troops in the event of a war or nuclear attack. But automobile interests, soon to be labeled the highway-industrial complex, had lobbied heavily for its passage. Automobile manufacturers, gasoline companies, construction firms and labor unions all had a vested interest in the federal government setting aside billions a year in

16 Jeffrey Brown, “A Tale of Two Visions: Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and the Development of the American Freeway,” Journal of Planning History 4, no. 1 (2005).

tax money simply to fund road construction. The largest public building project in the history of world was a boon for a number of industries. 17

It was also, in the short term, a boon for cities. As long as they connected to the larger system, interstates could go through urban areas. Many cities, like Cincinnati,

Chicago and New York plugged in plans they already had for urban highways. Others, like Baltimore and St. Louis, came up with new plans designed solely with the requirements of the Interstate Highway Act in mind. The impact of the highway system on American cities is well known, but too much emphasis has been placed on how the highways encouraged the decentralization of cities, how highways, as a transportation system, helped create suburbs, exurbs, sprawl, and industrial flight. But historians have not paid enough attention to highways as physical structure. Not only were they relatively ugly, but when off ramps and interchanges are included, they took up tremendous amounts of space, becoming Berlin Walls in many neighborhoods, shutting off one community from another. Cities often built them as part of larger urban renewal projects.

Urban leaders cleared out thousands of acres over the course of the postwar period, often leaving wastelands where there had been viable, if poor, communities.18 Highways were a major imposition on the urban environment, and provided little economic value to the neighborhoods where they were constructed. Highways helped connect suburban commuters to downtown, but only marginally improved transportation options, and thus job opportunities, for central city residents. Economic, political and racial considerations placed highways in overwhelmingly minority and working class neighborhoods.

17 Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) Ch. 1. 18 Ibid; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States; Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939-1989 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).

Residents of these communities were used to having the city government ignore them,

and saw highways as million dollar structures built for the benefit of others.

But business and political leaders believed highways were necessary for the

continued economic health of the city. As shipping moved from rail to motor freight, highways were essential for factories and other businesses. As more people commuted by car, downtown businesses wanted their workers to have ready access to their offices.

Downtown merchants saw highways as the solution to the traffic congestion that they believed was driving away all of their business. The highway act also left cities with few other options. As long as the plans met federal guidelines, cities and states only had to pick up ten percent of the tab. The federal gas tax would cover the other ninety percent.

Cities had struggled to fund improvements for most of the twentieth-century, and now they had an infrastructure goldmine, but highways were the only option. Instead of producing plans that integrated mass transit and roadways, cities produced highway plans, dedicated to moving as many cars as possible. Most urban leaders paid lip service to mass transit, and a few cities actually built new systems in the postwar era. But most cast their lot with the automobile, because that’s where the money was.19

The Urban Crisis

These attempts to remake the physical landscape of American cities were a

response to the urban problems of the 1940s and 1950s. According to politicians and

19 Mark S. Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). Richard M. Bernard, Snowbelt Cities: Metropolitan Politics in the Northeast and Midwest since World War Ii (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985; Clifford Ellis, “Visions of Urban Freeways, 1930-1970” (University of California, Berkeley, 1990); Bruce Edsall Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States; Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

policy experts, cities were too dirty, run down, old and congested. They needed to be

remade, rehabilitated and rebuilt. This was a crisis of the structural environment. But over

the course of the 1960s, the discussion of urban problems shifted to focus on social

issues, particularly poverty, racial conflict, and discrimination. As the problems became

worse, with riots and protests, and later, crime and municipal bankruptcy, the social and

economic aspects of urban problems overtook the environmental ones. But these

environmental problems did not disappear. The other deficiencies of cities only

exacerbated them, and they were a key factor in urban unrest.20

The social aspects of the urban crisis have their roots in the 1940s and 1950s, and

have to primarily to do with the racialization of poverty and its transference from a rural to urban setting. During the 1940s, the rapid expansion of the wartime economy opened up unprecedented job opportunities for African-Americans and other rural migrants in

American cities. These pull factors coincided with push factors in the southern countryside. For decades, Southern agriculture, dependent on cheap labor, had resisted the forces of mechanization that had already depopulated many of America’s rural areas.

Part of this was because discrimination in all aspects of the Southern economy consigned

African-Americans to a role as farm laborers, driving down wages to a profitable level.

Also, the sharecropping system discouraged heavy capital investment because farms were dispersed, and cotton was a delicate crop that required careful picking. But by the 1940s,

20 Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities; James Q. Wilson and Joint Center for Urban Studies., The Metropolitan Enigma; Inquiries into the Nature and Dimensions of America’s Urban Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).

viable cotton harvesting equipment was finally being offered for sale, which encouraged

the consolidation of smaller holdings and the end of sharecropping.21

During the 1950s, job opportunities in the South remained scarce, and the promise

of the New Deal and the experience of fighting a war to end fascism and racism created a

generation of African-Americans with rising expectations, unwilling to endure the

oppressive, violent world of the Jim Crow South. But what they found in the north was

continuing discrimination in jobs and housing. Ghettos in cities such as Cleveland,

Detroit and Chicago, which had been cramped in the 1920s and 1930s, overflowed with

people, as neighboring white residents fiercely defended their territory from blacks. The

labor successes of the 1930s, and the integrationist vision of labor unions like the

Congress of Industrial Organizations and the United Auto Workers, had opened up a

myriad of opportunities for African-American workers. But despite these successes,

Blacks were still consigned to the dirtiest and lowest paying jobs in any given factory,

shut out of the lucrative skilled trades in industrial unions, and limited membership in

other, smaller unions. In many cities, the building trades and other unions remained

notoriously discriminatory toward African-Americans. Overall, Blacks were the “last hired,” and, as inner city jobs migrated to the suburbs and the Sun Belt, or were eliminated because of mechanization, became the “first fired.”22

21 James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). 22 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960; Arnold R. Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953-1966,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Robert Bussel, “ ‘ATrade Union Oriented War on the Slums’: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and the St Louis Teamsters in the 1960s,” Labor History 44, no. 1 (2003); Deborah Jane Henry, “Structures of Exclusion: Black Labor and the Building Trades in St. Louis,

The cumulative effect of this massive job and housing discrimination was that it

transferred much of American poverty, and especially African-American poverty, to the

city. This rapid process increased the already heavy burden that cities and their leaders faced in the postwar years. Instead of being considered a national problem that now occurred in the cities, poverty and discrimination instead became an urban problem, the fault of the cities themselves, and the people who now lived there, the poor. The cultural, social and economic consequences of this shift – the concentration of poverty in urban areas – are many. But what has yet to be fully examined are its environmental ramifications. In addition to reinforcing racism and discrimination, creating a system of

American apartheid that has endured through every subsequent generation and economic upswing, the concentration of poverty degraded the environment and landscape of the

American city in ways different from the overcrowding and rapid growth earlier in the century.23

Concentrated poverty led to an environmental breakdown because of a lack of

capital and investment. Real estate guidelines standardized by the Federal Housing

Administration and the Homeowners Loan Corporation in the 1930s marked areas with older, decaying multifamily housing stock as bad for investment. These guidelines privileged investment in new, single family homes, which helped create the suburban

boom. But they also effectively walled the city off from real estate investors, lowering

1917-1966”; Clarence E. Lang, “Community and Resistance in the Gateway City: Black National Consciousness, Working-Class Formation, and Social Movements in St. Louis, Missouri, 1941--1964” (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004); Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 23 Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990); Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History; Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: BasicBooks, 1996); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

property values. This made the oldest, poorest areas of cities a magnet for African-

Americans. Rampant housing discrimination shut them out of other housing

opportunities, and they could only afford properties on the lowest end of the housing

spectrum. Federal and state lawmakers did not begin to address these policies, collectively known as redlining, until the 1970s. Although the rhetoric of the civil rights movement tends to identify redlining as a simple, but devastating, act of discrimination, it

had a tremendous impact on American cities. For most of the postwar period, the real

estate industry considered redlining good business. Realtors, investors, banks and

financiers did not consider older, poorer areas a good investment, so they put their money

into the suburbs or high-rise development in selective areas of the city.

Deindustrialization and commercial decentralization exacerbated this cycle of

disinvestment. Merchants followed homeowners to the suburbs, and a friendly tax

structure helped subsidized new shopping malls. Tax policy was also one of the many

factors, along with mechanization and labor policy, that encouraged manufacturing jobs

to leave older cities.24

With capital more attracted to the suburbs and newer cities in the South and West,

Midwestern and Northeastern city budgets, dependent on property taxes, suffered in the

postwar era. Those that had a diverse economy, such as New York or Chicago, or one

that was not based as strongly around heavy industry, like Cincinnati and Boston, were

able to whether the storm and have survived, and even thrived, since the 1980s. But those

24 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Lizabeth Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar,” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996); Thomas W. Hanchett, “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping- Center Boom of the 1950s and 1960s,” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996); Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States.

whose entire economy was based on heavy industry and manufacturing – Buffalo, St.

Louis, Detroit, Baltimore – have never recovered. The declining tax base forced cities to

pare down basic services, such as garbage collection, rodent control, street paving, and

other duties necessary to the healthy and efficient function of a modern city. Services

became especially scarce in the poorest neighborhoods. When forced to make a decision

about which potholes to fix, which streets to pave, which garbage to collect, municipal

managers invariably chose downtown business districts and remaining middle and upper

class neighborhoods, those with political clout that were still generating tax revenue.25

The cycle of disinvestment and collapse of the tax base were devastating to the urban environment. The cities of the Northeast and the Midwest went from being vibrant hubs of industry and commerce to decaying, declining wastelands. Homeowners interested in rehabilitation or renovation had the twin disincentives of declining real estate values and little access to capital. Even if they accepted the fact that home improvement would yield little financial reward, there was no one willing to lend them the money to do so. Their houses fell into disrepair. Many homes were owned by former city residents who rented them out, and declining real estate values provided little incentive for improvement. The blight that worried planners and politicians a generation before became rampant, reinforced by cities strapped for cash. Neighborhood and community parks fell into disrepair, with broken equipment and unmowed lawns. This only encouraged vandals, and a lack of maintenance dollars meant cities made few repairs. Vandals were an enormous problem in city neighborhoods. Urban critics characterized the destruction of property as proof that city residents did not care about their own neighborhoods. But ripping copper pipe and other fixtures out of abandoned

25 Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985.

homes was an important part of the underground economy, marketable products that

could be sold for ready cash. Garbage piled up on city streets that were marked with

potholes. Buildings that owners had abandoned were gutted and then set on fire, either for insurance money or by arsonists who knew that nobody cared about fires in a declining

neighborhood.

As national attention began to shift to the problems of the central city,

commentators recognized that the urban environment was part of the cornucopia of issues

known as the “urban crisis.” In magazines, journals and books, the problem of the urban

environment, often connected to the emerging environmental movement, was included

amongst discussions of crime, jobs, housing, education and race relations. In a collection of essays on urban issues, Betty Hawkins wrote that “although no spot in the United

States … is free from pollution, it is the urban dweller who is bombarded day and night

by man-made insults. He is getting it in the lungs, the eyes, the ears, the nervous system,

and the psyche, as well as ‘in the back’.”26 In the emerging environmental movement, the

city was the locus of the pollution problem. A more focused examination showed that

city neighborhoods were not just subject to increased pollution burdens. They had their

own unique problem. According to the Kerner Commission report “the level of sanitation

is strikingly below that which is prevalent in most higher income areas … In areas where

garbage collection and other sanitation services are grossly inadequate – commonly in the

poorest parts of our large cities – rats proliferate.” Combined with insufficient access to

medical care, poor sanitation led to the overall poor health of ghetto residents, the report

26 Betty Hawkins, “Cities and the Environmental Crisis,” in Perspectives on Urban America, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1973); United States. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders., Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders ([Washington: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1968), 136, 38.

concluded. “The residents of the racial ghetto are significantly less healthy than most

other Americans.” Housing was one of the biggest problems. In most major cities, thirty

percent or more of African-Americans lived in housing classified as “deteriorating or

dilapidated.” In areas where riots occurred, the percentage averaged forty-seven percent.

The Kerner commission report did not connect the physical condition of central

city areas, and the environmental problems that city residents suffered, to the wave of

urban unrest in the late 1960s. Along with crime, education and especially access to jobs,

experts considered environmental problems just another aspect of the degraded life of the

ghettos slums. In general, urban observers and scholars failed to recognize that urban

activism and unrest were in part a response to environmental degradation and decline. All

of these problems created a landscape of destruction and neglect, but also an environment

that city residents believed was unhealthy and harmful to themselves and their children.

One form of protest was rioting. But there were other more organized actions, large and

small, throughout American cities during this period. The three case studies that follow

this chapter were not isolated, but part of a larger series of grassroots efforts to try to

reform the urban environment.

Much of this organizing focused on the control of urban space. Urban renewal and

highway construction efforts encountered opposition in many cities. While planners and urban leaders deemed certain areas blighted and a threat to property values and

ultimately, economic successes, the residents of these neighborhoods held a different opinion. They lived in a community, but outsiders saw a slum. One such neighborhood was Chicago’s near west side, which was one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. It has been the starting point for generations of immigrants and rural migrants, and by the

postwar period it had strong Greek, Italian, Polish, Jewish and African-American

populations. It was the home of Hull House, as well as the Maxwell Street market, one of the city’s oldest and most celebrated urban bazaars. But Mayor Richard Daley saw the

neighborhood as a key piece in his plan to remake Chicago in the postwar era. The city

cleared out much of the neighborhood for a large highway interchange and a new branch

campus for the University of Illinois. Local residents responded with a series of spirited

by ultimately doomed protests. A similar fate befell the West End in Boston, home to

large Italian-American community. In his famous study The Urban Villagers, Herbert

Gans discussed the trauma neighborhood residents underwent, as their community

became the target of a major redevelopment project.27

Urban renewal protests were largely ineffective. Residents carried little political

clout, and were told they would have to make the sacrifice for the greater good of the

city. Freeways, however, went through the entire city. Many of these projects targeted

rundown industrial districts, or adjacent neighborhoods that had largely poor, and

disenfranchised populations, which meant that opposition was sporadic and often

ignored. Although planners consciously chose rundown neighborhoods for many routes,

in order to encourage slum clearance and because land was cheap and opposition limited,

roads inevitably had to go through a variety of neighborhoods. This put middle and upper

class Americans face to face with the destructive power of postwar urban reconstruction.

There were two strains to the road protests. In some cities, residents argued that the

aesthetic and environmental impact of the highway would far exceed its transportation

27 Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer; a Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962;Ira Berkow, Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977); Carolyn Eastwood, Near West Side Stories: Struggles for Community in Chicago’s Maxwell Street Neighborhood (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2002); Gans, The Urban Villagers; Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans.

benefits. A group of influential San Franciscans were able to stop the construction of the

Embarcadero Expressway by arguing that it would destroy the view of the bay, and spew pollutants into the air. In New Orleans, the Vieux Carré expressway was supposed to go right past Lafayette Square. Residents argued that the historic value of the area outweighed transportation needs, and city leaders adjusted the route. The other strain of highway protests was, like urban renewal activism, focused on saving neighborhoods.

Residents argued that, contrary to the belief of planners and politicians, their communities were viable, important places that the unneeded highway would destroy. In

St. Louis, members of the Little Italy community had the highway route moved north, so it would not bisect their neighborhood. Middle-class African-Americans in Nashville successfully used stopped the highway as well, one of the first successful highway fights by the Black community.28

Community preservation and control were the themes of the battle over the Lower

Manhattan Expressway (Lomex), the country’s most famous highway fight. History remembers the decade long battle as a contest that pitted master builder Robert Moses against insurgent urbanist Jane Jacobs. But this was not a two person battle. A broad coalition of New Yorkers worked together to stop Lomex. Jacobs would become the twentieth-century’s most well known proponent of diverse, tight-knit, human scale urban

28 Ellis, “Visions of Urban Freeways, 1930-1970”; Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939-1989. For other cities, see Richard O. Baumbach, William E. Borah, and Preservation Press., The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway Controversy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981);William Issel, ““Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservation of the City’s Treasured Appearance”: Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt,” Pacific Historical Review 68, no. 4 (1999); Zachary M. Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.: The Three Sisters Bridge in Three Administrations,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004). For contemporary accounts, see A. Q. Mowbray, Road to Ruin (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969); Albert Benjamin Kelley, The Pavers and the Paved (New York: D. W. Brown, 1971); Richard Hébert, Highways to Nowhere; the Politics of City Transportation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972); Alan Lupo, Frank Colcord, and Edmund Fowler, Rites of Way; the Politics of Transportation in Boston and the U.S. City (Boston: Little, 1971); Helen Leavitt, Superhighway--Superhoax (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970).

communities. But it was the residents of those communities themselves that formed a

broad, and successful, critique of the highway planning monster. What they offered was a

vision that saw urban space as something other than a location for a roadway. The city’s

people, communities and institutions were not disposable, something that renewal

authorities could tear down and rebuild somewhere else.29

For much of the 1960s, all of the road fights were local, motivated by the peculiar

politics and policies of their respective cities. There was no national movement or

organization, nor any change in federal highway policy. The road fight in Washington,

D.C., however, sparked both. The work of upper level federal officials, including

Transportation Secretary Alan Boyd, led to key revisions in federal road policy. Starting

with the 1973 Transportation Act, there were stronger provisions for citizen input, and cities could now use their highway dollars for mass transit. Emerging from the D.C.

battles was also the National Committee on the Transportation Crisis. This group did not

try to stop any specific roads, but was part of lobbying efforts that led to important

revisions to federal highway policy, including the creation of the Department of

Transportation, more funding for mass transit and increased intermodal transportation

planning. The work of the NCTC represented the subtle but important shift that had

occurred in anti-highway movement. By the 1970s, road fights were less about the over

control of urban space, and the destruction of neighborhoods, and more about how they

increased dependence on the car, weakened already failing public transportation systems,

and increase pollution. This gave road fighters a direct connection to the emerging

29 Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1995); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988).

environmental movement, but also made their efforts national in scope, concerned with the failed of American transportation policy, and not the local planning and land use decisions of a given city.30

Fights over urban renewal and highways pitted city residents against a complex

and intertwined bureaucracies. Highway and urban renewal policy originated from the

highest corridors of power in Washington, D.C. and various state capitals. On the local

level, the interests of property owners, engineering and construction firms, universities and large corporations all intertwined in the push for various building contracts. On an

intellectual level, these projects were about modernizing America’s oldest cities. On a

visceral one, there was a lot of money up for grabs. But other conflicts over urban space

were more basic. By the end of the 1960s, many cities had to cut back on services

because of funding issues, and the poorest neighborhoods usually felt the brunt of these shortages. A lack of capital meant that slums and ghettos were lacking in basic services.

New York City was suffering through a severe garbage problem, and many blue-collar,

African-American and Puerto Rican communities felt that they were getting the worst of

it. A number of local groups organized impromptu garbage protests, dragging anything

they could find into the streets to block traffic and get the city’s attention. The Puerto

Rican militant group the Young Lords conducted a series of protests in East Harlem.

“Basically, we don’t want violence for violence’s sake, and we don’t want to dump

garbage in the street,” a Lord identified only as Yoruba told the New York Times. “But if

30 Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.: The Three Sisters Bridge in Three Administrations.”

we have to go through red tape, if there’s never any action by the city, then we have no

choice.”31

Urban residents throughout the country started to feel as if they had no choice.

The conditions in their neighborhoods, especially for African-Americans, but also for

Hispanics and poor whites, were becoming intolerable. Garbage protests were effective,

and relatively easy to organize, because they took a tangible problem and directed anger

towards the state authority that was responsible. Other problems were more diffuse, especially housing issues. As the Kerner Report highlighted, the housing conditions in central cities were abysmal. Discrimination forced nonwhites to live in the oldest areas of

the city, with homes in the worst condition. In Cleveland, 33 percent of homes in white

areas were built before 1939, but 90 percent of homes in nonwhite areas were. These

ratios were 62 percent and 90 percent in Philadelphia, 57 percent and 84 percent in St.

Louis, and 46 percent and 80 percent in Detroit. In one African-American section of

Newark, 90 percent of the homes were classified as substandard or worse. The nonwhite residences were also more crowded than white communities, and their residents paid more rent for domiciles in worse condition.32 To some whites, the condition of ghetto

housing was overblown. Their immigrant ancestors had come to the United States and

been forced to live in the worse neighborhoods. Through hard work and thrift, they had

improved their lot, and now it was up to African-Americans to follow the same path. This

31 Joseph Fried, “East Harlem Youths Explain Garbage-Dumping Demonstration,” New York Times, 19 August 1969, 86; “Garbage Protest Closes 5 Blocks,” New York Times, 7 Feburary 1968, 35; “Garbage Burned in East Harlem,” New York Times, 4 August 1970, 18; “Community Groups Criticize Garbage Collections as ‘Sporadic’,” New York Times, 6 August 1975, 25; Craig Whitney, “Garbage Collection Poses Mounting Political Problem for Lindsay,” New York Times, 26 July 1970, 48. The Young Lords were also led a lead poisoning prevention campaign. See Matthew Gandy, “Between Borinquen and the Barrio: Environmental Justice and New York City’s Puerto Rican Community, 1969-1972,” Antipode 34, no. 4, 730-61. 32 United States. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders., Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 257-59.

assessment looked past the multiple types of discrimination that Blacks faced on a daily

basis, but also the unique housing conditions of the postwar period. The massive

expansion of the suburbs, backed by government subsidized loan programs, had opened

up unforeseen housing opportunities for middle and working-class white Americans. The

neighborhoods they left behind filled in with African-American migrants from the

southern states. But there was no comparable level of housing investment in the emerging

second ghetto. Public housing programs were successful for a while, but they collapsed

under the weight of their own structural inadequacies. Private capital was loath to invest

in the city. Loans and mortgages that were available were often offered at near usurious

rates.33

Urban housing activism was thus a response to the growing discrepancy between

housing conditions in white neighborhoods, and in the African-American ghetto. It was different from the open housing movement, which was geared toward providing opportunities for middle-class African-Americans in predominantly white neighborhoods and suburbs. Ghetto housing activism focused on working to improve present housing conditions. In Chicago, The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) fought for enforcement of the housing code, and confronted landlords that engaged in exploitive practices. They also clashed with the University of Chicago over the school’s plans to expand into the

predominantly African-American neighborhood. When the Johnson administration

initiated the model cities program in 1966 to focus funding and programs on certain city neighborhoods, Chicago Mayor Daley saw it as another way to siphon federal dollars into

his pet projects. But TWO members submitted their own Model Cities plan, much of it

focused on improving housing in the area. In Rochester FIGHT (Freedom, Independence,

33 Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, 220-39.

God, Honor, Today) made similar demands upon the city administration to improve

ghetto housing conditions.34

Saul Alinsky, the community activist who organized Chicago’s Back of the Yards

neighborhood in the 1930s, organized both FIGHT and TWO. In the postwar period, his confrontational style would make him one of the country’s best-known organizers. But he was not alone. In dozens of cities, ideolistic young social workers, priests and ministers went into low-income communities to organize the residents. Religious organizations, especially the Roman Catholic Church, sponsored many of these young organizers. In

1964, this work became government sanctioned, when the “maximum feasible participation” provisions of the federal War on Poverty encouraged government- sponsored social workers to organize low-income neighborhoods. Much of the urban environmental activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s sprang directly from these private and publicly sponsored organizing efforts. When poor city residents identified the

issues that mattered to them, they often identified housing, city services like garbage

pickup and recreation spaces for children.35

What they did not identify was air pollution. In the first half of the twentieth-

century, air pollution had been a distinctly middle-class issue. In the postwar period, it

continued to be an issue that appealed primarily to not only the traditional middle-class of

professionals and corporate executives, but also the newe r middle-class of factory

34 Woodlawn Organization., Woodlawn’s Model Cities Plan; a Demonstration of Citizen Responsibility (Northbrook, Ill.: Whitehall Co., 1970); John Hall Fish, Black Power/White Control; the Struggle of the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973); Saul David Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago press, 1946); Alexander Hawryluk, Friends of Fight: A Study of a Militant Civil Rights Organization (Ithaca: New York, 1967); Saul David Alinsky and Marion K. Sanders, The Professional Radical; Conversations with Saul Alinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Saul David Alinsky, Rules for Radicals; a Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971). 35 Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare.

workers and skilled laborers, those who had benefited most from New Deal economic and social programs. By the 1950s, most cities had made huge strides in overcoming their chronic air pollution problems. Despite the sustained activism of scores of anti-smoke groups during the Progressive era, many of the improvements came about because of the technological shift to heating oil and natural gas, and a general reduction in the use of coal. But just because cities became cleaner, did not make them healthier. Factories continued to run on coal power, and many of them were going full bore in the postwar economic boom. In older cities, like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, many factories dated from the turn-of-the-century, and still spewed a variety of toxins into the atmosphere. As automobiles became the country’s dominant mode of transportation, they too contributed to air pollution issues.36

Air pollution groups formed in a number of cities to try to force city leaders and regulators to enforce existing laws. In Pittsburgh, middle-class women formed GASP, the

Group Against Smog and Pollution. During the late 1960s and 1970s, they fought for the more stringent regulation of Allegheny County steel mills. In the process, they were one of a number of local environmental groups that helped give citizen’s legal standing when it came to environmental regulation. New Yorkers fought a similar battle during the

1940s and 1950s. In the immediate postwar era, the New York Times led a vigorous campaign to improve the city’s air quality. Enlisting the help of city councilman and other New Yorkers, especially the members of many prominent women’s groups, fought for an improvement in the city’s smoke control ordinances. Like GASP a decade later,

36 Joel A. Tarr, “Changing Fuel Use Behavior and Energy Transitions: The Pittsburgh Smoke Control Movement, 1940-1950: A Case Study in Historical Analogy,” Journal of Social History 14, no. 4 (1981); Oscar Hugh Allison, “Raymond R. Tucker: The Smoke Elimination Years, 1934-1950.”; David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

New Yorkers had trouble establishing standing with experts from the city and various corporate bureaucracies. Engineers and officials considered air pollution a technical problem, and its control was not as simple as simply cleaning up the air.37

###

On their own, each of these protests represents either a small part of a larger

action, or a blip on the radar screen. Puerto Ricans in New York City were not

consciously pulling their trash into the streets to protest the breakdown of the urban

environment. They were more concerned about their general rights as citizens, and

treatment by the city government. But they saw their mistreatment manifest itself in the

lack of garbage pickup in their neighborhood, a tangible, immediate problem that, they

believed, harmed themselves and their families.

When we focus on many of these events, they seem to be environmental aspects

of a larger vein of urban protest. But when the perspective is broadened, and the rest of the country comes into focus, a broader picture about the urban environment comes into view. The city was alternatively falling apart, or being torn asunder, and urban residents,

especially those with little choice but to stay in the city, began to protest its destruction,

and their lack of control over the urban environment. With this larger, national picture in

view, it is possible to look for incidents where the environmental aspects of the protest

were stronger, where the goal was the control or reform of a specific aspect of the urban

37 James Lewis Longhurst, ““Don’t Hold Your Breath, Fight for It!” Women’s Activism and Citizen Standing in Pittsburgh and the United States, 1965--1975” (Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, 2004); Scott Hamilton Dewey, Don’t Breath the Air, 135-157; On legal standing, also see Robert Douglas Lifset, “Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism, 1962--1980” (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2005).

environment. The three case studies that follow are larger, more complex movements,

each of which follows one of the three themes of this chapter: The challenge of continued

economic growth, the challenge of aging infrastructure, and the challenge of concentrated

poverty.

None of these movements have been considered part of the national

environmental movement that emerged during the 1970s. But that has more to do with

the development of a movement narrative than the reality of the late 1960s and early

1970s, when modern environmentalism coalesced around the first Earth Day. The epilogue, following these case studies, will examine how the concerns of urban residents, and disadvantaged communities, were of the panoply of issues that advocates pushed to become part of the environmental movement. For a variety of reasons, some were institutionalized and some were not. But the primary reason is that the middle and upper middle class moderates who had controlled the environmental discourse since the

Progressive era purged all of the radical strains that had existed in the early environmental movement, strains that were pushing the movement to consider urban issues and environmental issues related to class and race.

The national movement quickly institutionalized itself into a group of well- funded, and well connected, national organizations. Some were newer groups, like Ralph

Nader’s Natural Resources Defense Council, and others were older. The older groups were key, because they provided a ready model and constituency for those concerned about environmental issues. They were, in many ways, a moderating force, leading the way to an incremental, white-collar, Beltway environmentalism that favored wilderness

and natural resource protection over issues that put concerns about race, place and, most

of all, class, into sharper relief.38

This conclusion would seem to support the commonly held view of environmental

justice advocates that their movement arose in response to the mainstream, moderate

nature of environmentalism. This is partially true. But, as Martin Melosi and others have

pointed out, environmental justice advocates have set up mainstream environmentalism

as something of a straw man, to help push their agenda. Concerns about issues that relate

to the city, and unequal allocation of environmental hazards, have existed throughout the

twentieth century. This project is part of the wider effort to reclaim the radical heritage of

environmentalism. Numerous scholars in the past decade have attempted to show how

concerns about social justice and equity were often part of environmental issues. Despite

these efforts, the history of the modern environmental movement, as written by

environmental historians, is still focused on wilderness issues, national developments,

and major thinkers. Much of this has to do with the state of the field. Little primary

research has been done to fully examine the contours and developments of environmental thought, and in particular, environmental politics, during the 1960s and 1970s. This study

seeks to fill some of that void, by examining the radical strains of environmentalism need

to be placed front and center in future studies, not for the sake of illuminating them, but

in order to compare and contrast them with better-known developments, and to fully

explore the tensions, and contradictions within American environmental politics.39

38 On institutionalization, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005). 39 Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Scott Hamilton Dewey, Don’t Breathe the Air: Air Pollution and U.S. Environmental Politics, 1945-1970 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007); Adam Ward Rome, The Bulldozer in the

Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Martin V. Melosi, “Environmental Justice, Political Agenda Setting, and the Myths of History,” Journal of Policy History 12, no. 1 (2000).

Chapter Two

Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities: St. Louis and the Fight Against Lead Poisoning

Charles Liebert didn’t come into his office on August 11, 1970. He didn’t want to

face one of his tenants, Carrie McCain. With her daughter and a small group of activists,

McCain was staging a sit-in at Liebert Realty to protest the continued lead poisoning of her granddaughter. Dorothy Nason had been treated twice for lead poisoning over the past six months, and now McCain refused to pay rent to Liebert until he fixed the problem. She was there on August 11 to remind him of this.1 McCain was one of the

many people in St. Louis whose family was touched by lead poisoning during the 1970s,

but she was one of the first to protest that harm. The activists joining her were members

of the People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning, one of a number of groups that fought

against lead poisoning in St. Louis during this period. In the early 1970s, activists tested

thousands of children, pushed the city to enact and enforce effective lead paint laws, and

tried to secure safe and healthy housing for the city’s poor. Despite these efforts, at the

end of the decade lead poisoning was still a major problem in St. Louis, which points to a

failure of both the public health bureaucracy and lead paint activism. But a closer

examination shows that activists and city residents were behind every major victory in

the fight against lead paint, including the initial lead poisoning ordinance and its

subsequent revisions, and raising awareness across the community. Citizen activism

incited many of the achievements in lead poisoning prevention in 1970s St. Louis.2 This

1 “Sit-in Against Lead Poisoning,” St. Louis Globe and Democrat, 12 November 1970. 2 “Citizens Group Urges Lead Poison Warning,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 20 November 1970; “Judge Won’t ‘Shoot From Hip’ in Poison Suit,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 December 1970; People’s Coalition on Lead Poisoning, “Chronology of Events Between the Coalition Against Lead Poisoning and the Court

activism shows how urban residents shaped public health policy during this period, taking the focus off of doctors and government officials and putting it on those who were most affected by the problem of lead paint.3 Finally, it reveals how city residents used lead paint poisoning to construct a critique of the decline of the urban environment and how racial discrimination and segregated housing forced many of their children to endure its ill effects.

A brief but important window in national politics made this success possible.

When the federal government introduced the War on Poverty in the 1960’s, many programs included a caveat that they be enacted with the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. While the problems and abuses of this regulation became well known, this provision also offered a tremendous opportunity for the poor, primarily in

American cities, to have say in the planning, design and execution of new social welfare, housing and job programs. In many places, including St. Louis, residents used this bureaucratic wrinkle to force the city government to address a variety of problems they were encountering in the postwar urban environment, many of which were related to housing.4 In St. Louis, many of these democratic demands originally came from activists

System of St. Louis and the State of Missouri,”1971, F 348, Greater St. Louis Freedom of Residence Committee Addenda, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri – St. Louis (hereafter FOR Addenda). 3 The best discussion of the change in the epidemiology of lead from the 1950s to the 1970s is Christian Warren, Brush With death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), especially 178-202. Warren deals primarily with scientific literature, and so his account tends to privilege experts and professionals over local activists. See also Jane Lin-Fu, “Modern History of Lead Poisoning: A Century of Discovery and Rediscovery,” in Human Lead Exposure, ed. Herbert Needleman (London: CRC Press, 1992). and Elizabeth Fee, “Public Health in Baltimore: Childhood Lead Paint Poisoning, 1930 to 1970,” Maryland Historical Magazine 87, no. 3 (1992). 4 Historians are just beginning to chronicle the impact of these provisions within Great Society programs. See Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, “Negotiating poverty: Economic insecurity and the politics of working-class life in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, 1929 – 1969,” p. 480-555 (Ph.D. Duke University, 2003). The importance of these programs was

associated with the local Civil Rights Movement. But by the late 1960s, many of these

activists began to work for local social service agencies, going from picket lines to

federally funded positions in the city bureaucracy. But their government paycheck did not

limit their adversarial position. In fact, it enhanced it, giving activists more power to push

the demands of poor people on elected officials and private citizens.

Now that they were working within the system, many in St. Louis’s African

American community attempted to address a variety of issues that were a result of job

and housing discrimination and postwar economic dislocations. This chapter will discuss

how in St. Louis activist residents focused on how the rapid collapse of the postwar

housing market exposed African Americans to a variety of environmental problems. One

of these was lead paint poisoning, which primarily affected small children. A readily

identifiable disease and a sympathetic victim allowed activists and social workers to

mount a spirited campaign against lead poisoning, mobilizing support from numerous

public and private organizations, including the city government itself. But enacting a

solution proved to much harder than identifying the problem. Although most St. Louisans

agreed that childhood lead poisoning was a horrible affliction, made worse by its relative

preventability, there was little interest in addressing the root cause of the problem, which

was a lack of safe, decent and affordable housing. By default, the city elected for

management of the lead paint problem, rather than eradication, leaving childhood lead

poisoning as one of the many enduring legacies of the city’s postwar decline that only

further hastened its abandonment.

recognized by contemporary scholars. See Norman I. Fainstein Susan S. Fainstein and author joint, Urban Political Movements; the Search for Power by Minority Groups in American Cities (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1974).

“Will the war on pollution end up like the war on poverty?”5

The decades after World War Two were beneficent to metropolitan St. Louis, the

region that takes up eleven counties in Missouri and Illinois. There was explosive growth

in a succession of suburbs, and companies like Monsanto, McDonnell-Douglas and

research centers like Washington University helped buoy the region during the transition

to a high-tech, service oriented economy. But for the city itself, the decades after 1945

were devastating. Its population declined by half between 1950 and 1990, losing 230,000

people in the 1950s and 1960s alone. Hemmed in by a boundary fixed in 1871, the city

that had been relatively dense during the first part of the century saw a massive outflow

of people and capital. City leaders responded with an extensive urban renewal plan that

focused on rebuilding the city center, clearing land for industry, and housing the city’s

poorest residents.6 Despite early successes during the 1950s, by the 1960s it was clear

that the benefits of renewal efforts, and the region’s economic growth, would not be felt

equally. Many of the city’s residents were ill prepared for the shift, especially the African

American migrants flooding in from poor, rural areas of the Deep south. Hamstrung by a

lack of skills and job discrimination, these transplants quickly found that St. Louis was

not a land of opportunity during the 1950s. They responded with a vibrant and dynamic

civil rights movement, which provided training and experience for scores of activists. The

civil rights movement in St. Louis, like black freedom struggles in many American cities,

focused on economic rights as much as political ones. By the postwar era, African

Americans had attained a measure of political power, including representation in local

5 Wilbur Thomas, “Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities,” Proud, April 1970. 6 James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998); Joseph Heathcott and Maire Agnes Murphy, “Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940-1980.” Journal of Urban History 31, no. 2 (2005).

government, and the resultant benefits of patronage. But they were still shut out from

many of the city’s good paying jobs. Thus the core of activism throughout the postwar

period always focused on removing job discrimination and making sure blacks had a seat at the economic table. Civil rights successes in the early 1960s opened up the avenues of power and privilege to some activists, seeking positions in politics and the government bureaucracy as ways to advance the agenda of social justice. Some, like William Clay, entered politics. Others worked closer to the ground, attempting to deal with the range of problems that African Americans encountered in the decaying metropolis. These included access to jobs, but also housing, health care and education. As the decade progressed, more African Americans came to St. Louis, but the condition of the city worsened, and local government and social service agencies were ill-equipped to deal with the myriad of problems recent migrants and long-time city residents faced. Many activists and social workers stepped in to fill this void, while other community members stepped up to become the voice for local discontent.7

It is within this milieu of local organizing that lead poisoning became a major

issue. One of the primary victims of St. Louis’s collapse was its housing infrastructure.

Like most American cities, St. Louis experienced a population surge in the late 1940s,

which led to a boom in the urban real estate market, especially the apartment market. St.

Louis was a relatively dense city, with a large number of rentals. But local banks and other sources of capital saw the city as a bad investment – they were already sending their money out to the suburbs. Local entrepreneurs responded with a dynamic, speculative

7 This interpretation of civil rights activism in St. Louis comes primarily from Clarence E. Lang, “Community and resistance in the Gateway City: Black National Consciousness, Working-Class Formation, and Social Movements in St. Louis, Missouri, 1941 – 1964” (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004).

and largely informal network of first, second and third mortgages, partnerships, and other

business arrangements. For someone with smarts and hustle, there was a lot of money to

be made.8 High demand meant values were going up, and it was possible to flip

properties within one or two years and make a tidy profit. But by the 1960s many

speculators had left the market, and the remaining core of investors faced a declining

market, especially on the city’s north side, where a majority of its African Americans

were consigned to live. Up until World War Two, most of the city’s black population

lived in the central part of the city, on either the waterfront, in the Mill Creek industrial

area, or the Ville, the middle-class enclave northwest of downtown. But urban renewal in

the Mill Creek and the riverfront forced blacks west and north. Racial turnover was

quick, as whites fled for new suburbs in St. Louis County.9 By the end of the 1960s,

much of the north side was African American, but many of the properties were owned by

whites. And high vacancy rates and declining real estate values caused many rentals to

fall into disrepair. Banks were loath to invest in the north side, quickening the cycle of

blight and neglect. Middle and working class blacks with stable incomes stayed in areas

around the Ville, or began to flee to the suburbs, as the city’s fair housing movement

opened up communities to black buyers. This left the north side ripe for exploitation.

With little incentive to keep up their rental properties, owners let them decay, exposing

black residents and their children to a variety of indignities and health hazards. The public housing system was not much better. In the 1950s, St. Louis had built one of most famous housing projects in the world, Pruitt-Igoe, a gleaming complex of concrete and

8 Robert Eugene Quinn and Michael A. Mendelson, The decline of an urban housing entrepreneur: congratulations or condolences? (Edwardsville: Center for Urban and Environmental Research and Services, southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 1977). 9 James Neal Primm, Lion of the valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980; Heathcott and Murphy, “Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal.”

glass that would house over 10,000 people and be a model for projects all a across the country. A decade later, wracked by a series of management problems, the city’s entire stock of public housing was in serious disrepair, especially Pruitt-Igoe.10

Both of these issues – lack of choices, decrepit conditions – made housing the focus of a significant amount of activism in the late 1960s. The first, and most famous, protests began in the housing projects. In 1968 the residents of Carr Square, led by Jean

King, a young mother, began a rent strike against the metropolitan housing authority that would soon spread to all city housing projects. Although only about a third of public housing residents participated in the strike, they were able to get city leaders to give in to a series of demands that included better maintenance, a more equitable rent structure, and tenant management boards to deal with grievances and set policies. All throughout the strike, the city’s main sticking point had been funding. All maintenance money for public housing was supposed to come from rent payments; the city housing authority received no assistance from the federal or state government. To fill the gap, and end the strike, a coalition of civic leaders agreed to provide funding for repairs and improvements.11

Activism and organizing against private housing violations was also picking up in the late 1960s, but it did not attain the dimensions and publicity that the housing strike did. It had been easier for public housing residents to raise a successful protest against the city because it offered a large target that was supposed to be answerable to the people.

10 Charles A Liebert, “The Role of the Middleman in the Housing Market,” in The Politics of Housing in Older Urban Areas, ed. Robert Eugene Quinn Michael A. Mendelson (New York: Praeger, 1976); Washington University Institute for Urban and Regional Studies, Urban Decay in St. Louis (St. Louis: 1972); Robert Eugene Quinn and Michael A. Mendelson, The Decline of an Urban Housing Entrepreneur: Congratulations or Condolences?, On Pruitt-Igoe, see Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls; Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970). CITE REPORT WITH MAP OF HOUSING QUALITY. 11 Charles Kimball Cummings, “Rent strike in St. Louis: The Making of Conflict in Modern Society” (Ph.D., Washington University St. Louis, 1975).

Private market targets were more diffuse. Apartments and rental homes were part of a

convoluted group of owners, first, second and third mortgage holders and management companies. But this did not deter the city’s most committed social workers and housing advocates, many of whom were associated with War on Poverty agencies, especially the

St. Louis Human Development Corporation’s Gateway Centers. Chartered by civic

leaders in the early 1960s to address growing concerns about juvenile delinquency, the

Human Development Corporation was the city’s agent for the wide variety of federal

programs associated with the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Its board of directors

took seriously the mandate of “maximum feasible participation” and created a

decentralized network of Gateway Centers across the city, where residents could access a

variety of services. The centers were relatively autonomous, with boards made up of local

people and funding from federal grant programs, bypassing the already constricted local

purse strings.12 Most importantly, residents were trained to become social workers and

center administrators. This provided an important connection to the street level problems

of the poor in St. Louis, and management gave center employees wide latitude to become

advocates for community residents. When addressing housing issues, many social

workers encountered the consequences of the breakdown of St. Louis’s physical

infrastructure, particularly its housing market. Local residents dealt a variety of problems

including faulty plumbing, peeling paint and cracking plaster and insect and rodent

infestations. The advocacy and activism of social workers focused on the day-to-day

12 Lana Stein, St. Louis Politics: The Triumph of Tradition (St. Louis : Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002); Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990); William Paul Locke, “A History and Analysis of the Origin and Development of the Human Development Corporation of Metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri, 1962-1970” (St. Louis University, 1974); Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding; Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969).

fights with landlords and management companies over maintenance, rental payments, and

unfair lease structures. City and state laws still privileged property owners, giving them

an extraordinary number of loopholes when it came to skating housing regulations. Once

the person responsible for a problem was located, getting them to follow lease

agreements, address maintenance issues and make basic repairs often involved weeks of proceedings in the cities housing court. When forced to follow the law, many owners just sold the property, which absolved them of responsibility, and tenants had to begin the process anew.

One of the city’s most tireless housing advocates was Ivory Perry, a sharecropper’s son, veteran and factory worker who became active in the Congress of

Racial Equality in the early 1960s and had a prominent role in a number of civil rights actions. Like many activists, he transferred his energy to helping the poor via War on

Poverty programs, taking a job as housing coordinator with the Union-Sarah Gateway

Center in 1966. While working with community residents on disputes with landlords, leases and finding new apartments, Perry started noticing a common set of ailments among children in the older housing he visited, including runny noses, rashes, and constant colds. Perry consulted with Wilbur Thomas, a biologist at Washington

University. Thomas explained that the children’s ailments could be from the lead paint that permeated older housing. Digesting even a small paint chip could make a child sick,

Thomas told Perry. Lead paint also caused many chronic ailments, and led to long-term mental and developmental damage. Perry had some paint samples tested and found that they contained large quantities of lead.13

13 Most of the information on Perry comes from George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). Lipsitz devoted one chapter of his

Perry’s consultation with Thomas was fortuitous, but not coincidental. Thomas

was a young African American scientist who did community outreach for Barry

Commoner’s Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University. By

the early 1970s, Commoner was one of the primary advocates for a broad-based

environmental politics that argued that social problems, including racial discrimination,

poverty and war, came from the same source as environmental problems, and thus society

needed to address them in tandem. During the early years of the environmental

movement, Commoner was one of the few national voices that sought to fuse a social and

scientific vision. Wilbur Thomas applied this union of environmental and social concern

to the conditions of inner city St. Louis, especially as those conditions affected the city’s

poor, African American population. Commoner argued that technology was having

heretofore unknown effects on the natural world, with harmful consequences for the

human race. According to Thomas, urban blacks were feeling these consequences most

severely. “Most black folks are confronted with a unique pattern of environmental

pollution characterized by two kinds of exposure. The first of which is like air and water pollution and the indiscriminatory use of pesticides, which ignores geographical, political

and economic boundaries and poses serious threats for the health of all. The second type

is the existence within the Black community more than any other, of certain health

hazards such as lead poisoning, infant mortality, and air pollution.”14

biography to Perry’s lead poisoning activism, and that material has become the standard narrative for lead activism in St. Louis. See especially the documentary by Kriss Avery and Jim Rothwell, Ivory Perry: Pioneer in the Struggle Against Lead Poisoning (St. Louis: Rainbow Sound, 2006). 14 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle; Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971); Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: MIT, 2007); Thomas, “Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities.”

While at the CBNS, Thomas worked with Perry and other social workers to explain to the African American community the importance of environmental issues. One group he helped spawn was the St. Louis Metropolitan Black Survival Committee, organized in the spring of 1970 by Freddie Mae Brown, a neighborhood social worker with the Union-Sarah Gateway Center. For the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, Black

Survival put on a “guerilla street theater” program called “Black Survival: A Collage of

Skits,” to educate audiences about the environmental hazards facing African Americans.

The introductory skit shows a group of college students leaving their midterm exams. They run into a popular professor who asks them if they want to attend an anti- pollution protest. He is rebuked, with one student commenting “I heard about the movement for a better environment and I feel like it’s a cop-out from dealing with the real problems which are education and employment. No, that just ain’t my bag. I let you and whitey take care of that.” Later, a number of the students comment that they won’t be going back to their homes in the city for spring break. “I live in the city and not such a good part at that. Spring there is no different than any other part of the year. Everything is do dull and dreary -- there are no flowers, trees and grass. There are even no birds to sing.

But then who could blame them for not wanting to live in that neighborhood. We’re crazy to live there ourselves,” one student says. They eventually realize that the professor was right, the environment is an important issue to African Americans, and they ask him what the specific problems facing the Black community. The remaining skits discuss air pollution, lead poisoning, pesticides, rat and roach infestations, and solid waste

disposal.15 The performance concludes with a monologue from a boy whose mother had

just been taken to the hospital for a respiratory ailment, allegedly cause by air pollution.

The speech combines popular ecology with black power style rhetoric, an indictment not

only of American society, but rich white society in particular:

How long must we wait before the world is free of pollution! Must we first stand on the brink of extinction and be devoured by rats and cockroaches and wars that never end. Must we continue to be divided one from another by leaders who seek only political gain. Leaders who seek to sustain their own lives and snuff out the breath and life of the people. O God if you are truly alive, then hear the cry of the people. For our rich white brothers deny the black, the Indian, the Chicano, and the poor, food to eat ... Our rich white brothers aren’t concerned about poor people being unemployed, they don’t care about the lousy schools. Or cops who whop the heads of the poor, and they don’t care about the expressways that displaced our neighborhoods and the problems of pollution they bring in. As a matter of fact, they never cared at all about the problems until they started calling them environmental problems and saw that the mess in the food, water and air wasn’t just killing poor folk but was killing them too. They even had the nerve to think that dope wouldn’t hit their communities.16

This speech illustrates that environmental concerns were not limited to a select few scientists or activists in St. Louis’s African American community, and they were not divorced from the wide variety of other issues that resident, community organizers and social workers were trying to address. Many black St. Louisans considered lead poisoning and air pollution as symptoms of a broader system of discrimination and oppression, that not only limited black rights in politics and in the workplace, but in their own communities, forcing them to live in degraded environments. Activists in cities across the country were dealing with these issues. But in St. Louis they had access to a specific type of environmental ideology, through Barry Commoner and Wilbur Thomas,

15 Freddie Mae Brown and the St. Louis Metropolitan Black Survival Committee, "Black Survival: A Collage of Skits," in Earth Day--the Beginning: A Guide for Survival, ed. Environmental Action (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). 16 Ibid.

that translated their concerns into the language of popular ecology and environmentalism.

But it was hard for residents address these problems. Urban environmental hazards were

the product of a number of diffuse and complex problems, including housing discrimination, political disenfranchisement, poor city planning and a lack of building and investment capital. Activists could not blame one single factory or waste dump, or

the discriminatory actions of one local politician. “We don’t know all the problems, and

we are not statistically sure of those we think we know,” the professor character told the

college students in the “Black Survival” skits.

The lone exception to this was lead poisoning. In 1970, local national experts

recognized lead poisoning as a disease that affected poor, primarily African American,

children living in “ghetto housing.” It was the perfect issue to show the pain and suffering

caused by the degraded urban environment. It was clearly diagnosed, caused by an

identifiable problem, and its victims were innocent children. These factors helped

activists, for a short time, rally the broader city community around the issue of childhood

lead poisoning. But they were not able to get the city government or concerned citizens to

address the underlying cause of the poisoning epidemic: housing and the generally

degraded character of the city’s urban infrastructure. Thomas realized that although the

solution to the problem was readily apparent, it was almost unobtainable within the

current system. “If slum housing, characterized by peeling paint, dilapidated super-

structures, inadequate and antiquated external and internal facilities, was completely

replaced with sound and sturdy adequately designed homes, the incidence of these public

health hazards would disappear,” he wrote in Proud magazine. “To expect the existing

political, economic and social system to deliver new housing, adequate financing,

competent administrators, and appropriate priority, is like playing ‘mumbly peg’ with an

ice pick possessing a rubber point. It just won’t stick. The message is loud and clear that

if we want to achieve the kind of ecological quality and appropriate master strategy, provisions must be made for Blacks to save their community environment.” Although they knew the limits of the current system, Thomas, Perry and other activists were unable to find any way around them. The same forces that subjected St. Louis’s African

American residents to increased risk from lead poisoning – disinvestment, capital flight, and a national apathy towards urban problems – were the same forces that limited the options available to activists and concerned city leaders. After 1970, the only solution black St. Louisans would find to their degraded environment was abandoning it.17

“Decent and adequate housing must be considered a basic right”

Using lead poisoning to spearhead their environmental and social critique of St.

Louis was a natural for activists and organizers. Lead poisoning was an identifiable and

(apparently) solvable problem, and its social history as a disease played into conceptions

of the degraded urban environment. By the 1960s, it was widely perceived as a

“childhood disease of the slums.” Lead poisoning first entered the American

consciousness during the Progressive era, but was primarily considered an industrial

disease that affected workers in certain industries. In the 1920s, national paint companies

marketed white lead paint, long acknowledged for its superior color, to the country’s

expanding market of homeowners. Doctors in some cities started to notice the effects of

this widespread introduction of lead into the environment, especially childhood lead

poisoning, as early as the 1930s. But it was not until the 1960s that public health experts

17 Thomas, “Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities.”

widely acknowledged that children living in older urban housing were especially

susceptible to lead poisoning, which they supposedly obtained from eating sweet tasting

lead paint chips. Children’s bodies had a lower tolerance for lead, and research was just

beginning to show that low levels of lead that did not necessarily poison children could

still cause severe developmental disorders. Cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia began

lead abatement programs in the middle of the 1960s, but lead poisoning activism

remained a local issue. In 1972, Congress passed national legislation and created funding

for lead prevention programs, but the success of any efforts had to do with local

conditions and politics. Lead poisoning was a problem in older cities that were likely to

have homes with lead based paint, the same cities undergoing severe social and economic

turmoil in the early 1970s, including major municipal budget shortfalls. St. Louis fell into all of these categories.18

After his consultations with Thomas, Ivory Perry raised the issue of lead poisoning at a city conference on low-income housing in 1969 and got the tentative support of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, which led to the passage of the city’s first lead poisoning ordinance in April 1970.19 But the original law was a flawed tool. It split

enforcement responsibility between two city offices – the health department and the

housing division. The health department was responsible for testing paint chips and blood

samples taken from children at hospitals and community health centers. If a child had

18 Robert C. Griggs, et al., “Environmental Factors in Childhood Lead Poisoning,” Journal of the American Medical Association 187, no.10 (1964); Clair Patterson and Joseph Salvia, “Lead in Our Modern Environment: How Much Is Natural?” Scientist and Citizen, 10, no. 3, April 1968; Ann Koppelman Simon, “Citizens vs. Lead in Three Environments,” Scientist and Citizen, 10, no. 3, April 1968; Jane S. Lin-Fu, Childhood Lead Poisoning, an Eradicable Disease (Washington: D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1970); Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Warren, Brush With Death, 203- 244. 19 Lana Stein, St. Louis Politics; Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle, 174-75.

high blood-lead levels, then the health department directed the building division to

conduct a home inspection. Under the original law, building inspectors had to do a

complete survey of the house and a title search before the health department could bring

the owner in front of a judge. This process took two to three months, and its deliberate

pace proved exasperating to concerned citizens and activists. Over the course of 1970,

frustration began to build. Many children had been diagnosed with lead poisoning and

undergone the painful treatment, chelation therapy, to remove the lead from their bodies.

But their families often had no choice but to return the child to their previous home. If the

landlord had not successfully removed the lead, the child would often be repoisoned.20

Activism and protest coalesced around the Gateway Centers. In addition to Perry and Brown, who worked at the Union-Sarah Center, an ad-hoc group called the People’s

Coalition Against Lead Poisoning arose out of the Yeatman Community Health Center, which was also in the city’s predominantly African American north side. The primary spokesmen and organizers of the Lead Coalition were Robert Knickmeyer, a medical social worker from Yeatman, and Larry Black, Yeatman’s housing coordinator.21 Starting

in the fall of 1970, the Lead Coalition engaged in a series of confrontational tactics to

highlight the dangers of lead poisoning and the city government’s apparent unwillingness

to deal with the issue. The first of these was a rent strike by Carrie McCain, whose

granddaughter, Dorothy Nason, had been poisoned multiple times by the lead paint in her

20 Albert Nerviani to A.J. Wilson, 20 May 1971, Box 42, Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Alfonso J. Cervantes Papers, Washington University Archives, St. Louis, Missouri (hereafter Cervantes Papers); Charles Copley, “Lead Poisoning Prevention in St. Louis,” in Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention and Control: A Public Health Approach to an Environmental Disease, ed. Flora Finch Cherry (New Orleans, La.: Maternal and Child Health Section, Office of Health Services and Environmental Quality, Dept. of Health and Human Resources, 1981). New York City had similar problems in grafting a lead poisoning program onto an existing municipal bureaucracy. See Diana Gordon, City Limits: Barriers to Change in Urban Government (New York: Charterhouse, 1973) 17-62. 21 “Robert Knickmeyer,” Obituary, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3 September 1996.

apartment. She held back her rent from her landlord, Dorenkemper Realty, which

managed the property for Charles Liebert. She was eventually evicted, and legal aid

defended her in court, arguing that she had a right to nonpayment until Liebert made the

necessary repairs.22 Though limited, the rent strikes show the commitment of the parents

and families of poisoned children. Many of them were already living on the margins; if

not, it would have been easier for them to find safer housing. They had already incurred

hassle, pain and heartache when their children were poisoned, and were putting them at

risk again by withholding rent from their landlords. But they saw the risks were better than the alternatives. “Paying more rent would be like having some one shoot you with a

gun one time, and then paying him to shoot you again,” Carrie McCain said.23 Other

tenants withheld rent as a personal protest, and not part of a larger campaign. Vetra

Tanner lived in an apartment at 2820 Gamble in the Carr Square neighborhood on the

north side. She repeatedly asked her landlord, Block Brothers, to make repairs, but they

refused. According to a social worker from the Red Cross who was assisting with her

case, the owners allowed the property “to deteriorate to the point where it was almost uninhabitable.” Her children became poisoned from the flaking lead paint, so she started to withhold rent to help pay for their medical bills, and because, as she told a city building inspector, she did not want to subsidize “the poisoning and sickness of her own children.” Tanner was threatened with eviction, and eventually got the city to prosecute

22 “Lead-Poison Foes Plan Strike,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 22 December 1970; “Rent Strike Being Organized In Wake of Lead Poisoning Cases,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat 22 December 1970. 23 William Preston to Block Brothers Portraits, 26 May 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers; Vatra Tanner to Kenneth Brown, 26 May 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers.

the landlord under the lead ordinance.24 By the 1970s, urban apartment dwellers used rent strikes on a regular basis to attempt to force landlords to aggress grievances, typically

maintenance and repair issues. But they show that the families of poisoned children,

many of whom already lived on the economic margins, were willing to undergo a

significant risk to make their homes habitable and safe.25

While the Lead Coalition tried to highlight the problem of unresponsive landlords,

Perry tried to improve awareness and get children tested. He spent much of 1971 raising

money for a more comprehensive testing program. The city’s three testing centers were

inaccessible to those families that really needed the tests, he argued. Lead poisoning was

part of larger problems that required long-term solutions, but children needed testing

now. “(Housing) is the long range goal, but the present thing to do is have children

screened, because children who may be subjected to lead poisoning don’t have time to

wait on long term programs,” he said.26 Perry’s fundraising was not an effort to replace

the city government’s public health responsibility, but to push them to take action. “It

costs $250,000 for lifetime care of a mentally retarded person suffering from lead

poisoning,” Perry said. “But the city is spending only $50,000 a year for prevention and

cure.”27 City officials claimed poverty when activists attacked them for the lack of money

for lead testing, but it was also a matter of funding priorities. The Cervantes

24 William Preston to Block Brothers Portraits Manager, 26 May 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers; Vatra Tanner to Kenneth Brown, 26 May 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers. 25 Ronald Lawson, "The Rent Strike in New York City, 1904-1980: The Evolution of a Social Movement Strategy"," Journal of Urban History 10, no. 3 (1984). 26 “Lack Of Funds Reported In Fight on Poison Paint,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, 3 May 1971. 27 William C. Banton to Judith Casilly, 22 April 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers; “Lack Of Funds Reported In Fight on Poison Paint,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, 3 May 1971; Legal Task Force Subcommittee, “An Analysis of the St. Louis Lead Abatement Process: Some Comments and Directions,” Get the Lead Out Conference, 1971, Folder 348, FOR Addenda; “City of St. Louis Lead Poisoning Statistics and Projects,” Lead Poisoning Control Service, City of St. Louis, 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers. “Tenant Groups Seeks Funds To Fight Lead Poisoning,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 21 March 1971.

administration as a whole, and the health department in particular, did not place lead poisoning high on its priority list. “All I can say is that the health division is doing the best it can with limited resources. I don’t have the answer of how you raise $16 million dollars,” Health Director Dr. William Banton said in a newspaper article. He was referring to the city’s $6 million budget deficit for 1971 and a projected $10 million deficit for 1972. He added that although lead poisoning was a serious problem, he felt that the city’s high infant mortality rate was a more important issue.28 The budget crunch

St. Louis faced was common in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s. A declining tax base from residential and industrial flight and increasing crime and poverty put many older cities in a fiscal squeeze, all while they continued to become a magnet for poor

Americans who needed more services, not less. In 1972, the Nixon administration offered relief with its New Federalism programs, which removed the strings from federal dollars and let cities decide where they needed the funds. In St. Louis, this meant large downtown projects like a new convention center. These were supposed to spur economic development, but many advocates for the poor saw them as direct subsidies to large

corporate interests that ignored the immediate problems of city residents, including lead

poisoning.29

By 1971, the efforts of Perry, the Lead Coalition and other activists helped make

lead poisoning a community-wide issue. But once it entered the public forum, different constituencies tried to define the problem, and thus solutions, in different ways. The Ad-

28 Charlie Staples, “City Officials Named In Lead Poisoning Suit,” St. Louis Globe Democrat, 4 February 1971. 29 Heathcott and Murphy, “Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal”; George E. Curry, “Seeking Funds For Lead Fight,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 June 1975; Editorial, “The Convention Center,” KMOX, 1 November 1972. Box 19 Folder Convention Center, Cervantes Papers; Spencer Allen, “Reply to Kmox Editorial on the Convention Center,” KMOX, 3 November 1972. Box 19 Folder Convention Center, Cervantes Papers; Sally Thran, “Center Could Boost Revenues,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Hoc Committee on Lead Poisoning, created to advise the health department, was a group

of doctors and social workers that was not as confrontational as the Lead Coalition and

other activists. They did not seek to place blame on any one institution or group of people

for the lead poisoning problem. “If we are to eradicate this hazard, the entire community

must assume responsibility and mobilize for its immediate elimination. Lead poisoning

will not dissipate without a vigorous, sustained, multi-faceted attack,” they wrote in a

public statement.30 But the committee’s moderate voice did not speak for the entire

scientific and medical community. Some African American doctors and scientists were

not as conciliatory, like committee chairman Donald Suggs, an oral surgeon. “I don’t

believe the problem is receiving the same attention it would receive if another socio-

economic group were involved,” he wrote in a newspaper article on lead poisoning. “I

don’t want to sound shrill or strident, but we are determined. The city and the health community must measure up to the challenge. We’re not interested in scapegoats. We’re interested in youngsters.”31 Wilbur Thomas also continued to press the issue. By the end

of 1971, he was editing a regular column in Proud magazine, and monthly targeted

towards the city’s young African American population, where he and other writers dealt

with the variety of environmental issues that faced the black community. “In St. Louis,

most of the people affected (by lead poisoning) are poor and Black and they alone will

suffer the consequences of this hidden burden. The time has come, however, when the

community will no longer allow unnecessary afflictions to continue,”32 Thomas wrote in

his column on lead poisoning.

30 Ad Hoc Committee on Lead Poisoning, “Statement of the Ad Hoc Committee on Lead Poisoning,” 13 January 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers. 31 “Charges City Is Apathetic On Lead-Poison Problem,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 January 1971. 32 Wilbur Thomas, “Lead Poisoning in St. Louis” Proud, Vol. 1, No. 5, May 1970, 17.

The contrast between city officials and doctors, and activists and members of the

African American community, came in the spring of 1971, when the Community

Medicine Department of the St. Louis University School of Medicine convened a one- day, citywide conference to educate the community about lead poisoning and formulate solutions. Most the of the reports issued by the conference task forces were straightforward, recommending outreach programs to young mothers, improved screening programs, and revisions of city and state ordinances. The most critical and incisive report came from the housing task force. The problem was ineffective enforcement, the housing task force said, and “private real estate interests (that) have ignored the lead poisoning problem.” The Housing Task Force’s confrontational tone was not a surprise. Its members, including Ivory Perry and other activists from the Lead

Coalition, had been dealing with the lead paint problem at the street level. They did not see lead poisoning as a clinical issue that officials could solve with a more efficient bureaucracy. To them, poisoned children continued to live in unsafe environments because their families had no choice. Slumlords, absentee owners whose only concern was profit, controlled the housing market.

Minutes from one of the task force’s meeting summarize how its members viewed the viewed the lead poisoning problem. “Hard core economics make it difficult to make adequate maintenance and maintain a decent profit at the same time. Since tenants cannot pay more for good maintenance and since repairs do not improve the marketability of the building, the slumlords simply fail to make adequate repairs.”33 In its official conference position paper, the Housing Task Force said that although better education, testing and

33 Madeline Oliver, Minutes of the Housing Task Force on Lead Poisoning, Get the Lead Out Conference, 30 March 1971, Folder 499, FOR Addenda.

outreach programs were important, they were not the cure for childhood lead poisoning.

The city needed a housing program that regulated the private market and provided more

community control, the paper said. “If we are to solve the housing crisis, decent and

adequate housing must be considered a basic right of every citizen ... The rental value of

land must be seen as a social creation, and should appropriated eventually by progressive

taxation and used for social purposes.” The radical nature of the Housing Task Force’s

report did not spring spontaneously. It was part of the wider milieu of thought about

urban infrastructure in early 1970s St. Louis. As the city broke down around them,

activists and community members searched for ways to provide safe, decent and

affordable housing. They had long since given up on the free market and soured on large,

government run housing projects.34

Despite the radical tone of the housing task force, lead poisoning activists, doctors

and public health workers were relatively unified in their commitment to the issue in the

months surrounding the conference, but this solidarity would not last. Conference attendees represented different factions within the activist and public health community, each of which had their own agenda and ideas when it came to the source of the lead poisoning problem and its solution. To the city’s most radical activists, lead poisoning

was the symptom of larger problems that could only be solved with a fundamental

restructuring of the city’s housing market. But by the early 1970s, there were few solutions available. Despite the optimism of public housing residents with the success of the rent strike, by 1972 problems in St. Louis projects had become even worse. Financial

support for a maintenance and improvement program was withdrawn, and complexes like

34 Housing Task Force, “Housing Task Force Report on the National Housing Crisis,” 1971, Folder 348, FOR Addenda; Cummings, “Rent strike in St. Louis: the making of conflict in modern society.” Harry Edward Berndt, The Community Development Corporation as a Response to Poverty (St. Louis: 1975.

Pruitt-Igoe fell into even worse shape, and were eventually abandoned. Community

leaders and activists proposed a new model of tenant run co-ops, organized and financed

through housing development spin-offs of the local Gateway Centers. But these

community centered ideas came too late. Although there were a few pilot projects, local

and federal capital dried up. The remaining option was reform of the private housing market, but that proved to be an insurmountable obstacle. Landlords fought increased regulation tooth and nail, judges were loath to impinge on private property rights, and city officials knew that tough enforcement would only further decrease the supply of affordable housing.

“The people couldn’t pay more rent, so I sold it.”

In 1972 the city revised the lead ordinance to consolidate the efforts of the health department and the building division. Previously, owners had two months to fix problem

properties, and two separate city offices had to coordinate the repairs. The changes put

the entire system under control of the health department director, and activists, politicians

and public health workers all considered them a significant achievement. But it could

still take two months to delead a house. Seeing no way around the bureaucratic problems

– the city lacked the funds to create a truly streamlined program – the Lead Coalition

jumped on a provision that allowed the health department to appeal to the courts for immediate action. This led to “Court Injunctions to Save the Children,” campaign, which

pitted activists squarely against the reluctant officials of Mayor Alfonso Cervantes’

administration in an effort to force at least some vigorous enforcement of the city’s lead

and housing codes.35

Legal aid attorney Henry Freund first suggested using injunctions to stop lead

paint poisoning in 1971. The idea was to bypass the regulatory bureaucracy and force

landlords to deal with lead paint under the penalty of jail time. According the Lead

Coalition’s Robert Knickmeyer, the regulatory process, which went through the city’s

night housing court “takes several months and allows hazardous conditions to continue

unchecked.” To stop lead poisoning, the full weight of the city’s legal system should be

used, activists felt. But city officials did not agree. Although many in the Cervantes

administration paid lip service to lead poisoning prevention, they stopped short when it

came to asking for court injunctions.36 On Oct. 4, 1972, the Lead Coalition sent

Cervantes a letter urging his administration to start using court injunctions. More than

2,000 children had shown high blood lead levels in the past two years, the letter said, but the city had brought only twenty-five of those cases to court. “While the time involved in getting cases to Court and the Court’s adjudication has been encouragingly expedited, there is certainly nothing in the city statistics we cited above to indicate that ‘law and order’ is beneficially applied to save the lives of the inhabitants of our city’s most disgraceful housing,” the letter said. This process was especially distressing to parents, who often had no choice but to return poisoned children to dangerous homes. According to the Lead Coalition’s letter “two members of our coalition have personally experienced

35 Albert Nerviani to A.J. Wilson, 20 May 1971, Box 42, Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers; Sheila Bixby Defty, “Inaction Protested In Lead Poison Case,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 November 1972; People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning, “Injunctions to Save the Children,” 13 November 1972, Folder 288, Committee for Environmental Information Records Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri – St. Louis (hereafter CEI Papers). 36 “Citizen group blames city for laxity in lead poisoning cases,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 27 September 1972.

the despair of having a child poisoned by flaking lead chips, having the city notify the landlord and witnessed a creaking, archaic bureaucracy manifest indifference while the children were returned to the dangerous environment and repoisoned.”37 On October 6,

Ivory Perry met with McNicholas to try and plead the coalition’s case. The health commissioner was allowed to ask for injunctions under the current law, and the night housing court, the current location for lead poisoning cases, was too slow. But

McNicholas was not about to start hauling landlords before judges. He felt that the housing court was an adequate mechanism.38 This only infuriated Perry. “We can’t communicate with your attitude,” Perry said during their meeting.

A week later, the coalition staged a sit-in in McNicholas’s office to force him into dealing with issue. Knickmeyer, Perry and other activists were joined by several children and their mothers, including Veronica Harris, whose daughter Ethel, was in Cardinal

Glennon Hospital being treated for her second bought with lead poisoning. They sat near

Sheila Brewer and her mother, Shirley Brewer. Young Sheila, who had recently been hospitalized for lead poisoning for the fifth time, was the poster child for the “Court

Injunctions For the Children Campaign.” Although lead paint had finally been removed from her home, her parents and activists worried about the children in the forty-three other apartments in her building.39 The action against McNicholas yielded few results.

The city attorney was an obstinate and combative adversary who argued that it was not the job of his office to enforce the lead paint ordinance. A month later the coalition decided to focus on Dr. Helen Bruce. After a sit-in and a rally, Bruce and the Cervantes

37 Law Enforcement Committee of the People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning to Robert McNicholas, 4 October 1972, Box 42, Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers; Marguerite Shepard, “Children and the agony of lead poisoning,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 9 October 1972. 38 Marguerite Shepard, “Children and the agony of lead poisoning.” 39 “City to step up fight against lead poisoning,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 14-15 October 1972.

administration relented, and agreed to start using injunctions.40 The first target was Paul

Brune, one of the city’s biggest landlords. The case in question concerned 5132 Delmar, the home of Melvin McDowell, a one year old who had been hospitalized twice for lead poisoning. In December, Judge Paul Casey gave Brune one month to abate the lead problem in the McDowell home or the court would find him in contempt. A month later, almost nothing had been done at the property. “Look at that, look at that flaking paint,” said Ernest Larry, McDowell’s neighbor, as he pointed to the flaking walls, doors and windowsills when interviewed by a reporter from the Post-Dispatch. “I first asked Mr.

Brune to fix the place for Christmas but he didn’t do it. He said he’d get someone over here but he always says that.” Brune was back in Casey’s court by January, but the judge only issued a reprimand. According to the city inspector, Brune’s painter had not shown up to the property until the afternoon of Jan. 2, the day before he was supposed to finish the work.41

That the city did not fine Brune or place him in jail for violating the court order was anathema to the Lead Coalition, but McNicholas would not push for strong penalties.

Brune felt the activists and the city were unfairly singling him out as the culprit. Lead was everywhere, he said. “Children dig in it, it’s on the cars, dishes, pencils – everywhere. What it really boils down to is poor housekeeping.” 42 This attitude – combative, condescending – made Brune a favorite target of lead activists until he retired

40 Sheila Bixby Defty, “Inaction Protested In Lead Poison Case,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 November 1972;”City’s agreement to enforce anti-lead law ends sit-in,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 17 November 1972; People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning, “Injunctions to Save the Children,” 13 November 1972, Folder 288, CEI Papers; People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning to Helen Bruce, 16 November 1972, Box 42, Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers. 41 George Curry, “To Seek Writ In Lead Case,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 26 November 1972; George Curry, “Landlord Has Not Removed Leaded Paint Despite Court Order,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5 January 1973; “Lead Paint Coalition Calls Brune’s Reprimand Inadequate,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 13 January 1973. 42 Ibid, Curry, “Lead Paint Coalition Calls Brune’s Reprimand Inadequate.”

in 1973. In most of his public pronouncements, Brune placed the blame for lead

poisoning on the residents of his properties. “Lead poisoning doesn’t happen in my south

St. Louis properties. Where there is good housekeeping, it does not occur,” he said in

another newspaper article about lead in his properties. “Anyway, children can get lead

poisoning from dishes or automobiles or any number of places other than (the) walls.”

This comment reflects the racial overtones of the lead poisoning problem in St. Louis,

implying that south side, a.k.a., white residents, did not suffer lead poisoning because

they took better care of their property than African Americans on the north side. This was

the attitude prevalent among many St. Louis landlords. “The children wrecked the faucets

and furnaces,” real estate investor Louis Eisenstein said in the same article. “They

cracked plaster off the walls and ate it. I was forced to spend more than $500 to repair the

damage. The people couldn’t pay more rent, so I sold it.”43 These comments were

partially a self-defense by those who felt that they were unfairly portrayed as vindictive

slumlords. But despite the decrepit state of some of their properties, putting black hats on

property owners does not explain the structural problems facing the St. Louis real estate

market in the early 1970s. Twenty years earlier, Brune had prospered during the city’s

urban real estate boom, when speculation in rental properties was a growth business. But

with massive amounts of private and public capital subsidizing the growth of the suburbs,

that demand fled east, to the greener pastures of St. Louis County. In their place came a

tide of poor, African American migrants from the rural south. By the end of the 1960s, St.

Louis real estate investors faced a falling demand for rental property, especially on the

43 Walter Stradal, Press Release, St. Louis Board of Real Estate 15 November 1970. Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers.

north side. What demand did exist was only for the cheapest properties. Anyone who

could afford anything better moved to the suburbs.44

Not all representatives of the real estate business were as openly hostile as Brune and Eisenstein. The industry’s main lobbyist was Walter Stradal, Executive Vice-

President of the St. Louis Board of Realtors. During most of the early 1970s, he rode a tight line on the lead poisoning issue, wanting to show that realtors were concerned. “The

Real Estate Board remains firm in its position that the community faces a real and grave health problem which can only be met by mutual help and cooperation of all parties involved,” he wrote in a 1970 press release. But he was still out to protect their interests.

His main argument was that excessive enforcement would only make the St. Louis housing problem worse. “Even if the city of St. Louis were capable of enforcing this rigid ordinance, virtually all residential property existing before 1947 would have to be substantially renovated and the resultant costs would bring about prohibitive increases in rents which could in turn displace most of the tenants of low income housing,” he said later in the same press release.45 As the public face of the city’s real estate industry,

Stradal had to appear as if he was concerned about the issue, while in private his

comments were similar to Brune and Eisenstein. “It seems that the basic problem is the

fact that ghetto children have over a number of years developed a craving for plaster and

actually dig this plaster out of the walls so that they might eat it,” he wrote in a 1971

letter to a local paint manufacturer to inquire about inexpensive wall coverings.46

44 Most of the information for this paragraph comes from Quinn and Mendelson, The Decline of an Urban Housing Entrepreneur. The report is a short business biography of Brune written when he retired and sold all of his property at auction. Quinn and Mendelson use the sparse attendance and lack of bidding at the auction as a an assessment of how much the city real estate market has floundered since the 1950s. 45 Walter Stradal, Press Release, St. Louis Board of Real Estate (1970). 46 Walter Stradal to Charles Salisbury, 21 October 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers.

The public and private comments of landlords and realtors may seem like self-

defense against relentless and confrontational lead paint activists, portraying them as, at

best, disinterested capitalists, or, at worst, vindictive slum lords. But putting black hats on

them does not help us understand the structural problems facing the St. Louis real estate

market in the early 1970s. Twenty years earlier, Brune, for example, had prospered in

what was a boom time for local real estate. A dense population and limited housing

meant that demand was high, and so speculation in rental properties was a growth

business. But with massive amounts of private and public capital subsidizing the growth

of the suburbs, that demand fled east, to the greener pastures of low-cost ranch houses in

St. Louis County. In their place came a tide of poor, African American migrants from the

rural south. By the end 1960s, St. Louis real estate investors faced a falling demand for

rental property, and what demand did exist could only afford properties on the lower end

of the spectrum.

The structural problems of the housing market, the lack of funding available to

create new public housing projects, led to a fundamental shift in lead poisoning activism.

The injunction campaign had pushed the city as far as it was willing to go when it came

to regulating the private housing market. Despite the continued vigorous advocacy of

Lead Coalition members and other committed social workers, the range of solutions available to city residents became limited. Starting in 1973, activists pushed the city for more effective management of the problem. This advocacy included invocations of class and race based politics, that lead poisoning was only a problem because it was affecting the African Americans and poor. But in an increasingly segregated metropolis, where the poor and Black were consigned to live in a set of neighborhoods on the city’s north side,

this attempt to revive the sense of community mobilization that had existed only a few years before, fell on death ears. And activists, city residents and public health officials were all too aware of this development and its ramifications for truly preventing the lead poisoning problem.

The Lead Coalition ended its injunction campaign in early 1973, after

McNicholas agreed to start taking stronger action. Activists also hoped new mayor John

Poelker, elected in March 1973, would take more interest in the lead issue, and pressured him to do as much. In April, Black and Knickmeyer wrote a letter to Dr. Dean Wochner, city hospital director. They argued that the continuing lead problem was political, not administrative. “Obviously, our fight is not with hospital administration, doctors, social workers, sanitarians, or Lead Poison Control. Our fight is with the whole political mentality that prevailed in the Cervantes administration down through your office.” They demanded that city bureaucrats and health service workers be allowed to take a more active role in trying to deal with the lead poisoning problem, that the previous administration had held them back, and implied that this reluctance would not exist if the victims came from white communities. “In short what we are saying is that the City should get off its ‘hands’ and respond to this epidemic as though thirty percent of the children ages one through six were being poisoned on (sic) Holly Hills, Westminster

Place, Hortence Place, and Lenox Place.”47

All of these neighborhoods and apartment complexes were on the south or west sides of St. Louis, the city’s predominantly white areas. Allegations that the lack of attention to the lead problem was racially based ran throughout lead protests in St. Louis.

47 Larry Black and Robert Knickmeyer to Dean Wochner, 26 April 1973, Box 26, Folder Health Division Lead Paint, April 1973, John H. Poelker Papers, Washington University Archives, St. Louis, Missouri (hereafter Poelker Papers).

St. Louisans would pay more attention if this were a problem with white children, Lead

Coalition members like Larry Black said. “If this disease was prevalent in white America, what do you think would happen, if it were white kids being destroyed physically and mentally,” Black said in a newspaper article. He added that black politicians had also not given the issue much attention. “The black politicians have been far too silent on this whole issue. Let the record show we’re going to them. The public will find out which are willing to help them and which are not.” This racially charged language was more of a tactic than a belief among activists, used to rouse support in the African American

community, and place blame on St. Louis’s white establishment. Outside of the quick

newspaper quip, their critique was more nuanced. It was not only African American

children that were being poisoned, Black said. The poor were the most at risk. “Almost

every case of lead poisoning we’ve found has been in a family on welfare that has to live

in dilapidated housing.”48

To activists and health care professionals, lead poisoning was not simply an issue

of race or class or place. They all intersected, Ivory Perry said in a magazine article. “60

percent (of lead poisoning victims) are black, 40 percent are white, and all are poor.”49

Race, poverty and place put them at a high risk for lead exposure, and is also why the problem, though epidemic in proportions, was largely ignored by mainstream America,

Helen Bruce told the a newspaper reporter. “The reason nothing is done is because people say ‘Why worry about the poor?’. I’ve had some of my friends ask ‘Why don’t they sweep their floors?’ You don’t just sweep the problem away; it’s in the ceiling and

48 "City Agency Blamed in Lead Poisoning Case," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 27 September 1972, Box 4 Folder Health Division, Lead Paint, Cervantes Papers. 49 John T. Magidson, "Half-Step Forward," Environment, June 1971 1971,"City Agency Blamed in Lead Poisoning Case," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 27 September 1972. Box 4 Folder Health Division, Lead Paint, Alfonso J. Cervantes Papers Series 4.

woodwork.”50 Bruce went on to compare the response to lead poisoning with polio,

which at its peak was a fraction of the lead problem. “If one case of polio would break

out in St. Louis today it would make the front page. At its peak, polio affected only

58,000 persons. Almost four times that many suffer from lead poisoning,” she said. “We

had an all out campaign for polio. We established a national foundation and poured

millions into research.” This comparison was common among lead activists. Polio was in

the recent memory of most Americans. Although it was an epidemic, it had been

especially prevalent among upper middle class whites, Jack Newfield wrote in the New

York Times in 1971. Newfield was America’s best-known lead paint poisoning

muckraker. His stories in the Village Voice helped shed the light on the problem in New

York City, and he became the problem’s national voice. “Only a lack of purpose

sentences 200 black children to die each year. When 200 white children died of polio it

was called a national epidemic and all of our scientific resources were galvanized to find

a cure. But 200 black children are invisible, and nobody wants to know there names.”51

Bruce’s comments came in the summer of 1973, as she was trying to rouse local

support for the lead poisoning issue. Under the Cervantes administration she had been

under a virtual gag order from McNicholas about lead paint, but she became more vocal

with Mayor Poelker in office.52 The lead program was also able to gain more funding

under the new administration, reaching a rough approximation of the structure it would

hold for the rest of the decade. Federal grant money allowed the city to expand some of

50 George E. Curry, "Lead Poison Crash Drive Is Urged," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 July 1973, Box 87 Folder 26, Washington University St. Louis Arcives, John H. Poelker Papers (Hereafter Poelker Papers). 51 George Curry, “Lead Poison Crash Drive Is Urged,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 July 1973. The polio comparison was common among lead activists across the country. See Warren, Brush With Death, 195; Jack Newfield, “Let Them Eat Paint Chips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3 August 1972. 52 Robert McNicholas to Anoise Seymour, 24 November 1972, Box 42, Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers.

its programs in the short term, including paying high school students to work on

abatement projects over the summer. 53 Despite these changes, lead poisoning numbers

remained high. In March 1974, Larry Black and Sharon Hollander, a Washington

University social work student assigned to the Lead Coalition, expressed concern about

the effectiveness of the city’s lead poisoning program in a letter to Bruce, asking for a list

of all the injunctions issued in the past year, the addresses of all of the homes that had

been detoxified, and the health department’s procedures for lead control and abatement.

In her response, Bruce wrote that since the beginning of 1973 the city had prosecuted one

hundred property owners for violating the lead paint law, and sought injunctions against

seventeen of them. More than four hundred homes had been detoxified, and the addresses

and names of the owners were listed and attached to the letter. 54

If the city was making such an effort to detoxify homes and prosecute violators,

why was lead poisoning still such a problem? The answer to this was in Bruce’s letter, where she defined what the city meant by detoxification. “Detoxification is to remove or

otherwise make inaccessible all potentially hazardous lead bearing substances to which a

child has access in his home.” This may sound comprehensive, but it amounted to what

both activists and officials called “spot” detoxification: Lead paint was only removed

from the parts where it was visibly peeling or flaking. The city did not require that the

landlord remove lead from the entire building, because that was so expensive, many

owners would just abandon the property. In 1974, Bruce tried to explain this to public

health specialist Dr. Robert Karsh, who had served on the Ad-Hoc Committee for Lead

53 “Lead Paint Problems Are Stressed,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12 July 1973. 54 Larry Black and Sharon Hollander to Helen Bruce, 21 March 1974, Box 26, Folder Health Division Lead Paint, April 1973, Poelker Papers; Helen Bruce to Larry Black and Sharon Hollander, 8 April 1974, Box 26, Folder Health Division Lead Paint, April 1973, Poelker Papers.

Poisoning. “It would be ideal if we could require that all lead paint be removed from a dwelling. This, unfortunately, is simply not economically feasible, and would result in

eviction of tenants, and the boarding, or demolition of the dwelling, becoming the rule

rather than the exception.” The cost of deleading a dwelling was $2,000 to $4,000. If the

city forced the issue with landlords, they would just evict the tenants and abandon the

building, because the buildings were not worth the expenditure, Bruce argued. 55 Even with spot detoxification, about five percent of owners already abandoned their property because of lead paint problems, and that rate would skyrocket if the city enforced complete detoxification, lead poison control service director Gilbert Copley told the regional health planning board in 1975. “If required to detoxify, some owners would just abandon the building, leaving families to go to another lead infested structure,” Copley said. “The city is trying to reach a balance between making it safe but not so expensive owners will foreclose.” This balance, between housing and a leaded environment, was not something board members were willing to accept. “A tent city is better than having children live in leaded buildings,” one health board member commented.56

“The Canary in the Coal Mine”

St. Louis did not choose a tent city, however. Lead poisoning remained a significant problem. In 1975, the Centers for Disease Control lowered the threshold for lead poisoning from 40 to 30 micrograms per deciliter of blood. This new definition

55 Ibid; Helen Bruce to Robert Karsh, 4 December 1975, Folder 288, CEI Papers. 56 ARCH Environmental Health Planning Task Force, City of St. Louis 1 July 1975, Folder 288, CEI Papers. In the transcript of that meeting, the health board member is identified only as “Mr. Grist.” Michael A. Mendelson and Robert Eugene Quinn, The Feasibility of Lead Paint Removal in St. Louis Rental Housing (Edwardsville: Center for Urban and Environmental Research and Services, southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 1978) 13,30-31. Although Copley estimated that five percent of properties were abandoned because of lead paint problems, that number is deceiving. As real estate values plummeted, abandoned property was becoming a huge problem in St. Louis. Lead paint problems were often just the last straw for property owners, rather than the primary cause of abandonment.

caused a spike in the number of local poisoning cases. Larry Black called for emergency

funds to deal with the problem, accusing city officials of dealing with the problem by

ignoring it. “Now that health officials are agreeing with what we have been saying all

along -- that children suffer from lead at lower levels than those for which they were being treated health officials should go all out to solve this problem. The longer they wait, the more lives will be lost,” Black said. Two years later, the CDC ranked the

American cities with the highest rates of lead poisoning, and St. Louis was number one.

Both doctors and activists admitted that this dubious distinction was based largely on the city’s chosen method of lead control. “The approach to childhood lead poisoning in the city of St. Louis and nationally is a classic case of ‘closing the barn door after the horse has run out,’” an editorial by the St. Louis University Department of Community

Medicine commented.57

This approach came to be known in the public health field as secondary

prevention, where children were not treated and homes not abated until lead poisoning

was diagnosed. Officials, parents and activists knew the drawbacks. Barry Commoner likened it to “using children as the proverbial canary in the coal mine.” Primary prevention, removing all lead from a residence, was preferable, but as the threshold for lead poisoning lowered, and knowledge about the affliction increased, the cost of complete removal became onerous. Lead poisoning did not just come from hungry children eating flaking paint. Lead was in the dust and embedded in the walls. St. Louis made the choice for secondary prevention because primary prevention was so expensive.

Not only were private property laws paramount, allowing owners and landlords to engage

57 George Curry, “Seeking Funds For Lead Fight,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 June 1975; Department of Community Medicine, “Let Them Eat Paint,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, 17 October 1977.

in convoluted, and effective, ownership and lease agreements, when it came to ducking lead paint laws. But the city was loathe to use the full force of the law when enforcing the ordinance. Politicians knew that a commitment to delead all buildings without an

accompanying housing plan would deepen the city’s already severe housing crisis. With costs mounting, city officials and residents began to accept the leaded environment, and activism waned. In one year, the coalition lost two of its most important and

confrontational leaders. Ivory Perry retired from activism in 1973, and Robert

Knickmeyer moved to New York to take a job teaching social work. Larry Black

remained involved for a couple more years, but tolerance for activism within Great

Society programs dwindled over the course of the 1970s, and the goal of the Gateway

Centers became service delivery, not organizing the poor.58

With no tools available to fix the city’s myriad housing problems, politicians

instead chose to leave it up to the dysfunctional and poorly capitalized private market.

This meant that there would be no solution to the lead poisoning problem, only

management. In five years, lead poisoning became an endemic disease, instead of a

health emergency. With the city settling for management, not prevention, many residents

voted with their feet. During the 1970s and 1980s, St. Louis continued to lose population.

Not just whites were leaving, but African Americans as well. This only continued the

downward pressure on the housing market, and landlords and owners continued to

abandon buildings, and the city began to acquire its current landscape of boarded up

homes and empty lots, especially on the north side. But lead remained in the walls, and

lead poisoning remained a problem. Activists rediscovered the issue in the early 2000s.

58 “Get the Lead Out: Conference Report,” 22 May 1971, Box 42 Folder Lead Poisoning April 1970, Cervantes Papers. “Robert Knickmeyer,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3 September 1996; Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle; Warren, Brush With Death, 224-243.

Using the frame of environmental justice, they are once again trying to convince a

reluctant city administration that lead poisoning is an important issue.59

Childhood lead poisoning is still a major problem in American cities, and it is

only getting worse. When leaded gasoline was finally banned in the early 1980s,

epidemiologists noticed a sharp decrease in the blood lead levels of all Americans, and

further research showed that levels once thought to be tolerable were now poisonous for

children, and even minor exposure could cause long term mental and developmental

disorders in children under five years of age. But despite this revolution in understanding,

to both activists and the general public, lead poisoning remains a “childhood disease of

the slums.” Like their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s, environmental justice advocates use lead poisoning as a proxy for the lack of decent housing for many poor and working class, Americans, especially city residents and people of color. When analyzed from the standpoint of preventing lead poisoning, this class and race based critique is powerful, but it also has its limits. By focusing on the children of the poor and people of color, it

seeks to force collective guilt on society for neglecting the public health needs of a

vulnerable section of the population. But this construction has also limited the issues

appeal to a large swaths of the American population. Even though lead poisoning is a national problem, by still being a “childhood disease of the slums,” the majority of

suburban, white, middle-class Americans who don’t care about the slums can ignore it.

But analyzed from another angle, that of environmental politics and activism, lead poisoning was a powerful tool for activist residents in the 1960s and 1970s. It gave them

a chance to articulate and address the variety of problems associated with the decline of

59 George Lipsitz, “Ivory Perry and the Fight against Lead Poisoning in St. Louis,” Synthesis/Regeneration, 41, Fall 2006, 16-17.

the postwar city, especially housing. What happened to St. Louis in the early 1970s is a

microcosm of the process that would plague many older cities during this period. Before

World War Two, and for about a decade after the war, the American housing problem

was a lack of supply, especially for the poor and working class. This led to severe

crowding in cities, as flats were divided and subdivided to squeeze every last dollar out of

them. This shortage was eventually relieved with a suburban building boom that has

continued, unabated, since the late 1940s. The federal government subsidized much of this suburban growth, but support for affordable housing for the poor and those on the lower end of the working class paled in comparison.60 The only housing option for poor

Americans, especially African Americans and other poor racial and ethnic minorities,

became the city.

St. Louis was one of the first places where this process played out. By the 1970s,

the only affordable housing options for poor African Americans were on the north side of

the city. But there was little capital available for repairs and maintenance, much less new

construction. This led to the host of problems that residents encountered. Activists and

social workers used lead poisoning as a way to highlight the poor housing conditions that

residents were forced to face. Their main opposition was the city’s remaining property

owners and managers. But these were not the old slumlords of the overcrowded,

industrial metropolis. These were the new slumlords of the rapidly decentralizing,

postindustrial city. They were quick to abandon their properties, and those that held on to

them were loath to maintain them. What each home, two-flat and four-flat represented

then was a decaying piece of capital, similar to the abandoned factories and waste dumps

60 On federal subsidies for suburbanization see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

that would become the targets of environmental justice organizing twenty years later. On its own, each home or apartment was only hazardous to the few people living there. But in aggregate, the thousands of homes that made up places like the north side of St. Louis created just as large a danger, to just as large an amount of people as a brownfield or superfund site.

In St. Louis, at least, lead poisoning was not just a way to foment activism, but an adequate proxy for the variety of hazards and risks imposed on people by postwar urban abandonment that individually were small, but collectively enormous. By itself, an abandoned park, potholed street, vandalized building or a missed garbage pickup might not bother the average city dweller. But when all of them combined together, they sent a message to the African American residents that the rest of the city did not care about their neighborhood, and city leaders were content to let it fall into disrepair. When those poor conditions crept into the home – with rat and roach infestations, insufficient plumbing, plaster falling off the walls – many residents either voted with their feet, by moving, or worked with a social worker or legal aid attorney to have the landlord fix the problem.

For many in early 1970s St. Louis, the final push towards protest and activism was seeing their child, grandchild or friend’s child poisoned by lead paint. This reality, and the knowledge that all children were at risk to be poisoned or suffer a variety of unknown mental problems, was what fed lead poisoning activism in St. Louis and similar protests in cities across the country. To many black St. Louisans, lead paint poisoning was not a lone contagion that worked its way into an idyllic, healthy environment. It was a potent reminder of the broader injustice of being forced to live in some of the city’s most

neglected neighborhoods, and thus became the most useful part of their critique of the urban environment.

Finally, it is hard to underestimate the importance of Wilbur Thomas. As the bridge between the black community and the academic world of environmental science,

Thomas helped St. Louis’s lead poisoning activists attain expert knowledge. Through his work with Ivory Perry and other activists, but also through his column’s in Proud magazine, Thomas helped St. Louis’s African American population understand the language of environmental science. Many city residents knew, intuitively, that their neighborhoods were unhealthy. By explaining the dangers of lead paint and childhood lead poisoning, Thomas helped them translate that knowledge into a language and protest movement that allowed them to press the city for an improved lead testing and enforcement program. This is not to say that environmental activism that lacks expert knowledge has any less valid of a complaint about the inadequate dispersal of environmental hazards. It simply means that to successfully enact reforms, protest groups had to be able to work within a technocratic system that required systematic evidence that harm had been done before action could be taken.

Chapter Three

The Knee in the Groin Approach: The Citizen’s Action Program and Environmental Protest in Chicago

“What Kind of Priest Are You?” Hizzoner, the Mayor, barked at Len Dubi, before

leaving a 1972 press conference.

The issue that day was bonds to fund a new stadium for the Chicago Bears. But it

could have been tax assessments, an urban highway, or air pollution. And instead of

Mayor Richard Daley, it could have been an alderman, the county assessor, or a U.S.

Steel executive. No matter the issue, no matter the person in power, Len Dubi was bound

to get in someone’s face, and demand an answer, demand action, or simply demand

confrontation. This was not a priest to be messed with.1

Len Dubi was the associate pastor at St. Daniel the Prophet, a parish in Garfield

Ridge in Chicago’s southwest side, a blue collar neighborhood of Poles, Italians and other second-generation Roman Catholics. He was also the co-chairman and lead spokesperson for the Citizen’s Action Program, a city-wide protest group that was active

in Chicago during the early 1970s. CAP, as it was known, started in 1970 as the

Campaign Against Pollution, and, after a series of victories against some of the city’s

biggest polluters, expanded into a multi-issue organization that tried to address a variety

of concerns held by Chicago’s lower middle-class of the 1970s, including pollution,

transportation planning, education, consumer prices and high taxes. Saul Alinsky founded

CAP, and it adhered to his methods of community organizing. Early on, the group was

1 Louis Willi, “Father Dubi: A Man of Action,” Chicago Daily News, 2 May 1972, Box 1 Folder CAP, Citizen’s Action Program Records, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, Illinois (hereafter referred to as CAP CHM Records).

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successful, but a series of leadership struggles and structural flaws brought about its disintegration in 1976.

Dubi’s confrontation with Daley was legendary among CAP members. The

Chicago Tribune’s Don Casper captured it in an excellent photograph. Dubi, with wavy, parted hair and sideburns, in traditional collar and black suit, is yelling at Daley, who points back at him, finger straight out, warning the cleric not to mess with him, to question his authority. Reporters stand with microphones and cameras pointed at Daley, waiting for his famous temper to erupt. Usually taciturn, the mayor was known to lash out at those who dared to challenge him. This was especially true now, when he was at the peak of his powers, after having purged all opponents from his city. Here was this brash parish priest, challenging him, the Irish boy from Bridgeview, who went to Mass every morning.2 This photo captured everything that CAP was supposed to be about:

regular people speaking truth to power. In this case it was a parish priest, the son of a

steelworker, standing up to the most powerful mayor in the country, the kingmaker, the

Boss. CAP’s founder, Saul Alinsky, would have been proud of Dubi. In less than a year,

he had become Chicago’s most famous community leader, a walking advertisement for

the strength of Alinsky’s methods.

This chapter details the background and rise of CAP, discusses its early years

spent fighting pollution and its successful campaign to stop a city highway. CAP was a

large and diverse organization that attempted to address an array of issues during its short

lifetime. But its early years are worth studying in depth to understand how Alinsky’s

organizing methods could be applied to environmental issues. From the 1970s on,

Alinsky trained organizers worked with scores of local environmental groups, including

2 Derek Shearer, “Cap: New Breeze in the Windy City,” Ramparts, October 1973.

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some of the more famous environmental justice groups of the 1980s and 1990s. Any understanding of local environmental organizing has to include Alinsky.

The study of CAP also explains how a wide swath of Chicagoans became involved in CAP, especially blue collar ethnics from outlying neighborhoods, a population that has been relatively unexamined in histories on the postwar American city.

During the 1970s, CAP and environmental organizing were a key entry point into grassroots political mobilization for many in Chicago’s urban ethnic population, especially women. A general social and economic anxiety motivated this activism, but so did a desire to remain part of the city. Many, in fact, had no choice. The outlying neighborhoods they moved into were a big step up, and their middle-class affluence was somewhat precarious. The CAP story complicates the picture of urban ethnics in the

1970s. Their activism was not just a backlash against the perceived excesses of liberalism in the postwar city. In Chicago, it rested as much on older, working-class and Roman

Catholic definitions of neighborhood and community as it did in newer, middle-class identities of affluence and economic individualism. It also shows how blue collar ethnics, although they retained the economic options and privileges denied most African

Americans, still felt that the city remained their only housing and employment option. As such, they had to fight for its physical, as well as economic and social, improvement.

“A World of Hard Reality”3

Historians of twentieth-century social movements have tended to focus on labor organizing, the Civil Rights Movement or feminism. Each has their own organizing traditions that scholars have chronicled and explored extensively. But there are other,

3 Saul David Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago press, 1946), 142.

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important traditions that have fallen through the cracks. These need to be examined and

understood to create a thorough history of the environmental movement. Pointing out that

a certain group was concerned about environmental issues only goes so far. Different traditions appealed to certain groups, and how each organizes around environmental issues is instructive.

One of the most understudied organizing traditions in the United States, at least by historians, is the one pioneered by Saul Alinsky. In the 1930s, Alinsky was a young graduate student at the University of Chicago who wanted to become involved in community issues. He started working with people in the Back of the Yards, the neighborhood of working-class Eastern and Southern European immigrants directly behind the meatpacking plants on the city’s near southwest side. By the end of the 1930s,

Alinsky and community leaders organized the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council.

Many had thought that organizing such a group in Chicago was impossible. The city’s ethnic groups were notoriously antagonistic toward each other. Youths from one neighborhood did not wander into another for fear of a beating, or worse. All groups voted for the Democratic machine, but that support was rooted in the local ward bosses, who served as the primary bridge between the community and the city government.

Identity was centered on neighborhoods, and especially the local Roman Catholic or

Eastern Orthodox Church.4

Alinsky worked to bridge the gap between these communities by focusing on

existing institutions. Primarily churches, but also block clubs, fraternal organizations, and

4 Thomas J. Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

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union locals were the starting point for getting people involved. The neighborhood

council was a coalition rather than a membership organization. This gave people a

comfort level to get involved with a new organization, and gave that organization a firm base. The existing organizations, especially the church, provided leadership, financial

support and key infrastructure needs. This support was crucial in creating a strong and

long-lasting organization.

After his success in Back of the Yards, a variety of organizations recruited

Alinsky to organize communities in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1964, the Roman Catholic

church asked him to come to Rochester to organize the African American community in

the wake of a series of riots. This effort resulted in FIGHT, which stood for Freedom,

Independence, God, Honor, Today. It was in Rochester that Alinsky first began to face down corporations. Using shareholder proxies, FIGHT leaders were able to force

Eastman Kodak, the biggest employer in town, to hire and train more African Americans.

Back in Chicago, the Catholic church asked Alinsky to help with neighborhoods that were going through racial transition. He created the Organization for the Southwest

Community, a largely unsuccessful attempt to deal with racism in the white

neighborhoods that were openly hostile to housing integration.5 By the end of the 1960s,

Alinsky had built up a loyal cadre of experienced and dedicated community organizers

who believed in and followed his methods. With the support of Gordon Sherman, the

owner of Midas Mufflers and a contributor to environmental and anti-war causes, he set

5 Sanford D. Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky, His Life and Legacy (New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1989); Saul David Alinsky, Rules for Radicals; a Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971); Saul David Alinsky and Marion K. Sanders, The Professional Radical; Conversations with Saul Alinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Alexander Hawryluk, Friends of Fight: A Study of a Militant Civil Rights Organization (Ithaca: New York, 1967); Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals; Mark Edward Santow, “Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race in the Post- War City” (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 336.

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up the Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute, a school for community organizers.

The institute’s goal was to train organizers from across the country in Alinsky’s methods.

Alinsky was still the head of the IAF and its primary spokesman, but day-to-day operations fell to Edward Chambers and Richard Harmon, experienced organizers who had cut their teeth with Alinsky in the 1960s. Alinsky focused on writing and speaking, traveling the country to promote his methods, and raising money for the institute.6

At the institute, Harmon and Chambers taught the methods that Alinksy had honed over three decades of organizing. Alinsky liked to argue that he was non-partisan, but he had an important organizing ideology. Alinsky was a small “d” democrat. He believed in helping the powerless – workers, minorities, city dwellers – get power over their own lives from the powerful, primarily politicians, corporations and bureaucracies.

To do this, communities needed to organize in a very specific and deliberate manner. IAF

trained organizers would first do an intensive survey of the community, to find the

“centers of power” including churches, unions, and influential community members.

Next, organizers found out what issues concerned people. Ideally, these issues appealed

to a large number of people, but could actually be resolved. Results were extremely

important. Invariably, some community members were opposed to the new organization,

or hesitated before becoming involved. Success would quell opposition, convince the

fence-sitters and, most importantly, energize the true believers. If people gave time and

effort, they wanted to see results.7

6 David Emmons, Community Organizing and Urban Policy Saul Alinsky and Chicago’s Citizens Action Program (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1987). 7 Alinsky and Sanders, The Professional Radical; Conversations with Saul Alinsky; Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.

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This focus on finding the “centers of power” extended from Alinsky’s place based

organizing model. His first campaigns in the Back of the Yards, and later work all over

the country, centered on mobilizing the residents of a certain place, usually an urban

neighborhood or community that was relatively disadvantaged. Other organizing methods played on common identities gained in the workplace or as racial and ethnic minorities.

By focusing on place, organizers could more easily tap into existing local networks,

including block clubs, community organizations and church parishes. Alinsky would

push the limits of this method when trying to organize neighborhoods around the issue of

peaceful and moderate housing integration on the Chicago’s southwest side. As Mark

Santow has pointed out, using community identity as a source of pride only reinforced

the “racial geography” that lay behind residential segregation. But place-based organizing

was easily adaptable to local environmental movements, especially those that focused on

the increased pollution burdens leavened on a specific, disadvantaged community.8

The other key to the Alinsky method was confrontation. He believed that the

people should not be afraid to speak truth to power, for both strategic and tactical

reasons. In his 1946 book Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that by only confronting

power would success ever come. “Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society.

If one were to project the democratic way of life in a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.” And if they faced up to power and were successful, people would realize their own power, and be emboldened to take action in the future. “In actual life, conflict, like so many other things that happen to us, does not

8 Santow, “Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race in the Post-War City”, 336-46.

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concern itself too much with our own preferences of the moment any more than it does

with our judgement as to whether or not it is time to fight.”9

The grant from Sherman allowed the IAF to train a variety of organizers from across the country. Tuition was steep, but organizations sponsored most people, and the scholarships and tuition reductions were plentiful. One of Alinsky’s broader goals in creating the IAF was to organize the American middle-class. “Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle-class. That is where the power is … Large parts of the middle-class, the ‘silent majority,’ must be

activated; action and articulation are one, as are silence and surrender.” Only by

harnessing the power and influence of a broader group could the disadvantaged attain any

real power. “The only potential allies for America’s poor would be in various organized

sectors of the middle-class.” Alinsky sensed the anxiety of America’s middle-class,

especially the lower middle-class, and believed they were ripe for organizing. “To reject

them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear … If we don’t win

them Wallace or Spiro T. Nixon will.” 10 In Chicago, during the 1970s, he would test out

these theories, using IAF trainees to create the first, city-wide citizen movement. The

spark for this movement would a temperature inversion, which blanketed Chicago for a

week in November 1969. For Alinsky, air pollution was an issue to help organize people.

But air pollution had been important to Chicagoans for years, and a number of groups organized during the 1960s to mitigate its effects.

9 Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals. 10 Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 184-88.

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Thick Enough to Chew

Like many American cities, Chicago had always been dirty and smoky, and

reform efforts began during the Progressive era. But air pollution worsened after World

War Two. In 1953, the city experienced a major temperature inversion, when a layer of

hot air trapped a layer of cold, smoky air over the city. Prevailing winds usually pushed

Chicago’s polluted air to the northeast or southwest. But when winds were calm, all the polluted local air, from cars, trucks, factories, and coal-fired home heating, would hang over the city like a pall, for days at a time. After the 1953 inversion, engineers and city officials developed an air pollution ordinance that mandated improved technology for local factories and home heating systems. Reformers considered the ordinance a big step forward, but Chicago remained a dirty city, consistently ranking second behind New

York for the foulest air in the country. By the 1960s, pressure began to build for improved pollution controls, and new citizen groups formed. The first postwar air pollution group in Chicago was the Clean Air Committee for Hyde Park and Kenwood.

One of its organizers and primary spokesperson was Laura Fermi, widow of renowned physicist Enrico Fermi. Comprised of women associated with the University of Chicago, the Hyde Park committee had more in common with earlier air pollution groups than later environmental organizations. According to Fermi, “we got started in our cleanup campaign because we saw pollution as a nuisance, something depressing to the housewife. At first, we saw it as dirt, not as a health hazard.”11 The women monitored

local factories and reported polluters to city authorities. They also pressured the

11 Gary Cummings, “Female Warriors Led First Pollution Battles,” Chicago Today, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Muncipal Reference Collection, Chicago Public Library, Chicago, Illinois (Hereafter referred to as Chicago MRC).

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University of Chicago to switch all of its physical plant from coal to natural gas. Their efforts are similar to other reformers from the Progressive era, who would stand on rooftops with pollution guides, comparing the speckled pictures to the current state of air pollution. “Chimney watching … is similar to bird watching, but where the bird watcher uses binoculars, the smoke watcher uses a smoke (miniature Ringelmann) chart to indicate the degrees of blackness,” said the Chicago Sun-Times about the Hyde Park

Group.

The other group that was fighting air pollution in the late 1960s was the

Businessmen for the Public Interest, which was also sponsored by Gordon Sherman, and which assisted CAP in its early air pollution campaigns. Sherman, who was drawn to liberal causes starting during the late 1960s, funded BPI as an advocacy group in the mold of Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group. Much of its work was done by recent law school graduates interested in civil rights, poverty issues, and now, the environment. In 1969, BPI began to push the city to enforce its air pollution ordinances.

But they tended to focus on legal matters, testifying at hearings and putting pressure on regulatory agencies.12

CAP built on the work of these earlier groups, but also pushed Chicago’s politicians and regulators harder than other groups had previously done. The Hyde Park group followed traditional, middle-class tactics of moral suasion, intellectual convincing and firm, but ultimately ineffective, pressure on aldermen and other local officials. Laura

Fermi talked about how she lobbyed University of Chicago trustees at cocktail parties.

The BPI adopted the relatively new technique of lawsuits and other forms of legal

12 James Agnew, “Pollution: In a Few Years, It May Not Matter,” Chicagoland, December 1969. Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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recourse. Their first spokesmen, James Karaganis, was a young, idealistic lawyer who

saw environmental work as a way to “pick his own white hat” and “practice my legal skills and perhaps have fun at the same time.” His moderate style clashed with the hard earned, street level organizational experience of Ed Chambers and Richard Harmon.

“Karaganis has the organizational sense of a helium balloon. He is messing up the

works,” they told Alinsky in a 1969 memo. “We should ignore him because pollution is a

serious issue worth organizing around; it is not a concert hall to provide an audience for a

harmless, pretty legaldonna.”13 Although Karaganis irked seasoned organizers like

Chambers and Harmon, the BPI did succeed in priming the pump for CAP’s founding.

By the end of the 1960s, stories about air pollution became common in local newspapers,

and many of them focused on the work of middle-class groups and activists like Fermi

and Karaganis. This helped make environmental activism respectable, especially

compared to the long-haired radicals and militant blacks that had sparked the “Battle of

Chicago” at the 1968 Democratic Convention.

The next organizing opportunity was an environmental catastrophe that would

help crystallize the need for activism and reform. This came in November 1969, with a smog inducing temperature inversion that lasted almost a week. Dubbed the “super smog” by the local papers, a “blue-gray soup of smoke, grit and fog” settled on the city like a blanket on Thursday, Nov. 6, and sat there for six days. Light winds only moved the smog to different parts of the city, and it took a cold front to clear out the thick soup

13 Active opposition to housing integration in Chicago is well chronicled. See Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); Arnold R. Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953-1966,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995).

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of moist dirt on Tuesday, Nov. 11. For six days flights were delayed at O’Hare and

Midway airports, hospitals saw a spike of elderly and infant patients with breathing

problems, and children were kept indoors during recess. The smog was so thick that the

city’s airborne pollution monitor, a helicopter, reported that it was almost impossible to

see which smokestacks were not following pollution regulations. By the third day of the

city’s “environmental war,” as a commentator later dubbed it, Commonwealth Edison

(ComEd) became the primary target of citizen scorn. 14 The electrical utility’s coal-fired

power plants, which dotted the western and southern parts of the city, produced two

thirds of Chicago’s sulfur dioxide, which observers and reporters considered the main

culprit of the inversion emergency. In response to city requests, ComEd switched as

much production as possible to natural gas, shut down the remaining coal generators, and

ran downstate plants at full capacity to supply the city. This reduced dioxide readings

during the last few days of the inversion to .2 and .3 parts per million. They had been as

high as .8 parts per million on Nov. 7, the second day of the crisis.15

During the inversion, Alinsky ran into Chicago Daily News columnist Mike

Royko at O’Hare airport. The famous columnist asked the famous organizer if he was

going to do anything about air pollution. Use your soapbox first, Alinsky told Royko, and

we’ll see the response. Royko wrote two columns, on Nov. 11 and 12, taking the city

government to task for not enforcing pollution regulations, and telling the people that

14 William O’Shea, “Six Days That Shook Chicago,” Chicago Sun Times, 12 April 1970, Folder Air Pollution Box Chicago, Chicago MRC. 15 Ibid.; Les Hausner, “More Smog! But Fresh Air Is Coming,” Chicago Daily News, 11 November 1969; Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Harian Draeger, “5th Smoggy Day Likely -- (Cough),” Chicago Daily News, 10 November 1969; Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Milt Hansen, “Super Smog Hangs over Chicago a Fifth Day,” Chicago Today, 10 November 1969, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC. On environmental catastrophes as media events that spark activism, see Robert Olney Easton, Black Tide: The Santa Barbara Oil Spill and Its Consequences (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972).

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they have only themselves to blame. “City hall has been getting away with selling out the people’s right to clean air because it has been arrogantly confident that the people, as they choke, cough and suffer from dizziness, are not going to do anything about it,” Royko wrote. “Until there is a citywide, or countywide, citizen’s anti-pollution organization applying mass political pressure, judging politicians, bullying them, helping throw the do-nothings out of office, they will keep selling the people out.” The pressure didn’t cease the next day. “The reason the air is a floating garbage pit, and the people have been sold out to big interests, is that the politicians have assumed the people would not strike back. What we desperately need is a powerful lobby for the people’s right to breathe clean air.” As part of his efforts to spark interest in a city-wide environmental organization, Royko included a coupon in the column for his readers to send to their alderman and the mayor, asking them to enforce air pollution regulations. And he received more than 300 letters agreeing with the argument that a new organization was needed.16

These letters would become the seed for CAP. IAF staff and trainees had actually been trying to organize around environmental issues for much of the year. Under the guise of an organization called the Society Against Violence to the Environment, they worked in the affluent North Shore suburbs to drum up opposition to the Zion Nuclear

Power plant, planned for the shores of Lake Michigan. But local residents were not interested, and SAVE never got off the ground. The inversion crisis represented a new opportunity, so Royko handed the letters over to the IAF organizers. They contacted

16 Shearer, “Cap: New Breeze in the Windy City.”; Mike Royko, “Tell Alderman to Cleanse the Air,” Chicago Daily News, 12 November 1969, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Mike Royko, “Let’s Combat Pollution Now,” Chicago Daily News, 11 November 1969; Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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thirty of the writers and asked if they would be interested in attending the Illinois

Commerce Commission meeting in December. The ICC was in charge of approving all utility rates, and Commonwealth Edison was requesting a hike. Karaganis and other pollution activists had already suggested that they were going to protest the hike, because

ComEd needed to start complying with pollution ordinances before it raised its rates. IAF organizers suggested that people who were concerned about air pollution attend the meeting to argue against the increase during the public comment period. More than 100 people showed up. In either a blatant attempt to thwart their attendance, or simply insensitivity to the idea of an open meeting, the ICC held the hearing on the nineteenth floor of a Chicago office building, and the elevator was broken. Once the protesters climbed the stairs, the ICC only let a few of them in to speak. IAF organizers realized that within the anger at the ICC were the seeds of an environmental organization.17

In CAP circles, this was the group’s origin story, and it has all the important elements of an Alinsky style organization. Concerned citizens are shut out from having their say in the decisions of a group that supposedly exists for the public benefit. United in their anger, they transfer this energy into the founding of a new and vibrant citizens group. But this story omits the behind the scenes work of IAF trainees to get people to the meeting, and organize them afterward. They were already in touch with Karaganis because of their mutual benefactor, Gordon Sherman, and recruited him to represent BPI at the ICC meeting. The IAF would be the primary force behind CAP for its first few months, until its strongest constituencies emerged and it identified leaders from existing

17 Shearer, “Cap: New Breeze in the Windy City.”

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organizations. This was the backbone of the Alinsky organizing philosophy. 18 Trained

organizers should remain in the background. Community members, not the paid

professionals, needed to be the spokespersons and leaders. IAF organizers followed this

blueprint in the early days of CAP, looking for institutions and existing organizations that

were interested in the pollution issue. CAP held its first meeting at St. James Episcopal

Church on the South side. St. James’s Pastor, John Penn, was chosen as the interim

chairman. This meeting signaled that CAP would be different from other pollution

organizations. Instead of putting out a moderate, buttoned down image, CAP emphasized

confrontation and bluster. The most memorable speaker at the meeting was Angela

Pieroni, a housewife who matched a wardrobe worthy of Michigan Avenue with the

mouth of a sailor. Impeccably clad in a fur coat and matching hat, she exhorted, “I’m

tired of listening to politicians talk about pollution. They’re nothing but a bunch of old windbags. I live in an area, on the southwest side, where even a maggot can’t breath.”19

CAP organized around existing air pollution groups like BPI and the Hyde Park-

Kenwood group, and created stand-alone CAP chapters, which were focused around different neighborhoods. These chapters would eventually become the heart and soul of

CAP. An IAF trainee would survey neighborhoods to identify issues and people who were interested in organizing. They would then organize around the issue that had the greatest chance of success, which is why CAP’s first target Commonwealth Edison.

ComEd was the target of much public anger about air pollution. Royko devoted a whole

18 Ed Harmon and Dick Chambers to Saul Alinsky, 18 December 1969, Box 39 Folder 611, Industrial Areas Foundation Papers, University of Illinois Chicago Department of Special Collection, Chicago, Illinois (Hereafter referred to as IAF Records). 19 Tom Fitzpatrick, “She Stacks up Evidence in Fight for Clean Air,” Chicago Sun-Times, 16 January 1970, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC. This description is based on a documentary about the early days of CAP, which featured Pieroni. See William J. Mahin and Dick W. Simpson, In Order to Change (Chicago, Ill: University of Illinois at Chicago, 1996).

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column to letters from readers about ComEd. “If candlelight was good enough for Abe

Lincoln, to hell with Chicago’s No. 1 air polluter,” Larry C. Rocks told Royko. “I’m

prepared to live months without electricity to preserve my lungs. I’d like to find others

like myself who would write nice letters to the Commonwealth people explaining that

their electricity is not wanted any more - specifically that it isn’t worth the price of a

cough drop.” In addition to being a target of public scorn, ComEd was also a highly

regulated, public utility that would be malleable under public pressure. Finally, activists

identified an easy solution to the pollution problem: eliminating the use of high sulfur

coal.20

During the 1960s, as Chicago tried to get a handle on its pollution problem, the

most identifiable culprit was the coal that factories and utilities burned for power, and people burned for home heating. This soft coal was cheap, effective and locally available in Illinois. It was also very dirty, with a high sulfur content that belched noxious plumes of smoke into the atmosphere. A 1965 city ordinance required that businesses begin to

switch to coal that was less than 1.5 percent sulfur. Bituminous coal had sulfur levels of

about 3.5 percent or more. This regulation required a shift from cheap, local coal to more

expensive coal mined in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In order to get their

support for the ordinance, the city gave large coal consumers, particularly ComEd and the

South side steel mills, a five-year exemption from the law to adopt new technology. In

the summer of 1969, Daley and the board of aldermen extended this exemption until

summer 1971. There were powerful forces behind ComEd’s use of low-sulfur coal. In

20 Bruce Ingersoll, “They Want a Share in the War against Pollution,” Chicago Sun-Times, 27 April 1970. Box 5 Folder 44, Citizens Action Program Records, University of Illinois Chicago Department of Special Collections, Chicago, Illinois (Hereafter referred to as UIC CAP); Mike Royko, “Air Pollution Gripes Mount,” Chicago Daily News, 7 July 1969, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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1937, the state passed a law requiring all public utilities to use coal mined in Illinois.

Thirty years later the law, passed to ensure local mining jobs during the Great

Depression, had become a public subsidy for the Illinois coal industry. The utility

purchase requirement gave them a built-in market, one they were afraid of losing if the state rescinded the law. Ninety-seven percent of Illinois coal was high-sulfur. With the clamor for cleaner air, the Illinois coal industry saw a shrinking market for their primary product. Pollution fighters in the BPI and now CAP had argued that hard coal was readily available in other states, and that the coal lobby was just afraid of competition. But coal producers had the ear of Daley and other public officials, telling them that there were not enough open mines to supply the city. The mayor agreed. After the November 1969 inversion, Daley said that a forced switch would shut down the city.21

This political protection made companies that used high sulfur coal an easy target

for activists. In the end of January, CAP announced its first campaign against ComEd,

Proxies for People. CAP members would be encouraged to purchase shares of stock in

the company, and then sign the proxies for those shares over to group leaders, who would

then push the utility to make changes at stockholder meetings. Alinsky pioneered this

strategy in Rochester. In order to put pressure on Kodak to hire more African Americans,

he enlisted the help of the city’s liberal middle-class. Although they were not willing to

put themselves on the front lines of protest, middle-class moderates and liberals were sympathetic to the cause, and would rather give away their proxy rights than be accused

21 Casey Bukro, “Edison Often Villain to Pollution Foes,” Chicago Tribune, 20 December 1969, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Casey Bukro, “Endless Battle Rages over Edison and Use of Low Sulfur Coal,” Chicago Tribune, 22 December 1969, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, Managing the Air Resource in Northeastern Illinois (Chicago: Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, 1967); Jay McMullen, “Shut- Off of ‘Dirty’ Coal Poses Threat to Chicago,” Chicago Daily News, 13 November 1969, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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of discrimination. This allowed FIGHT to put as much pressure as possible on Kodak.

Alinsky saw proxies as the only way to limit corporate control over people’s lives, and a viable way of harnessing the power of the growing middle-class. In Rules for Radicals, he wrote that “the objective of the proxies approach is … a mechanism providing for a blast off of middle-class organization -- beginning with the proxy, it will then begin to ignite other rockets on the whole political scene from local elections to the congress.”

IAF organizers believed CAP could use voting proxies to harness the power of a variety of constituencies, especially the city’s well-heeled upper middle-class and powerful universities and foundations.22

Proxies had the potential to exert real pressure on corporations, but for CAP’s

anti-pollution campaigns, they were just a tactic. They took the fight directly to

politicians and the board of directors of ComEd, a local company with deep roots in the

community. Real success came about because CAP was able to harness citizen concern

about pollution within a relatively short period of time. Proxies helped do this by giving

people a tangible feeling that they could stand up to larger local and national forces.

Eventual CAP officer Anne Alberts saved up her money for months, just to buy a share

of ComEd stock. “I saved my grocery money for a long time to buy a share and get into

that meeting. I’m a stockholder of record, and I’m going to get in,” she told a reporter for

the Chicago Sun-Times. Proxies might have appeared to be an evolutionary step for

Alinsky style organizing, but they just powered what really made CAP successful:

confrontational, local politics. In March and April 1970 CAP organized a series of

protests and meetings that energized its supporters, alienated its detractors, and

22 Alinsky, Rules for Radicals; a Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, 165-83; Emmons, Community Organizing and Urban Policy; Saul Alinsky and Chicago’s Citizens Action Program; “Campaign against Pollution,” South Town Observor 1 February 1970, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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thoroughly irritated Mayor Daley and the Board of Aldermen. But these events forced the

city to revise its air pollution ordinance. The tone was set in meetings with Aldermen

Frank Kuta and Paul Wigoda, who represented outlying areas with heavy CAP membership. Hundreds of CAP members showed up at each meeting to try and force each alderman to take a stand on low sulfur coal. When the aldermen refused, they were

harangued by men like John Jaugilas. “You’re giving us excuses, Mr. Kuta,” he said.

“We heard them give years ago. We want you to go to the mayor.” 23

To the aldermen and some observers, these meetings were nothing more than

publicity stunts. “I refuse to be intimidated by large, noisy crowds,” Wigoda told a

reporter for a community paper. “I was told … that about 10 people wanted to discuss air

pollution, but almost 100 persons showed up. This is an old trick. My office is open to

anyone wishing to talk reasonably about a problem. I have never ducked a meeting. But I

will not knuckle under to irresponsible demonstrations.” Setting up a meeting to discuss

pollution problems, and then making extravagant demands and walking out of the

meeting, did not accomplish anything. But to CAP leaders, that was the whole point.

Early on, IAF organizers identified a lot of support for CAP in outlying city

neighborhoods like Garfield Ridge, that often had more in common with inner-ring

suburbs, but were still part of the city, which meant that power was centered in the hands

of the aldermen. Daley’s Democratic machine was still very much in control, and these

neighborhoods were made up of people who had spent their entire lives voting Democrat,

23 Shearer, “Cap: New Breeze in the Windy City.”; Dick Harmon to Saul Alinsky, 5 May 1972, Box 129 Folder 1414, IAF Records; Dick Harmon, “Cap Daily Situation Report,” Box 41 Folder 624, IAF Records; “Wigoda Confonted on Pollution,” North Town, 1 April 1970, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Ingersoll, “They Want a Share in the War against Pollution”; James Tuohy, “Pollution Hit at Precinct Level,” Chicago Sun-Times, 20 March 1970, Box CAP Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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especially in local elections. To stand up to their alderman was to stand up to the

machine, the center of power in the neighborhood.24

CAP members began showing up at Commonwealth Edison’s headquarters,

proxies in hand, asking to speak to corporate leaders, but courteous underlings usually

headed them off. They were not as confrontational as the members of the Board of

Aldermen, who still saw Chicago politics as a non-violent street fight. The pressure

worked. In March 1970, ComEd decided that it could start burning coal that was less than

two percent sulfur sooner rather than later. Royko applauded the announcement, and gave

a lot of the credit to CAP. James Karaganis and the BPI took the legal approach, trying to

stop ComEd’s rate increase, Royko wrote, but “Alinsky took the knee in the groin

approach.” ComEd engaged in an expensive public relations campaign to explain its

position, but it didn’t work because “Chicagoans, besides reading, also breathe,” Royko

wrote.25

Despite this success, CAP kept pushing. They wanted sulfur and particulate emissions elminated by 1971, and a legal agreement on the management of thermal and radioactive pollution from ComEd’s Zion nuclear power plant, located on Lake

Michigan, just south of the Illinois-Wisconsin border. IAF organizers kept Zion on the table in order to keep affluent donors in the northern part of the county interested, even though ComEd probably would not give in on the issue. CAP leaders focused their attention on ComEd’s annual stockholders meeting in downtown Chicago. They planned to marshal all of their proxies, state their demands to the ComEd board, and hold a rally.

24 “Wigoda Confonted on Pollution.” 25 Mike Royko, “Edison Airs Its Conscience,” Chicago Daily News, 4 March 1970, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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When the April 27 meeting came, CAP successfully jammed the lobby and plaza

of the First National Bank in downtown Chicago with more than 600 people. The group

of raucous but well-behaved students, senior citizens and housewives joined author, radio

host and CAP sympathizer Studs Terkel in a sing-along, including a version of “We Shall

Overcome” with the lyrics “We shall breath clean air, someday.” One protestor, a young mother, commented that “All the mothers here with babies today want everybody to know we don’t want to breathe this s---!” One reporter observed that “the young people

had made it seem like a civil rights or antiwar rally; the middle aged like a union meeting,

and the old people like a golden agers outing. Nobody in the lobby made it seem like the

annual meeting of a big corporation.” The size of the building’s auditorium was small,

and so ComEd allowed less than a hundred CAP proxy holders to enter. Co-Chairman

Paul Booth and Leonard Dubi made the demands about pollution control, and then

reported to the crowd with rousing speeches. Edison had “forfeited their right to run the

company,” Booth said. “They don’t care about us. They don’t care about us. What are we

going to do now? What are we going to do now?,” Dubi asked the crowd rhetorically,

responding that their next goal would be to push tougher pollution laws through the board

of alderman.26

To Harmon and other CAP organizers the rally successfully portrayed CAP as a

reasonable but passionate organization. But Alinsky felt otherwise. The crowd in the

lobby should have rushed the meeting, he wrote in a memo, thus forcing the issue that as

stockholders they demanded a vote. Harmon disagreed. They would have been arrested,

he said “and arrests would have had two effects: a) take the focus off Edison and put it on

26 Joseph Reilly, “Light Brigade’s 600 Get a Charge,” Chicago Sun-Times, 28 April 1970, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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CAP, which is what Edison wants; b) break the organization. This is white middle-class,

and they have come a long way toward toughening, but still have a hell of a long way to

go; they are not ready for mass arrests.”27

Harmon sparred with Alinsky over tactics because their respective visions for

CAP clashed. Alinsky saw CAP as a laboratory to train organizers and work out his

current theories on community organization, but Harmon felt that CAP had the potential to become a real citywide movement. He envisioned an environmental organization that was different from the ones that were emerging across the United States in the early

1970s, he wrote in an internal IAF memo in August 1970. “Most conservationists believe that they have to prove the harm that the corporation is doing. The burden is on them.

That is because they tend to be liberals, they tend to be technicians in the area, or aspiring technicians.” Environmental issues could energize working-class people; they just had to be framed differently. “The … principle is not to talk about the effect on the environment as a whole, but to start by talking about health. It is a classic case of people being soft because of a general plight; that is the conservationists alone did not move CAP. What moved CAP … is working class people concerned about their health which boils down to dollars and cents, bread and butter.” As a professional organizer, Harmon was interested in the organizing potential of environmental activism. But after almost a year of working with both traditional environmental groups and successful campaigns with

CAP, he noticed an important class difference when it came to environmental issues. To middle-class liberals, environmentalism was an essentialist group of beliefs that often had to do with remote landscapes and complicated regulatory policies. But the working class of Chicago, those “who are closer to survival … who have not had the damaging effects

27 Dick Harmon to Saul Alinsky, 5 May 1972, Box 129 Folder 1414, IAF Records.

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of higher education,” were motivated by environmental problems that had to do with

health and safety. 28 Their environmentalism was immediate, and not intellectual. This

was the kind of environmental activism that CAP would engage in for the rest of its short

existence. Its members were not as interested in saving the planet as they were in saving

the neighborhood.29

“What Kind of Priest are You?”

Harmon was optimistic about CAP’s potential because a strong set of leaders had

emerged. Early on, IAF trained Jesuit Priest Jack Mack had served as CAP spokesperson

and titular leader. But Mack struggled with the twin demands of the priesthood and

organizing, and eventually drifted out of CAP. His final contribution was asking fellow

clergymen Leonard Dubi to join CAP. By the end of the year Dubi was CAP’s public

face and most dynamic leader.30

Raised on the South side, Dubi was the son of a steel worker and a practical nurse.

His father, Steve Dubi, a quality checker at U.S. Steel’s South Works, hated the mills.

The mind-numbing monotony, brutal working conditions, and oppressive management

drained him, and Dubi encouraged his two sons to get an education. “I told my sons, ‘If

you ever end up in that steel mill like me, I’m gonna hit you right over your head. Don’t

be foolish. Go get yourself a schooling. Stay out of the steel mill or you’ll wind up the

same way I did.’” As a teenager, Leonard Dubi worked as an usher at Comiskey Field,

28 Ibid. 29 Dick Harmon, “Notes on Ecological Organizing,” 1 August 1970, Box 41 Folder 624, IAF Records. 30 Dubi and his father were interviewed by Terkel. See Studs Terkel, Working; People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 552-63; Mary Leonard, “Father Dubi, People’s Advocate,” Chicago Today, 11 June 1972, Box 2 Folder, CHM CAP Flanagan Collection; Harmon, “Cap Daily Situation Report.”

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home of the Chicago White Sox. Some seminarians were also ushers, and they drew him

into the priesthood. He was trained at Mundelein, Chicago’s primary seminary, right after a new rector took over, and social issues such as poverty, war, peace and race were discussed. Dubi soaked it in. “I developed a liberal agenda as far as social action was concerned,” he said in a 1972 interview. After being trained in social work with Catholic

Charities, Dubi took his opinions about social and racial justice to his first posting, at St.

Andrews on the near northwest side. But he learned quickly that his parishioners did not want to hear his liberal views. He realized he needed to listen to people’s concerns in order to help them, which he did a year later, when he came to St. Daniel the Prophet, in

Garfield Ridge. By the middle of 1970, Dubi had helped build Garfield Ridge into one of

CAP’s strongest chapters, providing many of the citywide group’s leaders and most active members.31

Located on the outskirts of the city’s boundaries, Garfield Ridge was a unique

community. Annexed into the city at the dawn of the 1920s, it sat virtually empty for the next twenty years. Often considered part of the city’s bungalow belt, Garfield Ridge was

actually a step beyond the neighborhoods on the southwest side settled in the 1920s, but it

filled in rapidly in the late 1940s and 1950s. Part of this was natural expansion. Garfield

Ridge was one of the few undeveloped areas in the immediate postwar era, and a ripe

target for the housing boom. The other draw was jobs. The community sat at a nexus of

transportation connections, including Midway Airport, Chicago’s Belt Railway, and the

sanitary and ship canal. The city plan had left large plots in the area zoned for industrial use, and the Clearing Industrial District, the country’s first industrial park, had been built

31 Mary Leonard, “Father Dubi, People’s Advocate”; Willi, “Father Dubi: A Man of Action”; David Emmons, Community Organizing and Urban Policy: Saul Alinsky and Chicago’s Citizens Action Program.

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just to the south. A number of large manufacturing plants, including a Studebaker factory,

filled in this area during the 1940s and 1950s. Although its residential streets were suburban in character, with stone and brick, bungalow style homes, industry surrounded

Garfield Ridge on all sides. Although it did not contain the heavy industry of steel manufacturing and oil refining on the far South side, the southwest side was one of the city’s densest industrial regions by the 1960s.32

White Chicagoans settled Garfield Ridge, including many ethnic Poles and

Italians, who had moved out of urban neighborhoods on the west and south sides of the city. It was heavily Roman Catholic and contained five parishes by 1960. In 1970, roughly eight percent of the area’s 43,000 people were African American, almost all of

whom lived in Le Claire Courts, a low-rise housing project built in the 1950s. Of the entire adult population, less than a third had finished high school, and only less than two percent had college diplomas. Most men worked in manufacturing jobs, including many skilled craftsmen and foremen, but there were also many civil servants, especially police officers. About half of employed women held clerical positions, but almost twenty percent also worked in factories. The median family income was $12,450. This picture of

Garfield Ridge, taken largely from 1970 census data, shows a typical, white Chicago community. Its residents were mostly blue collar, second and third generation Americans, almost eighty percent of whom owned their own homes. They were ethnically southern and eastern European, and worshiped at a Catholic mass. For many, their home in

Garfield Ridge was the first home they owned. From this perspective, it is easy to see

32 Louis Wirth et al., Local Community Fact Book (Chicago, 1971).

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Garfield Ridge as a step up for many of its residents, their first tentative foothold on material success.33

When he first moved to St. Daniel the Prophet in Garfield Ridge, Father Dubi

considered his parishioners middle-class, and, he noted, “I put all middle-class people

into the same bag. I thought they were all affluent -- with two cars and a color TV -- all

racist and all superpatriots. They didn’t need me; they didn’t have any problems. And I

approached people that way,” he said. But upon further examination, they had “a superficial affluence … that only covered up their powerlessness, that old feeling that

‘You can’t fight city hall.’” He discovered their underlying anxiety about a variety of issues, including high taxes, poor schools, and dirty air. Surrounded by industry, Garfield

Ridge was one of the most polluted areas of the city. Only the Loop, with its high

percentage of automobile exhaust, and the South side, with its steel mills, were dirtier.

Although Dubi had stereotyped the middle-class, he found a community that was similar

to his own background. Although his parents owned their own home, they had lived in a

cold water flat until he was fourteen, and his mother had been working since he was

four.34

In an interview with Studs Terkel, Dubi’s father Steve said that “I’m ready for

retirement. But the home we live in isn’t paid for yet. The car I’m driving isn’t paid for

yet. Nothing to show for forty years of work.” Both spatially and socioeconomically, the

residents of Garfield Ridge occupied a similar middle ground. Their neighborhood was

one of the last in the city to be developed. Sitting on the edge of the city line, its streets

and homes are similar in character to the neighboring inner-ring suburbs of Cicero or

33 Ibid. 34 Leonard, “Father Dubi, People’s Advocate”; Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area Planning Commission., Managing the Air Resource in Northeastern Illinois.

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Berwyn. But although it has a suburban character, the homes of Garfield Ridge are not

large. They have more in common with the bungalows of neighborhoods closer to the

center of the city, like Chicago Lawn, than postwar suburban ranch homes in La Grange.

Dubi characterized the residents of Garfield Ridge as middle-class in the above quote, but also referred to them as middle-class and working-class, almost simultaneously, in another interview. According to their occupations and average income, many occupied the hazy line that separated the middle and working-class in the postwar period. Most appropriately, these were the people – civil servants, skilled laborers, foreman – who had benefited most from the postwar expansion of the middle-class. The economic boom and expansion of the housing market allowed many of them to attain the trappings of a stable,

middle-class existence, even if they only had a high school education. But the occupation

of this transitional space between working-class insecurity and middle-class stability led

to anxiety over a variety of issues. When Father Dubi formed a CAP chapter out of St.

Daniels, many Garfield Ridge residents were immediately enthusiastic. “That little

chapter down in Garfield Ridge, they’re really militant, and they love that guy Dubi,”

Paul Booth said. By going through the church, CAP offered residents a safe and respectable way to get involved in political activism, outside of the Daley machine.35

CAP’s organizers originally approached Dubi about becoming chairman because they needed to balance the image put out by Paul Booth, who rose quickly in CAP’s leadership after Jack Mack backed out. Booth had been a prominent leader in the

35 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 2003); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Daniel J. Prosser, “Chicago and the Bungalow Boom of the 1920s,” Chicago History 10, no. 2 (1981); Terkel, Working, 552- 563. Padraic Kenney argues that in Eastern Europe, environmental issues offered a safe entry point for normally conservative people to engage in activism against communist regimes during the 1980s. See Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution--Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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Students for Democratic Society, and was now an economist for the local branch of the

packinghouse union. These New Left credentials worried organizers. The Chicago

Tribune wrote a minor expose about his background in the SDS, which caused a

“moderate reaction” in Garfield Ridge. So the organizers approached Dubi, who had

already shown his willingness to be confrontational in a series of meetings. His presence

also confirmed the strength of the Garfield Ridge chapter. After the Commonwealth

Edison Campaign, they were able to put one of their concerns at the top of the agenda:

The Metropolitan Sanitary District’s Sewage Treatment Plant in Stickney, right across the

ship canal from Garfield Ridge.36

Constructed in the 1930s, the MSD’s Treatment Plant sat in Stickney, a small village that, like Cicero, Oak Park, and Berwyn, sat immediately to the west of Chicago, and was never annexed into the city. When the district built the Stickney plant, it was the largest of its kind in the world, able to process up to 1.2 billion gallons of raw sewage per

day. Once the water was filtered and treated, a thick sludge remained, which the plant

processed by speed-drying it with high-heat burners. The remains were then sold as

fertilizer to farmers across the state. Experts considered this an innovative and efficient

way to use wastewater. The problem was that the odor from the drying process was often

unbearable.37 The MSD had been under pressure for a number of years to remodel the

Stickney plant. The plant had originally been on the far edge of Chicago. But as the city filled in, and the suburbs exploded, the plant’s multiple forms of air pollution, including smoke from coal fires and grease and other odors from the sludge, burned the nostrils of area residents, becoming a target of early environmental activism. Robert Sherman, a

36 Dick Harmon to Saul Alinsky, 30 March 1970, Box 104 Folder 1196, IAF Records. 37 Thomas Powers, “Plant Keeps Residents Gasping,” Chicago Tribune, 28 May 1967, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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Chicago police officer and resident of Clearing, the neighborhood just to the south of

Garfield Ridge, lobbied for improvements to the Stickney plant starting in the early

1960s. The MSD agreed to switch from coal to gas fired sludge driers in 1966, but the conversion process took a number of years. In the mean time, the plant’s position right next to the Adlai Stevenson Expressway, the Chicago highway that brought people from the southern and western suburbs to downtown, made it a frequent target of pollution concerns. When the wind was right, smoke from the plant’s four stacks altered traffic on the expressway, Chicago Tribune article noted. Workers commuting out to the Argonne

National Laboratory had to smell the plant twice a day, physicist and laboratory director

Albert Crewe said in a 1967 press conference on air pollution. The plant was one of the biggest polluters in the city, he said. “Have you even seen the smoke pouring from the stacks in the sludge-drying ovens?”38

Since in was in Stickney, the plant was outside the jurisdiction of city pollution

ordinances, but Chicago officials were able to place pressure on the MSD because many

of its other facilities were located within city limits. This helped them force the district to

convert from coal to gas, and reduce the odor from the sludge drying machines, which was actually caused by aerated grease. The driers burned off a large percentage of the

accumulated sludge. Although the MSD was exploring ways to eliminate the grease,

including afterburners and other “scrubbing” technology, the current method just

transferred pollutants from one medium, the water, to another, the air, as Crewe pointed

out. District officials claimed that the afterburner technology would reduce the plant’s

38 Richard Lewis, “Sanitary District Pollutes Air, Argonne’s Director Charges,” Chicago Sun-Times, 1967. Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Powers, “Plant Keeps Residents Gasping”;

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airborne pollutants to water vapor and carbon dioxide, but they were expensive, costing

$1.3 million a year to run, and would take a number of years to install.39

The combination of a noxious problem with a viable, technological solution,

limited only by bureaucratic intransigence and hesitation, made the Stickney plant a

perfect target for CAP’s next campaign. In August 1970 Dubi and a group of women

from Garfield Ridge went to meet with MSD officials about the odor problem. To

highlight their concerns to the press, they carried a giant Ex-Lax box with the slogan “To

Help the Sewer District Move its Load” written on it. The prop never made it into the papers, probably because of its crude nature. But the MSD campaign suffered from a lack of coverage early on because it appeared to be driven by local concerns, specifically in

Garfield Ridge and the southwest side. The campaign against ComEd was successful

because ComEd’s use of low sulfur coal caused citywide problems. So CAP staffers

looked for a larger hook. They found it in the district’s sewage outflow procedures.

During periods of heavy rain, when the MSD’s system was overwhelmed, engineers were

forced to dump raw sewage into Lake Michigan. The Sanitary and Ship Canal had, of

course, been constructed to prevent this, channeling sewage first to downstate

communities and then to the Stickney plant. Previous MSD director Vincent Bacon had

outlined a ten year, $380 million capital improvement plan to correct the outflow

problem, but the district lacked the authority to fund the project. Pressure from CAP

39 Dick Kirschten, “Soft Coal, Cars Chief Air Pollutants,” Chicago Sun-Times, 22 October 1967, Box Air Pollution Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC. Andrew Hurley discusses a similar phenomenon in postwar Gary, Indiana, where shifting disposal technologies shift the pollution burden to different populations. Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945- 1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

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forced the state legislature to give the district the ability to sell bonds for the project, as well as to improve the sludge disposal technology.40

In six months, CAP had engaged in two successful campaigns that significantly

reduced the amount of pollution in the Chicago area. But these victories were based in

part on the nature of the target, as much as the campaign’s structure. Both ComEd and the

MSD were publicly regulated utilities, subject to direct and indirect pressure from the city

and state government. They also had millions of customers in the Chicago area, and their

plants were in local neighborhoods. Many Garfield Ridge CAP members were practically

neighbors to ComEd’s Ridgeland plant and the MSD’s Stickney Plant. These were local

entities, vulnerable to local pressure. In choosing its next target, CAP focused on a

company that was not as susceptible to local activism.

In addition to coal fired power plants, the biggest source of sulfer dioxide and

other pollutants in the Chicago area were the steel mills on the South side of the city. In

1970, the city contained four integrated steel complexes. Across the state line, in Indiana,

was U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, the largest plant of its kind in the world, a major oil

refinery, and numerous ancillary and complementary plants. At its peak in the late 1960s,

the Calumet region was the most productive steelmaking area in the country. It was also

one of the most polluted. The steel mills dumped millions of tons of pollutants into the air

and water every day. When Chicago passed its air pollution ordinance in 1966, the city

gave all of the steel producers a five-year exemption from the regulations, ostensibly to

allow them to upgrade technologies and install pollution abatement equipment. By 1971,

both Republic and Wisconsin had made some progress in reducing pollution, but U.S.

40 Emmons, Community Organizing and Urban Policy Saul Alinsky and Chicago’s Citizens Action Program; Dick Harmon to Ed Chambers, 13 August 1970, Box 41 Folder 624, IAF Records. For Gary see Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980.

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Steel almost none at all. Its South Works plant became the target of CAP’s next anti- pollution campaign. This campaign marked a turning point for CAP, pointing out the limits of its anti-pollution organizing model, but also showing where the group’s natural constituency lay.41

Like the Stickney effort, pressure for CAP’s U.S. Steel campaign came from a local chapter, specifically from the Roseland neighborhood on the far south side. CAP leaders saw it as an opportunity to broaden the group’s base beyond the North Shore and southwest side. But taking the fight directly to U.S. Steel proved trickier than taking it to the MSD or ComEd. Since they were exempt from city pollution laws, U.S. Steel officials argued they were not breaking the law. CAP had gotten a lot of traction in the

MSD and ComEd fights with state regulating boards and image conscious elected officials that worked outside of the Daley machine. But the city pollution boards, like all of city government, were more patronage goody baskets, easy sinecures for machine loyalists, than impartial regulatory enforcers. They had no desire, and little power, to force giants like U.S. Steel to follow city pollution ordinances. Besides, U.S. Steel and its ilk provided too many jobs, and too much tax revenue to be messed with, city officials argued. They deserved to get the benefit of the doubt when it came to pollution abatement plans.42

This last point, about tax revenue, peaked the interest of CAP researchers, who looked into the assessed value of the South Works and other south side steel mills. What they found was that the assessor’s office, run by P.J. “Parky” Cullerton, a long time

41 James Spencer Cannon and Council on Economic Priorities., Environmental Steel; Pollution in the Iron and Steel Industry (New York: Council on Economic Priorities, 1973);Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area Planning Commission., Managing the Air Resource in Northeastern Illinois. 42 Paul Booth and Edward Greer, “Pollution and Community Organizing in Two Cities,” Social Policy, July/August 1973.

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friend of the mayor’s, had underassessed the plant, and the city was losing millions of dollar’s a year in revenue from the lack of taxes collected from these industrial complexes. Assessment interested a wider swath of Chicagoans, and CAP immediately jumped on the issue, and found a number of other large, underassessed properties, including other factories and two local horse racing tracks.43

Working Class Reformers

The serendipitous success of this issue forced a self-examination among CAP leaders. They realized that air pollution was not a broad enough issue to build a constituency for a real, citywide organization. After a 1971 leadership retreat, the group renamed itself the Citizen’s Action Program, with the goal of organizing around a variety of issues affecting Chicagoans. The success of the assessment issue was partially the reason for this shift, but also the general failure of the U.S. Steel campaign. There was no lack of concern among south side residents concerning pollution. In 1969, Ann Karwatka organized her neighbors into the Memorial Park Improvement Association, to stop the pollution from a neighboring asphalt plant. Her work received a large amount of publicity, especially after the November 1969 inversion episode. Karwatka and her neighbors picketed American Asphalt and Paving, arguing that its sulfur smell was a nuisance. The city agreed, but the solution “created a perfumed stench that was just sickening,” Karwatka said. Her other neighbors got involved because their children got lead poisoning from the air.

43 Emmons, Community Organizing and Urban Policy Saul Alinsky and Chicago’s Citizens Action Program.

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But CAP was unable to harness the activism from these local women. In focusing on U.S. Steel it chose the biggest target in the area. The goal was to make U.S. Steel give

concessions on pollution levels, giving CAP a big victory. It was not to improve the

overall environment of the far south side. This, in itself, was a daunting task. The sheer

number of factories and industrial facilities meant that the health problems of local people could not be attributed to any one source, any one pollutant. Many in the environmental justice movement would face this conundrum a generation later. Despite the street level knowledge that living in a certain place is unhealthy, it is hard to prove where that environmental injustice is coming from. CAP, partially based on IAF principles, and partially based on short-term tactics, decided to bypass the real fight, and

focus on one polluter. Not just one company, but the one person who stood for that

company. The goal was to personalize the conflict, but it was only partially successful.

The person they chose was Edward Logelin, a U.S. Steel Vice President who was

nominated for a national leadership position in the Presbyterian Church. The church’s

national platform included a plank that members speak out against pollution in their own

communities. CAP went to the Presbyterian Convention in Rochester and campaigned against Logelin, arguing that his position at U.S. Steel, and intransigence about pollution

issues at the South Works, did not make him a good Presbyterian. Logelin lost the

leadership position, but Presbyterians said he would have lost even without the CAP

protest.44

By focusing on one polluter in the Calumet region, and not the area’s general environmental problems, CAP failed to establish a strong constituency in that region. As

44 Ed Chambers and Dick Harmon to Saul Alinsky, 23 March 1971, Box 129 Folder 1413, IAF Records; Shearer, “Cap: New Breeze in the Windy City.”

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it reorganized, it fell back on neighborhoods on the southwest and northwest side, looking for concerns among those residents that might lead to a successful campaign.

There was some concern about school quality and tax issues, especially after assessment scandal. But nothing took off until CAP started organizing around the Crosstown

Expressway. The Crosstown was conceived as an important addition to the city’s already overburdened freeway system. In the late 1950s, Daley had quickly built a series of expressways radiating out from the center of the city. These provided suburbanites access to downtown, and workers access to the suburbs. But there was soon a demand for a more industrially oriented expressway. Many of Chicago’s light industries were spread in a circle that surrounded the western and southern corners of the city, following the right-of- way for the Belt Line Railroad. But as manufacturers started using truck freight more than railroads, Chicago’s streets became clogged with traffic as heavy vehicles struggled to get from tight urban roads to the city’s radial expressways. The Crosstown route roughly paralleled the railroad right-of-way from the northwest part of the city, south to

Midway airport, and then to the east, intersecting with the Stevenson expressway.

Although much of this route would go through industrial and commercial property, 3.500 homes would still have to be condemned, displacing approximately 10,000 people. In anticipation of this, and knowing that these middle-class, ethnic homeowners were more of a threat to the Daley machine than the poor and minorities that had been displaced for earlier projects, the city embarked on a comprehensive planning project to try and blunt citizen opposition. This project, directed by a consortium of planners, architects and engineers called Crosstown Associates, conceived of a multi-lane, sunken highway, which would be adorned with landscaping and other design elements, and would include

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schools, housing and commercial developments. Planners, local residents and national

observers lauded the plan for the Crosstown, and the firm hand of the Daley

administration made sure that the plan was completed efficiently, with little actual citizen

participation.45

This made Chicago the envy of the cities that were trying to build new highways.

“The City That Works” had done it once again, ramming through a successful

development project where others had failed. But the plaudits were short-lived. By 1971,

rumors circulated that the development aspects of the road had been quietly dropped,

leaving an eight-lane, limited access freeway cut right through the heart of the city.

Forced to sacrifice their homes and communities for another improvement project, the

residents of the city’s outer neighborhoods, already disaffected with the Daley machine,

staged a short and spirited revolt, which CAP took advantage of to organize new and

vibrant chapters, especially in the city’s northwestern neighborhoods. CAP eventually

formed a Crosstown Coalition that drew on the strength of the opposition to the road.

Like the pollution issue, the road succeeded in mobilizing those who were previously considered “unorganized,” and presented, for a short period, the possibility of a viable political alternative to the Daley machine.

Like the air pollution fights, the success of the Crosstown campaign hinged on two issues: Citizen disaffection and environmental degradation. These concerns were not mutually exclusive, but intertwining. Since World War Two, Chicago’s working and lower-middle-class whites, the factory foreman, small business owners and civil servants, had voted faithfully for the machine. But even though they were the primary beneficiaries

45 Don and Richard Rothstein Rose, “Working Class Reformers: The Cap Story,” Chicago Reader, 4 October 1974, Box CAP Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Studs Terkel, “Ya Gotta Fight City Hall,” 1973, Chicago Guide.

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of the postwar economic expansion, by the end of the 1960s, they were unsettled politically and socially. The war in Vietnam, and Civil Rights Movement and student activism in general have all been cited as causes for this rustling of “the silent majority.”

But what has been under explored is the anxiety in city politics. By the early 1970s, urban whites felt left out not only in the national political conversation, but in the local one as well. They worked hard and paid their property taxes and union dues, and in Chicago, dutifully voted for the machine. But the city did not pay attention to their needs. Streets weren’t paved and signs weren’t repaired. Houses and neighborhoods fell into disrepair, bringing down property values. Public schools didn’t get enough money, crime was increasing, and the city government appeared to be increasingly corrupt. In Chicago, much of this discontent found an outlet, as citizens rallied around opposition to the

Crosstown Expressway. Not only was the city neglecting their neighborhoods, but it was actively engaged in a plan to make them even worse.46

Much of the discussion about the activism of blue collar ethnics in the 1960s and

1970s has focused on their opposition to integration and defense of all white neighborhoods and schools. This has led to a “backlash” thesis that characterizes this activism as at best a reaction against the perceived violent tendencies of student and

African American activists, the increase of urban crime in the late 1960s, and the handouts to minorities and the poor that characterized the Great Society. At worst it is a staunch defense of racial privilege. But this picture is largely built upon a national narrative that developed during the 1970s, when the “Silent Majority” helped bring

Nixon into the White House. Local studies have also glossed over details in order to fit

46 Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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into a broader thesis of white ethnic activism being a race-based reaction against the

changing social and cultural geography of urban America.47

But a close examination of CAP complicates this picture. Starting with Garfield

Ridge, CAP’s organizers tapped into a strong vein of anxiety among Chicago’s white

ethnics who towed the line between the middle and working-class. With the Crosstown

Campaign this unease among Chicago’s Silent Majority found its fullest expression. The

city routed the expressway to go through a belt of homes on the West and northwest

sides, which roused a number of communities that were similar to Garfield Ridge in their

socioeconomic makeup: working-class, ethnic Catholics who had recently made the jump

to tenuous middle-class affluence. The Crosstown Campaign gave them an outlet for their

discontent, and led them to the type of activities they had previously scorned.

Watching student protestors during events like the 1968 Democratic Convention

used to drive Mike Stolarczyk crazy. He would turn the television off in disgust and go

out in his yards to pull weeds, he told a magazine writer in 1972. But he had started to

come around to their point of view. “Those kids, they we’re trying to tell us something, to

get a message across. The thing is, they could’ve done it a little differently,” Stolarczyk said. A floor man in the construction trades, Stolarczyk owned a two flat in the northwest side Belmont neighborhood with his father. Starting in the 1960s, high taxes and declining city services had started to alienate him from local politicians. The construction of the Crosstown spurred him and his neighbors to action. Through their church, they formed a neighborhood committee, which became part of CAP’s coalition. Denise

47 Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); John D. and Thomas Sugrue Skrentney, “The White Ethnic Strategy,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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Ponzetti told the Chicago Tribune a similar story. In the late 1960s, she and her family

had moved to Mayfair, a neighborhood on the northwest side, near the intersection of two highways. She became involved in CAP through the Mayfair Civic Association, which grew out of an adult discussion group at her Catholic parish, St. Edwards, when, according to the article “the participants decided that Christian duty extends beyond the sanctuary walls.” Mayfair’s early efforts included lobbying for stop signs on certain

streets, cleaning up local parks, and getting the city to commit to building a new

community center. After it was revealed that the Crosstown would tear through the

neighborhood, the civic association’s members took up that issue.48

Tribune reporter Robert Cross followed Ponzetti around one night in August,

1972, as she canvassed her neighborhood for signatures for a CAP petition, which included demands to stop the Crosstown, improve schools, lower property taxes and limit lakefront development. Ponzetti argued passionately for citizen involvement to counter the power of the Daley administration. “If we as citizens let it be known that we’re not going to be pushed around, we just might stop it [the Crosstown]” she told one neighbor.

Politicians expected people not to care “because then they can push you around. Just look at the way those Daley people crashed those meetings of McGovern delegates. The gall!

The arrogance! To burst on them like that. That’s what gets me.” Most of her neighbors

were supportive, but she ran into heated opposition at the local service station. The owner

was noncommittal, but two customers argued with her virulently. One was a city resident

and a Daley supporter. “I want it - I want the Crosstown. I want it because it will be the

greatest thing that ever happened to Chicago. All it’ll knock out are a bunch of slums,”

48 William Barry Furlong, “Profile of an Alienated Voter,” SR, 29 July 1972; Robert Cross, “Can Denise Ponzetti Block the Crosstown and Lower Our Taxes?” Chicago Tribune Magazine, 27 August 1972.

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the man said. “My house isn’t a slum,” Ponzetti countered. The man said that he lost his

house in suburban Lake Forest because the taxes were so high, so he moved back to

Chicago. “If you want my opinion, Mayor Daley has been the greatest man the city of

Chicago has ever known.” Another man, who still lived in the suburbs, refused to veil his racism. “I don’t mind that my taxes are high in the suburbs,” he said. “What gripes me is

that my taxes are going into this city. I want my money to stay in my district. Let the

niggers and the other people here support the city of Chicago.”49

Like pollution, the Crosstown Campaign offered Chicagoan’s like Ponzetti and

Stolarczyk an entry point into social and political activism. By tearing up their homes,

displacing them and their neighbors, encouraging trucks and other high polluting traffic,

the highway was a serious threat to the stability of their communities from the “new

exploiter class – politicians.”50 With this activism, they exhibited a sensibility that was a

hybrid of an older style of urban politics that focused on defense of neighborhoods, and a

newer style of activism that centered on low taxes and community autonomy. Take, for

example, Stolarczyk’s racial politics. Although he said that he would vote for George

Wallace, because he was against busing, working on the Crosstown has helped him see

the value of citywide, interracial coalitions. He spoke glowingly of his coalition work

with a middle-class African American woman from the south side, Ura Matthews, and acknowledged that blacks had a reason to be angry. “They had been fighting alone for years, because they thought we wouldn’t do anything – no matter how bad we got hurt – if the politicians could show us that the blacks got hurt worse,” Stolarczyk said. His ability to work with Matthews has much to do with class bias and the fact that, being

49 Cross, “Can Denise Ponzetti Block the Crosstown and Lower Our Taxes?” 50 Furlong, “Profile of an Alienated Voter.”

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from the South side, she posed no real threat to his white, northwest side community. But it also speaks to a hesitant, but real attempt at citywide identification that centered around environmental issues. Ponzetti is similar. Although she did not directly confront the men

at the gas station about their racist assumptions, she displayed a commitment to the city

that was in contrast to the one’s pro-Daley boosterism, and the other’s suburban

disconnection and outright hostility.51

The Crosstown Coalition had its biggest success early on, when it helped elect

Democratic candidate for governor, Daniel Walker. Walker, a lawyer and Montgomery

Ward executive, had been a liberal thorn in Daley’s side since the 1960s, when he

marched with Martin Luther King, and then directed the government report that called the

violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention a “police riot.” Interested in

running for governor in 1972, the Democratic machine balked when he asked for their

support. He ran as an outsider, promoting his candidacy with a publicity stunt. In 1971 he

walked across the state to show that he was a populist, reform candidate, and, in an effort

to take a chunk of Chicago voters from the machine, came out against the Crosstown. In

Spring of 1972 he defeated the Daley backed candidate Paul Simon in the Democratic primary. Despite CAP’s avowed position to not get involved in electoral politics, anti-

Crosstown fighters knew that their chance to stop the road rested with Walker. He received strong support in northwest and southwest precincts in both the primary and

51 On defense of neighborhoods, especially from housing and school integration, see Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953-1966.”; McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North. On suburban politics, see Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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general elections. Once in office, Walker made good on his pledge, blocking funding for

the Crosstown.52

Walker’s election, and the defeat of the Crosstown, represented the high water

mark for CAP. Never again would the group be able to harness enough power to make such a substantive change. Like the air pollution campaign, part of the success had to do with the issue. The Crosstown motivated a broad cross-section of Chicagoans. Those on

the West and southwest side that stood in the highway’s path were the most passionately opposed. But CAP was able to recruit new members from middle-class African American

groups on the South side that also stood in the path of the highway, and they received

strong support from anti-machine liberals on the North side, who were simply interested

in beating Daley. The highway was a local issue, controlled by local politicians. Although

highway opponents were forced to go beyond Daley, to the governor’s office, to stop

construction, the sources of power were still easily identified, and vulnerable to political

pressure. Future campaigns would not be so clear-cut.

The Crosstown fight identified new constituencies on the northwest side of town

that were interested in CAP-style activism, and it also identified new leaders. One of

these was Mary Lou Wolff, a housewife and mother of nine, who became involved in the

Crosstown fight through her civic association in Mayfair, a neighborhood on the

northwest side. In 1973, members elected her the next chairperson of CAP, replacing

Dubi and Booth. Her style was not as confrontational as these two men, but she

represented the core of the movement much more than these two firebrands. Newspaper

accounts portrayed Wolff as “silent housewife who” left the kitchen to fight city hall.

52 The town of Cicero and the Cities of Stickney and Lyons Board of Election Commissioners for the cities of Chicago and Berwyn, “Canvassing Sheet for Primary and General Election,” (1968-1980).

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“Mrs. Wolff is a small, soft-spoken woman, an inconspicuous grass-roots reformer if

there ever was one. She looks like a pixie but sounds much tougher,” one newspaper

profile said. Wolff played up this role, arguing that her position as a woman and a mother

was complimentary, not contradictory, to activism. “My motives and reasons for doing

what I do come from being a mother of nine children. I’m angry at the quality of life.

Unless we act, our children won’t have as much of a chance to be complete human

beings.” Mothers make perfect political activists, she said. “Women understand our

issues … And they have both the time and nerve for the job.” But Wolff’s traditional

veneer belied a more complicated past. Although she claimed “I’m not a college graduate

or a Women’s Libber. I’m not radical or even liberal,” during the 1950s, she had been involved the Young Christian Workers, a international Catholic Trade Union

organization. During the 1960s, she was part of discussion group in her parish on

experimental liturgy. She also admitted that she had always “gone her own way,” opting

for natural childbirth at home and breastfeeding instead child rearing methods that were

considered more mainstream.53

Although many within CAP considered Wolff an effective leader, under her stewardship some of CAP’s internal flaws became apparent. After the Crosstown

campaign CAP’s researchers began to focus on the lack of money flowing into urban

neighborhoods from lending institutions. Local savings and loans, built up with the

decades of deposits and mortgages from city residents, were now lending most of their

money to the suburbs, or to downtown high-rise projects. They did not see the city as a

53 Laura Green, “She’s Not Afraid to Ask Why,” Chicago Sun-Times, 2 April 1973, Box 2 Folder CAP, CHM CAP Papers. Cornelia Honchar, “Silent Housewife Leaves Kitchen to Fight City Hall,” Chicago Tribune, 5 November 1972, Box 3 Folder, CHM CAP Flanagan Collection; Don and Richard Rothstein Rose, “Working Class Reformers: The Cap Story.”

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good investment. Redlining, as this practice was called, had been rampant in African

American communities for generations. But now it was happening in predominantly

white, blue collar communities, and they were up in arms. There was little money

available for rehabilitation, much less for younger families to buy a house in the

neighborhood where they grew up. Money flowed easily into the suburbs and new

condominiums on the affluent North Shore, but not in the meat and potatoes communities

of the North and West side. CAP started a “greenlining” campaign that involved

boycotting banks and other institutions that did not lend in their home neighborhoods, and trying to get residents to put their deposits in banks that did. The campaign was marginally successful, leading to the adoption of community reinvestment legislation at

the state level.54

The Greenlining effort was part of CAP’s overall “Save the City, Save the

Neighborhoods” campaign, which focused on getting the city government and lending

institutions to reinvest in city neighborhoods, including schools, roads and other

infrastructure, and housing. This was not a new issue. Since the 1950s, groups on the

West and southwest sides had been campaigning at various levels for urban renewal dollars, better representation from city government and improved bank lending practices.

As Amanda Seligman has shown, many of these campaigns were tied to preventing racial turnover in neighborhoods. While not overtly racist, they were often focused on maintaining the status quo, versus citywide reform. African American groups and other critics accused CAP and Metropolitan Area Housing Alliance of racism in their

54 Jerry De Muth, “Accuse Loop Banks of Home Loan Lag,” Chicago Sun-Times, 5 February 1975, Box 6 Folder 45, UIC Special Collections CAP Records,David Moberg, “The Death of Cap,” Ramparts? October 1977, Box CAP Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC; Citizens Action Program, “Redlining -- Greenlining,” 1975, Box 6 Folder 46, UIC CAP Papers.

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neighborhood preservation efforts. Sociologist Pierre de Vies, an expert in regional

housing segregation, told the Chicago Defender that CAP and MAHA are promoting the

“thinly veiled racism of their constituency.” Their real aim was to increase redlining “and

thus preserve white communities.” CAP literature on the “Save the Neighborhoods”

campaign had no overtly racist sentiments or intentions. But the implications were always

that once a neighborhood did fall into disrepair, it was ripe for blockbusting and racial turnover.55

CAP leaders had no cover from these accusations. Despite paying lip service to

being a citywide, multiracial movement, they never included African Americans in any

campaign other than the effort to stop the highway. There was no outreach to black

groups, especially during the Save the Neighborhoods campaign, which, in some ways,

was tailor-made for interracial cooperation. But that would have involved a strategic and

ideological shift that CAP, and its leaders, were unable to make. Strategically, CAP

leaders were focused on winnable campaigns. Once they discovered who held the power

in any given confrontation, they focused on getting that power source – whether it be a

corporation, the mayor or the city government – to make concessions. With that victory,

organizers could motivate troops for the next fight. In this organizing strategy, complex

issues, where problems and solutions rested with a host of local and national persons and

institutions, were an anathema. Alinsky-style organizing was built for the quick strike,

not the hard slog. Leaders were taught to find the bogeyman, demonize him, and force

him to make changes. Whether it is the mayor, the Board of Aldermen, the utilities or big

corporations, there way always a bad guy.

55 “ Call Maha, Cap Racist,” Chicago Defender, 16 September 1976, Box CAP Folder Chicago, Chicago MRC.

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This style of organizing created worldview where the members of the group were never the bad guy. Looking in the mirror, understanding the complex set of metropolitan relationships that produce neighborhood decline, racial turnover, and segregation, is what

CAP, and groups like it, needed to do to be truly successful. The lower middle-class, blue collar neighborhoods of the southwest and northwest sides were relatively powerless in early 1970s Chicago. They felt left behind by the city administration and corporate

America. But, compared to most African Americans, they had a tremendous amount of power and privilege. Their employment choices were better, and even though the city was generally ignoring their neighborhoods, they had a variety of new housing choices available in the suburbs, where many ended up moving.

Despite a rhetoric that said CAP was a citywide organization, it was really only concerned with the problems of one constituency, and was not interested in formulating a citywide set of policies and reform initiatives. Much of this was because of the Alinsky organizing model was opposed to involvement in electoral politics. Alinsky believed that politics corrupts organizations, and they become part of the power structure. But as much as compromise had the possibility to dilute the effectiveness of an Alinsky organization, in the case of CAP, it would have forced the organization to expand its base, and form important coalitions. With the Crosstown campaign, a nascent reform coalition was visible: Disaffected, blue collar whites from the outer neighborhoods, liberals from the

North side, and middle-class African Americans from the South side. But instead of

building on this success, CAP went back to its base, focusing only on their concerns.

There was obviously a desire for change in Chicago’s neighborhoods. The level of involvement during the air pollution fight and the Crosstown campaign showed that. But

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instead of harnessing that energy into a real political insurgency, that had the possibility

of truly reaching across class and racial lines, CAP stuck to the Alinsky model, which

only limited its effectiveness, and its life cycle.

In 1975, CAP died a quick and painful death. Neighborhood groups had been making rumbles for some time that the group’s citywide leadership was not paying enough attention to their concerns. They raised money, they argued, but were not getting

any assistance for local campaigns. Then the main office restructured the entire citywide

staff. Local groups that had been getting staff assistance – a pain organizer working with

them on a full or part time basis – were left without any professional help. Since they were still raising money, they argued, they should get as much assistance as they were paying for. This led to a crisis among core CAP leaders and member groups that the organization did not survive. It limped along as a shell of its former self for a couple of years, but no longer was it the citywide behemoth that had stood up to Mayor Daley and the Chicago Machine.

###

During the 1970s, the Citizen’s Action Program offered Chicagoans a chance to voice their frustration with the policies and politics of the Democratic machine.

Environmental degradation provided the perfect entry point for their activism. Dirty skies and a planned highway represented their broader discontent with the policies of a city government for which they had been loyal supporters for years. This was one of the strength’s of Alinsky-style organizing. It was most successful when people had forged a common identity around a certain place. During the 1930s, it had worked in ethnic

neighborhoods in the Back of the Yards. In the 1970s, some of these traditional, religious

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connections existed. But shared environmental burdens also brought people together, especially when they had similar religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. Although the environmental injustice these Chicagoans experienced was nowhere near as severe as the

experience of African Americans in St. Louis and Baltimore, it was a different style of

environmental politics. These were not college-educated liberals who had a broader

concern for ecological issues. They were worried about the health of their families and

communities, and believed they were the specific victims of negligence and indifference.

The CAP story also reveals the diverse nature of urban ethnic politics. As Thomas

Sugrue and John Skrentney have recently pointed out, the “ethnic revival” of the early

1970s was not just a conservative backlash or nostalgia for a simpler time. Blue collar

politics contained progressive as well as reactionary strains. The most well known

progressive was Father Geno Baroni, who established the Urban Ethnic Center, a

Washington, D.C. based lobbying organization, and was appointed to lead the

Department of Housing and Urban Development’s neighborhood development office

during the Carter administration. But these progressive strains also existed at the

grassroots. Through their concern about the urban environment, CAP members showed

that they were still engaged with the city, and its attendant racial, economic and social

problems. Overall, this story shows that dissolution of the New Deal coalition in 1968 did

not automatically mean a conservative ascendancy. The 1970s were a contentious time in

America politics, especially at the local, urban level, and environmental activism is an

important frame for understanding the era.56

56 Skrentney and Sugrue, “The White Ethnic Strategy.”

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Chapter Four

We Must Destroy You to Save You: Baltimore’s Freeway Revolt

“The city is now so deeply involved with the road, regardless of what it will do to Baltimore, that any change in policy is intolerable to city officials. We cannot abandon our commitment to those whose homes and businesses will be taken, they say. The line of reasoning is familiar. ‘We must destroy you to save you.’ The urban expressway is our domestic Vietnam.”1

Leonard Ziegler was feeling frisky on August 9, 1969. Few public officials

escaped his verbal barbs, especially the federal bureaucrat who oversaw the exhumation

of dead bodies and the relocation of cemeteries. “Where is that pervert from the Federal

Government? Isn’t he here tonight, the gravedigger? He must be home contemplating his

necrophilia. That is a perverted and sadistic love affair with dead bodies,” Ziegler said.

Ziegler, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, was speaking at a public hearing on a

planned extension of Interstate 70 through the heart of west Baltimore. State officials

wanted to dig up an entire cemetery in order bypass Rosemont, a black residential

neighborhood. Saving Rosemont was supposed to be a good thing, but to Ziegler the

alternative, an incursion into the cemetery, was just as bad: Another abuse of federal

power by the Interstate Highway System. He was not alone in his anger. For two nights in

August 1969, more than sixty Baltimoreans took what was supposed to be a hearing

about one section of the road and used it to voice their frustration and anxiety about the

entire highway building process.2

1 James Dilts, “Changing City -- ‘We Must Destroy You To,’” Baltimore Sun, 4 August 1968. Box VIII-1 Folder Rosemont, University of Baltimore, Langsdale Library, Special Collections, Movement Against Destruction Papers (Hereafter referred to as MAD Papers). 2 Hearings on the Rosemont Bypass, 9 August 1969, Maryland Room, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland (Hereafter cited as Maryland Room).

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At the time, most saw the Rosemont hearings as just another act in Baltimore’s

“transportation Wagnerian opera,” as one city councilwoman called it, a chance for

residents to raise the pitchforks and wave their torches, blowing off some steam in their

frustration with city government. 3 Baltimoreans had been speaking out against official highway plans since the 1940s. As the business, science and politics of highway construction evolved during the postwar era, civic leaders and politicians presented plans for ever more elaborate and costly ribbons of concrete for the Charm City. But opposition remained occasional and parochial. Citizens and neighborhood groups would speak out only if a section of the road affected their business of community. This all changed in

1968 with the formation of the Movement Against Destruction. MAD, as it was known, was a city-wide coalition, that helped make opposition to the road not only more sophisticated, but more unified. Residents crossed racial, class and neighborhood boundaries to offer support to help stop the road. This urban solidarity was on full display at the Rosemont Hearings, as blacks cheered on whites and suburbanites rallied behind city dwellers. The cohesion was short lived, as shifting plans and compromises divided the coalition, and opposition was once again neighborhood-based by the middle of the

1970s. The hearings were the high-water mark for the Baltimore Freeway Revolt.

This chapter will focus on the rise and fall of that revolt, when MAD was at its most effective, and city, state and federal officials seemed most interested in community input. For a few years, it looked as if Baltimore could get a transportation system that benefited all of its citizens. This moment would not last, but it was an important

expression of environmental protest, and of an urban vision that came from the

3 James Dilts, “Court Gives Go-Ahed for Franklin Mulberry,” Baltimore Sun, 20 June 1973. Box VIII-1 Folder Franklin-Mulberry, MAD Papers.

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community, and not city hall, the planner’s office or the corporate boardroom. It was also

able to hold up the highway construction process until the early 1980s, when a lack of

funding and shifting priorities caused the city to scrap much of the urban highway

system. Although it did not save the city, Baltimore’s freeway revolt did stop the road.

This case study has much common with the other two, but it also deviates in three

significant ways. Baltimore experienced the urban crisis in a fundamentally different way

than Chicago or St. Louis. These two cities were attempting to make the transition to a

service economy, while Baltimore remained a steadfastly blue-collar town. This affected

how urban leaders envisioned the city, but it also meant that the city’s population was

relatively stable through the 1970s. Baltimore did not experience the wrenching

dislocations of deindustrialization until the 1980s. Secondly, and more importantly, the

Baltimore story is about attempts to physically remake the city, of active engagement by

state power and municipal leaders to reconstruct the urban landscape. Baltimore residents

were not fighting a policy of neglect, but intensive efforts to reconstruct the city that they

were attempting to reform to meet their own needs. Their urban, environmental vision

was born out of this conflict and conflicts over space. Finally, in Baltimore, residents

haltingly, fleetingly but somewhat successfully crossed class and, more importantly, racial boundaries, in order to work together. They were able to do this not because of a lack of racial conflict in the city, but in spite of it. The Baltimore freeway revolt is a powerful example of how environmental conflicts can forge common, space-based identities.

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A Completely Idiotic Undertaking4

In the 1940s, Baltimore’s business and political leaders contracted with master

builder Robert Moses to come up with a plan for a crosstown expressway. Published in

1944, the Moses plan was the first shot, the Fort Sumter, in the Baltimore Freeway

Revolt. Its two most important conclusions would be accepted by many of the city’s

leaders and highway planners until the late 1960s. First, it argued that Baltimore needed a

limited access, cross-town expressway to move traffic across the city. “The city car is an

intrusive and in many respects disquieting gadget. We shall nevertheless have to live with

it, get the most out of it and make it our servant. This cannot be brought about by mere

grudging accommodation of car users. The modern city artery must be built for every

man, woman and child on every conceivable errand.” Second, this road would have the

benefit of clearing out “blighted” areas in the African American west side. “Some of the

slum areas through which the Franklin Expressway passes are a disgrace to the

community and the more of them that are wiped out the healthier Baltimore will be in the

long run.” These features of the Moses plan – that Baltimore needed a Crosstown

expressway, and it should go through the black neighborhoods of the city to help “save”

the west side – would make it through thirty years of different planners, plans and

politicians.5

The response to the proposed Moses Expressway was harsh. More than 2,000

people appeared at a 1945 city council meeting to question the need for the road. The

road wouldd probably be built, Baltimore’s famous chronicler H.L. Mencken said,

because it had “everything in its favor, including the fact that it is a completely idiotic

4 James Dilts, “A Brief History of Baltimore’s Transportation Planning,” 1977. Box VII-1, Folder James Dilts, MAD Papers. 5 Robert Moses and W. Earle Andrews, Baltimore Arterial Report (New York City: 1944).

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undertaking.” More than fifty percent of the people displaced by the road would be

African American, even though they only made up about twenty percent of the city’s population. Many whites, like Herbert Brune, were concerned about the highway not out of sympathy for blacks, but self-interest. “19,000 people will be displaced with no

provision of where they are to go, 11,000 of them Negro citizens for whom housing is a

peculiar problem in Baltimore and who do not want, any more than white citizens want

them, to encroach on white neighborhoods,” Brune told city officials.6 The city

eventually decided to put off construction of the Moses Expressway. The cost to build it was onerous, $40 million, and city leaders were unsure what other projects Baltimore would need in the postwar period. By the early 1950s, the state of Maryland was planning for metropolitan Baltimore’s road needs, but these projects encouraged disinvestment from the city. Baltimore’s leaders were still eager for a true urban highway system, but they lacked funding.7

All of that changed with the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which created a

large federal trust fund for highway construction. As long the states built highways to

federal specifications, and connected them to the larger system, the federal government

would pick up ninety percent of the tab.8 This was the largest infrastructure fund in the

world, and every American city was eager to dip their hands into the jar. Many cities

immediately went about executing their existing plans, or wrote new ones with the

6 Dilts, “A Brief History of Baltimore’s Transportation Planning”; Herbert Brune, “The True Facts About the Moses Expressway.” (Baltimore: Joint Meeting of the Baltimore City Council and the Baltimore Legislative Delegation, 1945). The Moses plan agreed with people like Brune, recommending a public housing project. “It is neither necessary nor desirable to disperse this class to other areas.” Ibid, Moses and Andrews, Baltimore Arterial Report. 7 Raymond A. Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004). 8 There are a number of accounts of this process. The best overview is Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Ch. 1.

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federal guidelines in mind. Baltimore took the latter course, announcing its new plan,

known as 10-D, in 1960. The Crosstown expressway was now only one part of an entire

urban highway system that was designed to link downtown to the suburbs, and

Baltimore’s industries and port traffic to the national interstate. Approval of the plan was

held up for a number of years by the political wrangling between local politicians,

engineers and planners that was exacerbated by Baltimore’s unique political situation.

Under Maryland law, the city council, not the state government, had to condemn all

routes through the city, which gave them an essential veto power over highway plans.9

It was in opposition to this condemnation that Baltimoreans first voiced their displeasure with the highway. There was no unified opposition, but this did not mean that public hearings were not rancorous. In fact, they were legendarily contentious. “Every condemnation ordinance was a real bloodbath,” former Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro said in a 1974 interview. Donald Schaefer, who at the time was chairman of the council judiciary committee, took much of the abuse. Speakers, metaphorically, “kicked him in the balls, hit him on the head, and then spit on him,” D’Alesandro said. Most real opposition could be taken care of with the regular horse-trading of city politics. Council members quelled the largest pockets of rebellion in their districts by moving the route a few blocks this way or that.10 As the approval process for the 10-D plan dragged on, the

Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects began to lobby for a

reconsideration of highway plans on aesthetic grounds. In particular, architect Archibald

9 This is conflict between planners, engineers and politicians is discussed extensively in Michael P. McCarthy, “Baltimore’s Highway Wars Revisited,” Maryland Historical Magazine 93, no. 2 (1998). The political situation is detailed in Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” 690-92. 10 Douglas Haeuber, “The Baltimore Expressway Controversy: A Study of the Political Decision-Making Process” (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, 1974), 29; “Expressway Hearing Ends in Shambles,” Baltimore Sun, 21 July 1969, Box VIII-1 Folder East-West Expressway, MAD Papers.

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Rogers approached city politicians with the idea for a team of architects, planners,

sociologists and engineers to reexamine the highway plan and try to use the road to

“reform and revitalize the city” and “structure the city while structuring the highway.”

Most city politicians were not interested in these abstract concepts. But they did know

that their constituents continued to harangue them over the highways.11

This frustration helped Rodgers get state officials to support his idea, and they told federal officials that this would be a pilot program for a new type of highway planning – the “urban design concept team” – that would help subdue the freeway revolt, so they agreed to foot the bill for the consulting fees. To keep the emphasis on design, rather than engineering, Rodger’s argued that an architecture firm should direct the team.

He recommended Chicago based Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, because it was a large, multifaceted firm that was also not from Baltimore. State and federal officials insisted that SOM partner with an engineering firm. After almost a year of negotiations, the federal Department of Transportation awarded the huge $4.8 million contract to Urban

Design Concept Associates, a partnership between SOM and Greiner and Associates,

Maryland’s largest engineering firm. The contract directed this “two headed monster” as

Rogers would later call it, with evaluating the existing 10-D plan, and recommending changes to improve its design and alleviate its negative affects on the city. The contract barred the UDCT from adjusting the road route. City council had already set the condemnation corridor, and state officials felt that further changes would just cause more delay. 12

11 Louise Campbell, “Transport: A Concept Team for Baltimore,” City, November 1967. 12 Archibald Rogers to Thomas D’Alesandro III, 24 July 1969, Box 545 Folder 668, Thomas D’Alesandro III Papers, Baltimore City Archives, Baltimore, Maryland (Hereafter cites as D’Alesandro III Papers);

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When the UDCT opened its Baltimore office in 1967, its members had a mandate

to listen to the people’s issues and concerns, which they did with vigor. Unlike previous

engineers and planners, their goal was not to simply get the road built, and they had no

local interests.13 Team members brought a democratic spirit to the design process that had

been sorely lacking. For six months, they worked with community members, asking them

what they wanted, what they needed, and what they could do without. In the process, they

educated interested residents about highway engineering and planning. This was key,

because it gave local residents the technical knowledge they needed to effectively

organize against the highway. State officials would squelch the design team’s open door

policy by the summer of 1968, only six months into the design process. But the damage

had already been done. By 1969, the highway opposition in Baltimore was more unified,

and exponentially more sophisticated and effective. In a moment of fear and

exasperation, politicians and bureaucrats had given local residents a voice, however

small, in the planning process. Those residents used this opportunity against their leaders for the better part of a decade. Although this unified opposition would not last, the

adoption of the UDCT approach was the catalyst for an important democratic moment in

Baltimore. Like Wilbur Thomas had done in St. Louis, in Baltimore the design team

helped ordinary city residents gain expert knowledge, educating them about highway and

traffic engineering issues. By the end of the 1960s the highway opposition in Baltimore

Nathaniel Alexander Owings, The Spaces in between; an Architect’s Journey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 13 Clifford Ellis, “Visions of Urban Freeways, 1930-1970” (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1990), 279-320; Congress, Senate, Committee on Public Works, Subcommittee on Roads, Urban Highways, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Roads, 90th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1968).

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would become extremely sophisticated. This new knowledge helped a small group of

residents construct an urban vision to prevent the destruction of their neighborhoods.

Sacrifice in the Name of Progress

The willingness to work with the community that planners and architects brought

to Baltimore was important in fomenting the highway revolt. But they were not dealing

with a blank slate of discontent. By 1968, there were a number of organized groups that

were already dealing with the highway issue. The most organized opposition came from

African Americans in west Baltimore, who had been dealing the urban renewal,

condemnation and highway construction since the 1940s. Starting in that decade, officials

and planners identified large sections of the city east and west of downtown that were

blighted and needed to be redeveloped. The Moses plan called these largely African

American areas “some of the worst slums in Baltimore.” The city made a significant

effort to rehabilitate some areas, but planners and officials considered others untouchable.

A map in a 1946 issue of the Baltimore Sun brought these beliefs in to sharp relief. Each

dot on the map represented five cases of syphilis, based on health department data, the

caption said. Sections of east and west Baltimore were covered. “The map shows, in a

clear and convincing manner, that syphilis is much more frequently encountered both

relatively and absolutely in the city’s slum areas than in the city’s outlying areas.” The

caption goes on to say that, the tuberculosis map looks exactly the same, and so it wasn’t

worth printing both of them. The concentration of dots corresponded with most of

Baltimore’s black neighborhoods.14

14 “Syphilis Map,” Baltimore Sun, 1 March 1946, Vertical File: Urban Renewal, Maryland Room; Moses and Andrews, Baltimore Arterial Report.

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This newspaper graphic is one example that helped create a mental map of race,

disease and “blight” that would have a profound effect on Baltimore’s African American

community in the decades after World War Two. What they were attempting to remake

was one of the most storied and vibrant urban Black communities in the United States. As

a port city in a border state, Baltimore was a halfway point between freedom and slavery

for many antebellum blacks. The decline of plantation slavery in Maryland meant that

many of the city’s slaves were “hired out” to work in the city’s shops, shipyards and

small manufactories. Even though they were still in bondage, they experienced a degree

of freedom unknown to many of their rural counterparts, managing their own time and

affairs, and interacting with the city’s sizable free black population. Its heritage in slavery

meant that the city’s black population was relatively integrated into the city fabric,

occupying homes and apartments all across the city. This changed in the 1910s, when

rapid growth and an influx of migrants from the rural South and Southern and Eastern

Europe led Progressive city reformers, such as Mayor J. Barry Mahool, to propose

residential segregation as the solution to the city’s public health and overcrowding

problems. Although the U.S. Supreme Court eventually struck down these laws, they

accelerated an emerging system of residential segregation that confined blacks to a set of

neighborhoods on west, northwest and east sides of Baltimore.15

Up until the 1960s, the heart of black Baltimore was the west side. Pennsylvania

Avenue, which ran northwest from downtown, the main commercial strip, serving both the blue collar communities to the South, which ran along Franklin and Mulberry Streets, and neighborhoods just South of Druid Hill park, home to the city’s black middle class.

15 W. Edward Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Garrett Power, “Apartheid Baltimore Style: The Residential Segregation Ordinances of 1910-1913,” Maryland Law Review 42 (1983).

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Pennsylvania Avenue was home to the Royal Theater, one of the premier stops on the

national Chitlin’ Circuit, as well as scores of black owned businesses. The neighborhood

was also home to Sharp Street Methodist, a towering stone church that had originated in

South Baltimore, just west of the Inner Harbor, in the late 18th century. It was one of

many black Baltimore institutions that made the move to the northwest side after the

Baltimore and Ohio expanded its Camden Yards station. In addition to other churches like Bethel AME and Union Baptist, one of the community’s main assets was Frederick

Douglass High School. Built in 1925, the school graduated some of the city’s most famous African Americans, including Thurgood Marshall and Cab Calloway, and a

number of other important leaders and activists.16

Many of Maryland’s most important civil rights campaigns and emanated from

west Baltimore during the 1930s and 1940s. Under the leadership of Lillie Mae Jackson,

the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP became a vibrant activist organization, fighting to

integrate the University of Maryland, organizing voter registration drives and addressing

school funding deficiencies. The NAACP was supported by the City-Wide Young

People’s Forum, a student movement unique to Baltimore that was founded by Jackson’s

daughter Juanita in the early 1930s. The Forum directed a number of campaigns,

including a boycott of stores that did not employ black workers. All of these organizing

and activist efforts were supported by Carl Murphy through his newspaper, the Baltimore

Afro-American. Founded by Murphy’s father, John, under Carl the Afro, as it is known, became one of the premier black newspapers on the Eastern seaboard, with regional

16 Karen Olson, “Old West Baltimore: Segregation, African American Culture, and the Struggle for Equality,” in The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History, ed. Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes, and Linda Zeidman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

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editions published in thirteen different cities. Murphy never hesitated to engage the Afro in numerous civil and human rights campaigns.17

By the postwar era, the work of the Jacksons, Murphy and scores of other activists

and regular citizens led to some real achievements for black Baltimoreans. A massive

voter registration drive during the 1940s led to real black power at the voting booth.

African-American support helped elect moderate Republic Theodore McKeldrin to the

governor’s office in 1950, and most of the city’s schools and public accommodations

were desegregated over the course of the 1950s. But African-Americans still lacked real

power, especially when it came to deciding the future of their communities and neighborhoods.

When those who did have the power, Baltimore’s white leaders and planners, looked at African American neighborhoods in west Baltimore, they did not see a dynamic and important community. They saw a degraded housing stock inhabited by Baltimore’s poorest residents that had the potential to drag down the rest of the city. This was an environmental problem, and so planners and city officials recommended an environmental solution. To remove disease and blight, Baltimore needed to engage in an ambitious urban renewal plan, which included rehabilitating existing neighborhoods.

These efforts targeted both black and white communities. But the other aspect of the plan,

“slum clearance” was focused almost entirely on African American communities. From

1951 to 1964, eighty-nine percent of the families displaced by urban renewal were black.

Renewal officials rationalized this disparity as simple economics. Because most blacks were poor, they could only afford the worst housing. “Almost all of the areas were

17 Hayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892-1950 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998); Bruce A. Thompson, “The Civil Rights Vanguard: The Naacp and the Black Community in Baltimore, 1931- 1942” (Ph.D., University of Maryland College Park, 1996).

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selected for clearance because they contained the worst housing in the community,” a

brochure from the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Authority commented.

“Consequently, they were occupied by the lowest income groups – predominantly

Negro.” This conclusion did not take into account discriminatory factors that severely

limited African American housing choices. The city’s African American population had more than doubled since the 1920s, but recent migrants were consigned to live in neighborhoods that had been largely black for decades. This stretched an already decaying housing stock to the breaking point. Thus, in a process that played out in similar ways all across urban America, African Americans were forced to bear the brunt of the solution to a problem in which they had been the primary victims. The constant demolition and construction in the city’s black communities increased the transient nature of many poor and working class families exponentially. A 1966 Baltimore Sun

article described the family of “Mrs. Hattie K” who had been relocated three times in 10

years. “Sometimes the landlord doesn’t tell you about the next block being torn down,”

she said. Hattie K.’s experience was not unusual.18

Condemnation and land clearance affected, directly or indirectly, the lives of most

African Americans in Baltimore. When done for highway construction the process was

often devastating. Purchase and clearing of the land occurred well before engineers

finalized construction plans. This left blocks and blocks of boarded up and bulldozed

waste lands, which helped to drag down property values, and thus the stability, of

surrounding communities. This is a key background for the origins of anti-highway

activism in Baltimore, especially among African Americans, but also for the city as a

18 James Dilts, “Spreading or Ending Slums? Poor Shoved out to Make Room for Rich, Foes Charge,” Baltimore Sun, 24 April 1966, Vertical Files Folder Urban Renewal, Maryland Room; Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency, Outline of Urban Renewal (Baltimore: BURHA, 1965).

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whole. The experience of Black Baltimoreans helped create a new kind of anti-highway

movement that was built on the direct experience of the highway’s destructive powers.

West Baltimoreans saw the city as more than a collective of buildings. It was a community, and the highway, by destroying the environment, destroyed the community and limited any hope for real renewal.19

The first explicitly anti-highway group in west Baltimore was the Relocation

Action Movement, or RAM. RAM emerged in 1967, out of the efforts to clear the

Franklin-Mulberry corridor for I-170, which was part of the 10D plan. Located in the

African American west side of Baltimore, Franklin-Mulberry had been on Baltimore’s

highway plans for more than twenty years.20 Many locals had resigned themselves to the

road’s eventual construction, but were still trying to mitigate its affect on their

neighborhood. RAM’s leaders, such as John Wells and Esther Redd, were homeowners

and community leaders. Their two major concerns stemmed from their interest in the

stability and well-being of the community. The first was that property owners were not

receiving just compensation for their homes and businesses. Since regulations limited the

state road bureau to making payments of fair market value, black homeowners found it

increasingly difficult to find replacement housing. Baltimore lacked a fair housing

ordinance, much less any concerted program to open up the suburbs to black

homebuyers. This left narrow bands of homes on the city’s west and east sides for a

rapidly growing African American population, driving up home prices. “This expressway

was uprooting them (west Baltimoreans) from their homes and leaving them stranded

without enough money to purchase another home in a city which does not provide for the

19. Dilts, “Spreading or Ending Slums? Poor Shoved out to Make Room for Rich, Foes Charge.”; Ibid, Redd. 20 Franklin-Mulberry was first identified in the Moses plan. See Moses, Baltimore arterial report.

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adequate rehousing of its relocated citizens,” one unsigned RAM document said.21 These meager payments also erased what was for most homeowners their primary investment, as well as the accumulated capital of an entire community. According to a 1968 RAM position paper, some people had paid $6,500 for their homes in 1948, and the state only offered $4,000 twenty years later. “Another owner paid $6,950 in 1949 … the actual sum of money paid on the mortgage amounted to over $13,000 and now the state is coming up with the ‘munificent’ sum of $5,200 to take his home. What do these figures mean in children deprived of education, in “dreams deferred”, in the quickening erosion of the belief that America is a land of opportunity? By stealing our homes you also steal our faith in America,” the paper said.

RAM efforts to improve compensation for condemnation were partially successful. With help from Stuart Weschler, an attorney with the Congress on Racial

Equality, RAM was able to get the city to pass a moratorium on further land acquisitions in July of 1967, but realty agents continued to harass homeowners. They threatened

Mayor Theodore McKeldrin with protests in August 1967 unless the city came up with a solution. The mayor eventually set up meetings between RAM, CORE and federal officials in Washington to discuss the problem, and in July of 1968, Governor Spiro

Agnew signed a new law that required “fair replacement value” be paid instead of “fair market value.” It also allowed the state to make up to $5,000 in cash payments to homeowners for moving fees and other costs associated with displacement and relocation.22

21 RAM, “A History of the Relocation Action Movement,” undated, Box VII-1 Folder Relocation Action Movement, MAD Papers. 22 CORE was in Baltimore as part of its Target City Project, an effort to focus resources on one city to improve civil rights and living conditions. See Louis C. Goldberg, “Core in Trouble a Social History of the

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Integrated into RAM’s efforts to improve compensation was the larger goal of

ameliorating the devastating impact that the condemnation and construction process was having on the community. Insufficient payments were only one part of the generally unjust highway construction process. To local residents, it felt like homes were condemned, purchased and demolished almost at random. This left them with a constant anxiety of the future of their community, and created a patchwork of empty lot and boarded up homes. The Franklin-Mulberry corridor in particular had became an

“environmental waste land,” an “open invitation (for) disease, accidents, and general filth.”23 Many condemned buildings still sat empty, and were dragging the surrounding

neighborhoods down with them. “People live in jungles of boarded up houses, rats, and

fire department sirens ... we demand constructive action immediately to save our dying

neighborhoods … Unless those being victimized are treated like human beings, NO

EXPRESSWAY WILL PASS THROUGH OUR CITY!!!” Until construction started,

RAM members pushed for interim uses such as playgrounds and ball fields, and asked

the city to rent out homes that had been purchased but not removed.24 Even though the

area was condemned, it needed more city services, not less. In a 1967 petition to Mayor

McKeldrin, residents demanded the city increase police and sanitation services, in order

“to correct the negligent method of condemnation which often left one or two families

stranded in a block of vacated, boarded-up, garbage infested, city owned housing causing

Organizational Dilemmas of the Congress of Racial Equality Target City Project in Baltimore, 1965-1967 (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1970); RAM, “Relocation Action Movement,” 19 June 1968, Box VII-1, Folder Relocation Action Movement, MAD Papers. 23 Esther Redd to Fritz Linaweaver, 16 September 1969, Box 543 Folder 659, D’Alesandro III Papers. 24 RAM, “Relocation Action Movement.”

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increased problems of vandalism, rats, and an unreasonably large amount of additional upkeep on their own homes.” 25

To RAM leaders and other community members, the highway was a symbol of the unjust control of urban space, of the discriminatory treatment African American communities received, and would continue to receive, from the local, state and federal governments. But the highway was also more than a symbol. For decades, the white power structure had confined Black Baltimoreans to narrowly defined ghettos, where the housing stock was poor, and city services were limited. In spite of this, they had built a vibrant community. But now the city was going from a policy of malevolent neglect to active destruction, tearing apart the communities that had been ignored for years. As the following excerpt from a RAM position paper shows, this destruction, done in the name of “progress,” was the tipping point for many west siders:

In the name of progress various expressways and highways are being planned for the city of Baltimore. Rivers of concrete are being pushed through parks, areas of historical significance and most importantly serve as a source of destruction for many residential areas. It is no coincidence that most of the neighborhoods slated for construction are black. For too long the history of Urban Renewal and Highway Clearance has been marked by the repeated removal of black citizens. We have been asked to make sacrifice after sacrifice in the name of progress, and then that progress has been achieved we find it marked “white only.” The members of RAM are residents and homeowners who live in the Expressway path and adjacent areas. We have united not to stymie progress but to demand justice; we do not ask for patronization but an end to victimization. We are presenting this position paper in the hopes that the city will wake ups its responsibility and avoid the damaging effects the thoughtless renewal projects can have. The city of Detroit stands as an example of what happens when massive numbers of people are uprooted for a prosperity they are not permitted to participate in. We will make our stand in the streets and the doorways of our

25 RAM, “A History of the Relocation Action Movement.”

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homes. Unless Black people’s demands are satisfied the Expressway WILL NOT be built.26

It is hard to underestimate the power that the routing of the road had on west

Baltimore. In twenty years of highway planning, the only constant was that the road was

going right through the heart of Black Baltimore. Planners and politicians bickered for

years about the design of the road along the Inner Harbor, but they never moved it an inch in west Baltimore. It is hard to write the history of things that have not happened, but by being labeled a slum in 1944, west Baltimore would forever remain a slum. By targeting it for demolition, instead of rehabilitation, the city gave the neighborhood an unofficial condemnation. Homeowners were loathe to invest in it. African Americans

purchased property there because they had no choice, often paying exorbitant rates. Then the city’s highway plans drove down home values to the point that many of them lost money by the time the official condemnation proceedings came about. And even after homes were purchased, the corridor still sat empty. This cumulative experience is what stands behind the activism of RAM and other west siders, and is how they were able to convince other city residents about the destructive power of the road. The freeway revolt in Baltimore has to be understood in this context. It was not simply a part of the activist climate of the late 1960s, or the rise of militancy within the African American community. It was the cause of this militancy, a result of the lived experience of thousands of Black Baltimoreans in the postwar period. The constant uncertainty, anxiety

26 RAM, “Position Statement,” 16 January 1968, Box VII-1 Folder Relocation Action Movement, MAD Papers.

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and eventually, destruction that they lived with peaked in the late 1960s. When the city actually tried to build the highway, the residents finally rebelled.27

Starting with Robert Moses, a generation of highway planners and engineers had presented Baltimore’s politicians and civic leaders with a succession of highway plans.

These plans promised, both explicitly and implicitly, to remake Baltimore. Instead of a dirty old port city, it would become a modern, efficient metropolis. Old, decaying neighborhoods would be cleared out, and, with them, the array of social and environmental problems they posed to the city. The city’s manufacturers and heavy industries would have ready access to markets, and downtown property owners would be able to lure in workers and shoppers from the suburbs. But the actual process of modernization was much uglier than all the sweeping highways and towering new housing projects made it seem. Through RAM, MAD, CORE and other neighborhood groups, west Baltimore residents detailed the ugly and destructive nature of highway construction. It was not clean and efficient, but haphazard and capricious. By offering up a better city, it completely ignored the one that already existed, the communities that had developed over generations, and that the highway project was ripping apart with mean- spirited indifference. Starting in 1968, west Baltimoreans began to communicate the destructive powers of the highway to the planners and architects from the UDCT, and their fellow Baltimoreans on the other side of the city. As one RAM statement put it,

“The highway was a cancer that inner city residents did not need.”28

27 This argument goes against much of the freeway revolt literature, but goes along with much of the emerging literature on African American activism in Northern cities, which places it in a long continuum of injustices black communities had to endure in the postwar era. See Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities.” 28 RAM, “Ram Observer,” 25 June 1969, Folder 543 Box 663, D’Alesandro III Papers.

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A Grim Reminder

Once they opened up an office in Baltimore, Urban Design Concept Team

(UDCT) staff members held meetings with community members to explain the design

team process and solicit their concerns. African American west siders explained how the

Franklin-Mulberry corridor had become a scar on the community, and were worried about the consequences of the highway in neighboring Rosemont. The UDCT commissioned planner Charles Abrams to examine past relocation problems. His report emphasized how almost ninety percent of urban renewal and highway displacements in

Baltimore had targeted African American neighborhoods, how compensation for rental tenants, especially under the federal highway program, was abysmal. “The only way

Baltimore has housed its Negro households and rehoused its uprooted has been to send them into housing left behind by white homeowners.” With highway construction about to displace an additional 3650 households, a housing crisis loomed large. Urban blacks were limited to housing within the city boundaries, which Abrams likened to a “Berlin

Wall,” with the housing on the inside rapidly declining. Even vacancy rates for rental properties, as high as six percent in some surveys, were deceiving. Once a property was vacant, it was quickly vandalized, then abandoned.29

With the help of Abrams and community activists, design team members quickly

recognized that the highway posed an imminent threat to Rosemont, a neighborhood just

to the west of the Franklin-Mulberry corridor. Not only was Rosemont a stable African

American community, it was one of the better neighborhoods in the city. Home ownership rates were above seventy percent, and educational levels were above the city

29 Charles Abrams, “The Role and Responsibilities of the Federal Highway Sytem in Baltimore,” 15 May 1968, Folder 548 Box 686, D’Alesandro III Papers.

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median. Many residents owned their own businesses or held white-collar jobs. But the

city had started purchasing homes in Rosemont in 1967, and by 1968 owned more than

200 of the 800 properties scheduled for demolition. This destabilized the neighborhood,

as the city demolished some homes and others were torn apart by vandals. Many

homeowners were waiting for the state to pass supplemental compensation legislation,

and did not want to risk forfeiting payments. To help the neighborhood, the state should

issue a moratorium on all condemnations for two years, UDCT manager John Galston

wrote in a letter to the state’s Baltimore road czar, Joseph Axelrod. “These families …

have suffered health and safety hazards, i.e., inadequate sanitation, police, street lighting,

etc. As a result of early acquisition, the Franklin-Mulberry segment stands partially

cleared, partially boarded up and heavily vandalized, a grim reminder to everyone in the

adjoining community of Rosemont.”30

The efforts of the UDCT to save Rosemont, sparked by the west side residents themselves, reveal an interesting bias and patterning of class among whites and outsiders.

The correspondence between design team members and to city officials emphasized the

middle-class nature of the Rosemont neighborhood. These impressions spilled over in the

local and national press. In 1968 and 1969, when the design team was getting a

considerable amount of attention, commentators held up their success in “saving”

Rosemont as a victory for the efforts to “humanize the highway.” But almost all of the

articles described Rosemont as a “community of well-kept, lower-middle-class Negro

homes.” To professional planners and sociologists, the use of this language was not

30 Charles Abrams, “The Role and Responsibilities of the Federal Highway Sytem in Baltimore”; Charles Abrams to Nathaniel Owings, 1 July 1968, Box 663, Folder 543, D’Alesandro III Papers; June Ross to Norman Klein, 22 July 1968, Box 543 Folder 663, D’Alesandro III Papers; John Wells to Thomas D’Alesandro III, 29 November 1969, Box 543 Folder 663, D’Alesandro III Papers; John Galston to Joseph Axelrod, 30 July 1968, D’Alesandro III Papers, Box 543 Folder 663.

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necessarily insidious. They recognized that a middle-class area was worth saving because

of the stability it brought the rest of the community. But once this attitude began to

permeate the popular press, it implied something else entirely – that Rosemont was the

only neighborhood worth saving because it was middle class, because the homes were

“well-kept.” The other parts of Baltimore’s racial ghettos were slums, and thus, not worth

saving. This language shows that despite the progress that by the end of the 1960s, mainstream Americans were willing to pay more attention to, and have more sympathy for, urban African Americans. But this sympathy and respect was limited to middle-class

African Americans, “homeowners” with “well-kept” residences.31

Two weeks later the UDCT issued another memo, arguing that the city needed to shift the Rosemont route altogether. Only by shifting it southward and saving approximately 650 homes would Rosemont have a chance at remaining one of

Baltimore’s strongest neighborhoods. Over the next year, city officials and UDCT

members would struggle to do this while opposition to the road gained strength. Many

Baltimoreans started to realize that the highway routing was a zero-sum game. If designers shift the route from one community, another neighborhood would suffer. With a whole system planned for the city, few areas would escape its ill effects. Design team

members fueled the dissatisfaction. Part of the team’s mandate was to meet with

community groups. In school cafeterias and community centers across the city they

explained that the arguments in support of the road were not completely objective,

showing how engineers could manipulate traffic counts, and that there was no guarantee

31 The boilerplate describing Rosemont as a community of “middle-class Negro homeowners” pervaded all media discussions of the community. See Dilts, “Changing City – ‘We Must Destroy You .’”; Ben A. Franklin, “Freeway Designs Approved by U.S.,” The New York Times, 18 January 1969, Box 548 Folder 686, D’Alesandro III Papers.

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that a new road would improve traffic flow. In one community meeting that city official

Joseph Smith attended, design team chairman John Weese “repeatedly blasted the mayor

for refusing to accept the Rosemont Corridor as requested by the concept team. He went so far as to place the blame for the expressway situation on the Mayor,” Smith said. The

amount of trust between officials and residents was already low. With the design team

raising even more doubt, local residents were questioning the need for the expressway in

stronger and stronger terms.32

The Needs of the Community

This dissatisfaction coalesced in the summer of 1968. After six months of meeting

with members of the design team, and two years of fighting the road as part of smaller,

neighborhood organizations, an important group of Baltimoreans decided that they

needed to take transportation planning into their own hands, and formed the Movement

Against Destruction. MAD grew out of a conference convened by Baltimore’s Catholic

social service center in August 1968. The goal was to bring community groups together to discuss what they had in common in terms of their concerns about the highway. With

the assistance of Catholic social workers, conference attendees decided to form a

citywide coalition to meet regularly and discuss highway issues. Conceived as a coalition,

MAD was made up of around twenty community groups. In the beginning, its core

constituencies were middle and working class African Americans from the west side,

many of whom were also leaders in RAM, some of their allies from Baltimore’s CORE

32 David Allison, “The Battle Lines of Baltimore,” Innovation, July 1969, p. 17; Joseph Smith to Kalman Hettleman, 24 May 1968, Box 546 Folder 676, D’Alesandro III Papers; Janelee Keidel, “An Expressway Bridges a Gulf between People,” Baltimore Sun, 17 August 1969. Box VIII-1 Folder Rosemont, MAD Papers.

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chapter, and middle-class preservationists and gentrifiers that wanted to save the Federal

Hill and Fells Point neighborhoods. The experience of African American west siders

would feed much of MAD’s early opposition to the roadway. They had seen first hand

how the entire condemnation and construction process could destroy a community, and

they successfully communicated this to other members.

Initially, MAD was opposed to all highways running through Baltimore, but that

would change. Members soon realized that speaking in the negative would only get them

so far. They had to find something to speak for – community planning, mass transit, etc. –

if they wanted any traction with city and state officials. In one of its earliest meetings,

MAD members brainstormed on what they believed the city’s transportation planning

and goals should be. The results of the September 8, 1968 session, transcribed in the

group’s minutes, gave a telling picture of how MAD’s members perceived the issues.

They were extremely pragmatic about the realities of highway planning and funding, and

realized that the power of the road to decentralize the metropolis meant that its

destructive powers continued long after the road was built. The road needed to “Move

people with the least possible destruction to the existing city … Relocate industry back to the community.” MAD’s members were also extremely savvy when it came to national transportation policy. They knew all of the country’s transportation dollars were going to subsidize automobiles, instead of creating a real transportation system: “Vested interests in obsolete methods, i.e. cars … Lack of integration for all modes of transportation … A

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department of transportation on all levels to offer total integration of all forms of

transportation.” 33

MAD’s members also argued that decisions should be made by the community

instead of a tight coterie of engineers, politicians and business leaders: “Must adjust the

needs of transportation to the needs of the community … Planning is determined by

existing powers, rather than by the future needs to the community … Councilmen abdicated their responsibility to engineers … Reaching and influencing the engineers and

technicians … counter-balancing vested interests with the people and mass transit vs.

automobile interests.” City council members might have to answer to the people, but the

engineers and planners had carved out a relatively undemocratic niche, where they had

too much control over the future of the city. According to MAD, instead of providing the

city with the best road system, these experts needed to provide the best transportation

system.34

Over the next eight years, MAD’s core constituencies and leaders would shift, and

it would go through one major reincarnation, from a mass movement organization to an

advocacy and pressure group that was more interested in lawsuits than protests. But

throughout its existence, MAD stayed true to the democratic vision that its members

articulated in its early meetings. The organization was always skeptical of the city’s

business and political leaders, especially traffic reports from engineering “experts.” They

did not eschew expert information completely, but believed that city leaders interpreted

data to serve their own interests. This questioning of technical and expert authority is one

33 MAD Meeting Minutes, 16 September 1968, MAD Papers, Box I-2 Folder Minutes; Expressway Conference Committee, “History, Facts and Opinions on Expressway,” August 1969, Box VI-1 Folder History, Facts and Opinions on Expressway. 34 Ibid, MAD Meeting Minutes. On the role of engineers nationwide, see Bruce Seely, Building the American Highway System : Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

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of MAD’s primary connections to other postwar environmental groups. The success of the groups in the St. Louis and Chicago case studies, as well as hundreds of others nationwide, depended on getting access to and being able to interpret technical information. Finally, MAD’s members and leaders always had faith in a city and transportation planning process that was as democratic as possible. This often left the group open to criticism from those who said that MAD could never agree on an alternative to the highway. But that was the point. MAD and other highway activists were not against a highway or roads. They were against a highway designed to serve the interests of one set of people, at the expense of the rest of the city.

As MAD was attempting to develop an identity and long-term strategy, the cumulative impact of the city’s transportation crisis, and a variety of other urban problems, led local leaders to change the highway plan yet again. This new plan, which would be named 3A, was the result of direct and indirect pressure from Baltimoreans. In their consultations with residents from west Baltimore and other neighborhoods, design teams members realized how much destruction the road was causing. These fed into the cornucopia of other problems that were beginning to afflict the Charm City, including a shrinking tax base, accelerating deindustrialization, white flight and an influx of poor

African Americans who were becoming increasingly militant in their demands for social justice. These problems reached a flashpoint in April 1968. Conflict between African

Americans and whites was common in postwar Baltimore, as blacks attempted to move in to white neighborhoods, have their children attend previously segregated schools, and fought for expanded job opportunities. City leaders began to fear major urban unrest as early as 1964, when the Watts riot sparked an annual barrage of urban rebellion in cities

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across the country. Baltimore escaped much of this conflict until April 1968, when, in the

week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a deadly riot swept across the

city. Six were killed and hundreds of businesses were destroyed, causing $10 million in

property damage. The Maryland National Guard was unable to quell the protests, and

only after President Johnson called in federal troops did the unrest cease. 35

In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, Baltimore’s riot became famous

because of Gov. Spiro Agnew’s televised scolding of local African American leaders

failure to rebuke the violence, which made him an instant celebrity in right wing circles.

To cement himself as the “law and order” candidate, Republican Presidential nominee

Richard Nixon tapped Agnew to be his running mate. But the week of violent unrest tore

the city apart. At least a thousand businesses were destroyed, many of which never

reopened. It ripped a hole in the fabric of this blue-collar city, and it is within the context

of this unstable situation that the city leaders decided to make significant changes in the

highway plan. Design team chairman Nathaniel Owings suggested the value of a new

route in September 1968 at the meeting of a local housing group. He said that the city

could save Fells Point, Federal Hill and Rosemont with some easy adjustments. His idea

quickly gained steam and Baltimore’s Mayor, Thomas D’Alesandro III, decided to

support it in December 1968. State officials were livid with Owings. The contract stipulated that the UDCT was only supposed to look at improving existing route, 10-D.

The condemnation lines were already set, and the state was actively purchasing property.

35 D’Alessandro III’s sister, Nancy, married Paul Pelosi, moved to San Francisco, and became the first female Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

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But Owings argued that the spirit of the contract was to reconcile the highway to the city, and bypassing Rosemont, Fells Point and Federal Hill was the only way to do that.36

Although he clearly irritated local officials, Owings attempts to “sell” the 3A

route played well on the national stage. Engineering, planning and policy experts had

cautiously hoped that the design team concept would be a solution to urban freeway

conflicts. Once the federal government approved the 3A plan, the national media gave it

an enthusiastic endorsement. “Officials … said it was a victory for people over

automobile technology,” a New York Times article said. “The Baltimore compromise …

was regarded as a potentially precedent setting example of how to ‘civilize’ a highway.”

The new plan “eliminated most of its predecessor’s worst features; and it softened the impact of several others,” Architecture Forum said. A year later, the Christian Science

Monitor was still raving. “The sprawling port city of Baltimore may achieve even more fame as the city where urban democracy got a rebirth than it has as the birthplace of the national anthem.” Baltimore could be a model for the nation, Judson Gooding wrote in

Fortune, because it offered “a road that would be responsive to (residents’) wishes and to many of their non-transportation requirements. In Baltimore at least, the automobile is no longer the undisputed sovereign to the land.”37

But as much as national observers hailed the new plan, support in Baltimore

ranged from tentative to nonexistent. The editors of the Baltimore Sun had seen many an

36 “Expressway Furor Grows,” Baltimore Sun, 26 October 1968. Box VIII-1 Folder East-West Expressway, MAD Papers; Janelee Keidel, “Expressway Fault Found,” Baltimore Sun, 22 October 1968, Box VIII-1 Folder East-West Expressway, MAD Papers. 37 James Bailey, “How SOM Took on the Baltimore Road Gang,” Architectural Forum, March 1969; Franklin, “Freeway Designs Approved by U.S.”, Folder 548 Box 686, D’Alesandro III Papers; George Favre, “Baltimore Urban Design Team Wins,” Christian Science Monitor, 6 February 1970, Box VIII-1 Folder UDCT, MAD Papers; Judson Gooding, “How Baltimore Tamed the Highway Monster,” in The Environment: A National Mission for the 1970s, ed. The Editors of Fortune (New York City: Harper and Row, 1970).

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expressway plan come and go. In an unsigned editorial, they wrote that they were hesitant

that this new plan would do or mean anything. “To death and taxes is added another certainty: Expressway plans in Baltimore are ‘final’ only until such time as a determination is made to have a fresh study. A whole generation of Baltimoreans have grown up, married and become parents while hearing ‘once and for all’ decisions as to the mythical East-West expressway.” Thomas Fiorello, a community organizer and former UDCT staff member, told MAD members that there had been no real

“democratic” decision making with 3A. Officials had chosen it as the lesser of two evils.

There had never been a public hearing “in which citizens were afforded an opportunity for effective determination of the need for a federal interstate highway. Baltimoreans were never asked via referendum whether or not they felt that Baltimore needed an eight- lane, high speed freeway through its urban center in order to solve the city’s major transportation problems.”38

Once the federal government agreed to the 3A route, MAD members struggled

with what their stance should be. In meetings they argued about whether they should

endorse the new route as an improvement, or continue to oppose all roads. Some wanted

to parse the details of each section, while others argued that “we are not highway

planners,” and that the details should be left to the experts. In a statement released to the

press, MAD decided to endorse one section of the road. “The Movement Against

Destruction highly recommends that the Fort McHenry bypass which connects I-95 to the

38 Editorial, “Elusive Expressway,” Baltimore Morning Sun, 14 December 1968, Box VIII-1 Folder East- West Expressway, MAD Papers; Thomas Fiorello, “For Hearings on Expressways,” Baltimore Sun, 10 December 1968, Box I-2 Folder Minutes, MAD Papers. State officials supported the new plan because it was approved by the federal government, but were less than enthusiastic in private. See David Tompkins to John Weese, 9 April 1969, Box 545 Folder 668, D’Alesandro III Papers; Kalman Hettleman to Fritz Linaweaver, 28 April 1969, Box 548 Folder 686, D’Alesandro III Papers.

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Southwest with I-95 in the east be given top priority in the city and state’s highway

program for Baltimore. Completion of the other segments of the expressway will depend on critical evaluation of this first priority upon completion.” MAD members realized that

Baltimore needed some new highways, but disagreed with engineers that the city needed

to build an entire “system.” The Fort McHenry bypass, as it eventually became known,

would help move cars and trucks around the city and from the port to other industrial

areas. The city could build other sections later if this route was insufficient.39

This was the only section of the 3A system the city would build. MAD’s members

presented the engineers with what seemed like a reasonable plan: Build the most needed

section first, the one that goes through industrial areas, and then see its effect on traffic

flow before you starting destroying neighborhoods. Engineers scoffed, believing that the

only solution was an entire system. But the real problem was money. The Interstate

Highway Act was set to expire in 1972. Baltimore had to have its highway plans

approved by the federal government and get shovels in the ground by the end of that year,

or it forfeited federal funding, which would doom the project. Baltimore’s leaders were

eager to lock into highway dollars, which is why they had agreed to the idea of the design

concept team. The team’s only charge had been to “weave the highway into the urban

fabric” with design features and with joint development, building new parks, schools,

hospitals, housing and commercial structures along with the highway.40 Over the course

of 1968, design team members displayed conceptual drawings of potential developments

all over the city, which they thought the federal government would pay for, because

Baltimore was a pilot project for the design team concept. This confidence was ill

39 MAD Minutes, 8 September 1969, Box I-2 Folder Minutes, MAD Papers. 40 Joseph Smith to Kalman Hettleman, 24 May 1968, Box 546 Folder 676, D’Alesandro III Papers.

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founded. By the late 1960s, budgetary restrictions cut existing urban programs, leaving

little room for untested ideas. Architects were confident that they could mitigate air and

noise pollution issues for schools and housing above highways, but nobody knew for sure. When officials explained that a lack of funding would make most plans unfeasible,

community members and activists felt that the design team had just used the pretty pictures to sell them on the idea of the highway. “The SOM plans we found beautiful,”

RAM and MAD member Esther Redd said. “Then we asked ‘Who’s going to pay?’ and

they said there was no money for it ... They’re still trying to dupe us.” Some design team

members, like architect Steve Zecher, agreed with Redd’s characterization. “The concept

team is hustling for the highway lobby. If there are prostitutes in the expressway

program, you might say the concept team is their pimp,” Zecher told the Baltimore Sun.

He quit the team because state officials cut them off from having meetings with city

residents.41

The design and routing changes of the 3A plan, including the joint development options, were supposed to speak to the environmental concerns of Baltimore residents, that highways would improve the urban environment, not destroy it. Engineers and architects formulated these plans based partially on their experience of the freeway revolt in other cities, where citizens in relatively intact districts were concerned about the negative effects of highways, including pollution, the dividing of neighborhoods, and a general disruption of the community fabric, both physical and social. What they did not take into account was the experience in Baltimore. Contractors had not poured an inch of asphalt for the new highway system, but condemnation, the threat of condemnation, and

41 Favre, “Baltimore Urban Design Team Wins”; Janelee Keidel, “Design Concept Team Aid Resigns over Restrictions,” Baltimore Sun, 26 August 1969, Box VIII-1 Folder UDCT, MAD Papers.

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haphazard land clearance had already worked their destructive powers. By the end of

1968, Baltimoreans had established a local narrative about what the highway construction

process could do to the community. This is crucial to understanding the developments of

1969, when city residents, led by MAD, shoved the gift of the 3A plan, the “humanized

highway,” back in the face of state and federal officials.

A Forum on the Road Itself

A broadening base of support also helped cement opposition to the highway. In

the beginning of 1969, MAD’s base had been white liberals, like Stuart Weschler and

Arthur Cohen, both of whom had been involved in RAM and CORE, a few gentrifiers

and preservationists from Fells Point, and African Americans from west side neighborhoods that sat in the path of the expressway. This make-up led to a concentration on west side issues. But over course of the spring, representatives from blue collar neighborhoods in Southeast Baltimore began to come to MAD meetings. The communities of Canton, Highlandtown and Fells Point, tight knit neighborhoods of

Italians, Poles, Greeks and blue-collar ethnics who worked on the docks or at the city’s

large factories run by Bethlehem Steel, General Motors and General Electric. Through

most of the 1960s, these Baltimoreans had supported the highway. They believed city

leaders who said the road would help shore up factory and port jobs, and thought

condemnation would help them move to bigger and newer homes. As late as 1967, local

residents had shouted down a group of historic preservationists whose opposition to the

road was based on their love of the era’s colonial era rowhouses. “Let’s everybody walk

out. Let the silk stockings have their own meeting,” one resident said at a May 1967

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meeting. They changed their tune as they began to see the impact of the planning and

design process. Like on the west side, indecision about the highway route meant that the

city would condemn homes but then leave them vacant, bringing an increase in vandalism

and other property crimes. Residents were unsure whether they should even move to

another house in the community, for fear that the route might affect that property as well.

In the midst of all this, City Council President Donald Schaefer warned community

members that Southeast factories would be in jeopardy if they did not get highway

access. There was also uncertainty over whether or not the road would go through St.

Stanislaus Church, the center of the Polish-Catholic community. This confusion and

disillusionment led to the creation of the Southeast Council Against the Road, or SCAR,

the first significant representation of the working class Southeast community within

MAD.42

This socioeconomic and geographic expansion of the MAD coalition represented

the broader malaise that came over Baltimore concerning the highway by summer of

1969, which would culminate in the Rosemont hearings in August. Ostensibly held to

survey citizen opinion about the planned Rosemont bypass, they turned into three nights

of citizens voicing their frustration about the road. The hearings are worth examining in

detail for the vision that city residents presented, however fleeting the moment may have

been. The Baltimoreans who spoke at the hearing were not consciously trying to provide

a coordinated vision for the city. The most interesting comments came from those

42 James Dilts, “Fells Point - Goodby (Sic) to All That?” Baltimore Sun, 16 February 1969, Box VIII-1 Folder Fells Point, MAD Papers; Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Janelee Keidel, “300 Fells Point Folk Hoot Down ‘Silk Stockings’,” Baltimore Sun, 24 May 1967, Vertical File: Highways, Enoch, Maryland Room; James Dilts, “Fells Point - Goodby (Sic) to All That?”; MAD Minutes, 14 July 1969, Box I-2 Folder Minutes, MAD Papers.

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speaking off the cuff, but from the heart. Taken together, their testimony is remarkably

cohesive: We don’t want this road because it will destroy our communities. We do want

help, they said, but with smaller projects and programs that we have requested and

planned.43

Constant relocation from urban renewal and highway projects was a theme for

many African American speakers. Moving and condemnation had become more than just

an inconvenience, said Charles Curtis of the Harlem Park Neighborhood Council, an

African American neighborhood that bordered the condemnation corridor. “Here in

Harlem Park since 1956 these people have been under the gun. We spent over four and a

half million dollars improving our homes. [Baltimore urban renewal was] supposed to be

an example for the whole country. Then they come along, tear down all these houses,”

Curtis said. “Now we are overcrowded, [they] are running us out because of this

highway. There are 18,000 of us who are getting pretty sick from all this devastation,

which is one block from us.” Whites sympathized with blacks such as Curtis because the

highway could do the same thing to their neighborhoods. Barbara Mikulski was an

activist social worker from Southeast Baltimore, and a member of SCAR. She first became aware of the roads destructive capabilities when she was serving on the Catholic

Urban Commission and met a black veteran from Rosemont who said “that his home is going to be taken; two, his neighborhood was going to be destroyed; and three, because he was black he had no place to go. We asked him what did he want. He said I want to have a roof over my head, I want to send my kids to school, and I want to have a little

43 Dilts, “Court Gives Go-Ahead for Franklin Mulberry,” Baltimore Sun, 20 June 1973, Box VIII-1 Folder Frankling Mulberry, MAD Papers.

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stake in my community. We thought that wasn’t too much for a World War II veteran to

ask for.”44

In addition to a common threat, the testimony from the Rosemont hearings also

shows that what brought Baltimoreans together was a common identity as city residents.

This was in opposition to the officials and business leaders who wanted to build the road,

but also in response to those who had left the city to live in Baltimore county’s booming suburbs. To city dwellers, the roads were being built to benefit suburbanites to get in and

out of the city quickly, at the expense of their communities. “[The road] will only serve a

segment of the population, suburbia, and the people passing through the city. It’s major

cost and upkeep will be borne by the very people most affected by it, the city dwellers.

They have to give up homes, park lands, community services and many other things if

this road becomes a reality,” said Rosemont resident Dallas Bartlett. The road would just

be another project to increase the social and psychological separation between the city

and suburbia, Charles Curtis said. “So our former neighbors who live in the county, who

don’t pay any taxes in the city, can just drive through and say, ‘Well, we drove through

and we saw them cats down there smoking pot or something, you know, getting high,’

and go back home to have something to talk about, while we have to crowd up on top of

one another.”45

Gloria Aull from Southeast Baltimore was proud of the city, and said that urban areas and highways were incompatible. “Quite frankly I do not want the road because I am a city girl. I don’t like june bugs, I don’t like the songs of birds in the trees. I have never had them, so how can I miss what I have never had. But I do know concrete city

44 Hearings on the Rosemont Bypass, p. 62-74. 45 Ibid.

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streets and human life in the city, and I don’t believe the concrete roadway is conducive

to human life in this city. I don’t think we are compatible. Boys, you can build your roads

around Baltimore and I say amen, we love you. But don’t come through my

neighborhood, (and) don’t come through Rosemont,” Aull said.46 Although Aull stated

unequivocally that she is a city person, who does not have much use for nature, she does

not want concrete highways, because they will destroy “the human life in this city.” Even though Aull makes a forthright claim against nature, she is still, broadly speaking, an environmentalist. She argues for the control of space. Urban, built, physical space that is human controlled space. It destruction would irreparably harm the social fabric, the relationships and communities, of the city.

Although Aull was speaking about the “concrete roadway,” she and other SCAR members had become active because of the destruction caused by the condemnation process. Fells Point had always been a blue-collar neighborhood, but abandoned homes were attracting vandals, and property crime was on the rise. West side residents knew this kind of destruction all too well. With construction not scheduled to start for another three

to four years, many RAM and MAD member Esther Redd, were still pushing the city to

come up with some sort of interim use for the Franklin-Mulberry corridor. According to

Redd:

We were promised a recreation area at Franklin and Mulberry … did you see anything there capable of something for the children? We are still struggling to get it open by the 1st of September. When we open it we hope you come out to see it to see what the people of Rosemont have done, and the city has done not one thing but argue with us and told us we are not entitled. They say our children vandalize. What can they vandalize that they haven’t got? You throw a seed on the bare ground and it produces nothing. Give that seed something to cultivate and it will bear fruit.47

46 Ibid, p. 56-60. 47 Ibid, 91-84.

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In hindsight, the African American communities on the west side were the victims of a host of social and economic forces that contributed to their lack of stability and physical deterioration. But the road, combined with the city’s haphazard planning and construction process, was an easy and very real target for the frustrations of community members. “We believe that a road is an anathema, an eating disease penetrating through the city, taking neighborhood properties, graveyards, anything else in its way … and what do they leave behind? People without property, old folks that have homes and are too old to get no more because they ain’t going to give you no more homes after you get so old, so what do you have left? They are on the Welfare, or out begging. It leaves behind destruction, rats and everything, and the world is turned upside down, people fighting against each other, separate,” said Hezekiah Morris, who represented the Western

Community Improvement Association. To him the physical destruction caused by the road was responsible for the social destruction of “people fighting against each other,” and “old folks … on the Welfare, or out begging.”48

But the message of the Rosemont hearings was not all apocalyptic. Many offered positive suggestions, all with the same theme: Let the people have a much larger say in planning and redevelopment decisions. “I was here last night and a great number of people seemed to be opposed to everything. Well, in Harlem Park we aren’t opposed to everything, and this statement will prove it, I think,” Charles Curtis said. “First of all, we are all for our former neighbors in the counties driving to and from work on scenic highways that do not deprive us of our homes and the social amenities related thereto. We are all for the road-interest groups such as consulting engineers providing they consult

48 Ibid, 19-23.

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with the persons directly affected by these roads, and providing the black American

citizens are in their employee.”49

The transcript of the Rosemont hearings is unrivaled as a document of the

people’s exasperation with their government, opposition to the road, and fundamentally

optimistic vision for the city. Observers and participants agreed. “While printed road

hearings do not yet approach congressional hearings as a literary art form, they have a vitality all their own,” James Dilts of the Baltimore Sun wrote about the transcript. “The

hearings on Rosemont were held ostensibly to examine four alternate routes around the

community. The anti-expressway forces turned the hearings into a forum on the road

itself.” Reporter Janeless Keidel, who attended all three nights of the hearings, remarked

on the unity between black and white speakers. One “witness noted that some officials

had felt the expressway issue would put Negroes against whites. ‘Instead,’ he said, ‘the

threat of the road is acting like a zipper, pulling black and white together.’”50

Right after the hearings, MAD members were ebullient. Secretary Lin Butler

noted that in three nights of hearings, with almost a hundred speakers, support for the

road was nonexistent. “Not one statement was made in support of the proposed Rosemont

bypass. How will ‘public’ officials react to this very public stand against the highway?

Who will read or hear these cries of rage against the highway? Federal, state, city

officials? Who?” The answer was no one. Only a few token engineers from the state, and

a couple city councilmen already on record as opposing the road, showed up. This

angered MAD members, and they began to blame themselves for a lack of action. The

49 Ibid, 62-74. 50 The official Rosemont transcript is more than 800 pages, with an additional 300 pages of letters, many of them from out-of-towners and suburbanites who had loved ones interred at the cemetery. James Dilts, “Who Wants the Expressway?” Baltimore Sun, 6 June 1971, Box VIII-1 Folder Miscellaneous, MAD Papers; Keidel, “An Expressway Bridges a Gulf between People.”

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feeling was that the group’s structure was not adequate for mobilizing the people’s

passions. They needed to form issue-oriented task forces, instead of permanent

committees. “MAD has always been crisis oriented,” Butler wrote, most effective when focused on one or two issues. As a coalition, this was how MAD should have worked. It had no built in constituency like church or neighborhood groups. Thus if there was nothing to organize around, then the group became dormant. What Butler and other MAD members failed to realize at the time was the strength of MAD as a coalition that could

bring people together. MAD worked best as a support group for different neighborhood

activists, as a clearinghouse for information. This would be its strength over the next six

years. But it would only be its most active when focused around one or two issues, and

eventually die when its member groups stopped fighting the freeway. The Rosemont

hearings were the apex of unified opposition to a freeway in Baltimore. The next five

years would see the MAD coalition slowly break apart, as city leaders changed strategy

and started to build the highway pieced by piece. 51

In July 1970, D’Alesandro announced that the city was endorsing the least destructive of the Rosemont bypass options, which would go along railroad right-of-way

to avoid most of the community. Many of the Rosemont area residents began to focus on

issues other than stopping the road, including saving their community. The condemnation

ordinance was not lifted until the end of 1970, almost three years after city officials had

considered changing the route. Many residents had moved and sold their homes. There

were significant problems with vacancy and vandalism, and remaining residents wanted

the city to start selling or renting homes that they had already condemned. They had

become magnets of vandalism, helping to spread blight. The Franklin-Mulburry corridor

51 Minutes Box Folder, .

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remained a vacant strip of land, two blocks across and fifteen blocks long. One of the

supposed successes of the 3A plan had been a joint development project for the corridor.

Across the three blocks of the new highway would be a school, some housing, and a

shopping center. The city dropped the project because engineers were unsure they could

control the air pollution from the highway, and the school district decided it did not need

a new building in that neighborhood. 52

The empty Franklin-Mulberry corridor had become a symbol of the city’s transportation frustrations, and now city leaders just wanted to start construction. Soon after he assumed office in 1971, new Mayor Donald Schaefer endorsed the 3A plan, and announced that the city would build the highway in sections, starting from the central city outward. Although this had the immediate effect of creating more fronts in the highway war, Schaefer believed it was best to get the road started rather than waste any more time.

“By late 1975, the total expressway system will be planned or under construction.” It also had the effect of splitting the highway opposition, making it supposedly easier to negotiate with each neighborhood.53

By 1971, MAD membership had started to dwindle. At a low point, less than ten people were showing up to each meeting. But the group was reinvigorated in 1972 by a

group of residents who became active because of the threat the highway posed to Leakin

Park, a large wildland park on the far west side. These residents eventually formed the

Volunteers Opposed to the Leakin Park Expressway, and contributed money and leadership to the MAD coalition. Especially important were Carolyn and George Tyson, a

52 James Dilts, “3-Block Platform Project Postponed,” Baltimore Sun, 13 June 1972, Box VIII-1 Folder Franklin-Mulberry, MAD Papers; James Dilts, “Frankin-Mulberry Highway’s Cost Is Double 1972 Estimate,” Baltimore Sun, 1 October 1971, Box VIII-1 Folder Franklin-Mulberry, MAD Papers. 53 Nick Yengich, “McHenry, Fells Pt. Tunnels in Mayor’s Expressway Plan,” The Evening Sun, 25 May, 1972, Box VIII-I Folder, MAD Papers.

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white, middle-class couple from Cantonsville, which sat on the west side of Leakin Park.

Carolyn Tyson became MAD’s president and the face of the organization during its last

sustained attempt to stop the construction of the 3A system. This second phase of MAD

managed to hold off construction on key segments of the road for another couple of

years, which would be key for the system’s eventual defeat. Baltimore’s leaders would

eventually ditch the idea of an East-West expressway in the early 1980s, arguing that the

city no longer needed it. The 1972 MAD was more successful partly because it was

different organization than the 1969 MAD. The earlier MAD reflected an organizing

model of the 1960s, with mass mobilization and a primary interest in social justice goals.

That character had not left completely by 1972, but MAD then was more of a middle-

class organization, focused solely on stopping the road, and interested more in explicit

environmental considerations, rather than the earlier group, which saw environmental

problems as part of the larger social justice considerations.54

###

The success of Baltimore’s road fight came not in any great, final victory. There

was neither a climatic court case, nor a crucial city council vote. After forty years of

trying to build a crosstown expressway, the idea faded into the background as the city

began to make the painful, and incomplete, transition from industrial metropolis to postmodern city. Not building the highway did not save the city, just as building the highway would not have destroyed it. Baltimore’s problems are the result of many other decisions, some made locally, others not, that tore apart the social and economic fabric of

54 Minutes 2 July 1973, Box I-2 Folder Minutes, UB-MAD.; “Name Dropping: Carolyn Tyson,” Baltimore News American, 26 March 1972. Box VIII-1 Folder Miscellaneous, UB-MAD.

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this city. But the road fight is still an important window on the urban experience of the

late 1960s.

The opposition to the road was in part a product of Baltimore’s political system.

Although the city had done away with its ward-based city council in the 1920s and

replaced it with larger districts, there was still a lot of power vested in the old

neighborhood political clubs. This system, a remnant of the boss politics of the early

industrial era, gave community members a relatively large voice in a lot of municipal

issues. But the city council had no control over the planning of the highway system. State

and federal law gave this power to the Maryland Bureau of Public Roads. This power was

the result of attitudes and reform efforts that went back to the Progressive era. When

politicians had control over roads, they used that power to serve their own interests, and

not those of the people. Reformers believed engineers, with their expertise in traffic

planning and road design and construction, would make impartial decisions for the good of the city. The Interstate Highway Act gave engineers tremendous power over vast amounts of urban space. At their most powerful, urban renewal authorities leveled entire neighborhoods, but highway engineers tore through entire cities.

The Baltimore story is an example of the general failure of urban transportation

planning in the postwar era. With the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, the federal

government not only anointed the automobile as America’s dominant mode of

transportation, but also acknowledged the limited access expressway as the dominant

form of roadway. Engineers, planners and city leaders had little choice but to try to ram

highway designs through American cities. For older, industrial cities like Baltimore, this

was devastating. The Charm City was a unique mix of old rowhouses, stately mansions,

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loft wharehouses, heavy industry and a busy port that represented almost two hundred

years of American urbanism. But federal highway policy saw it as just another aging

industrial city that needed to be retrofitted for the automobile age. Despite opposition,

Baltimore’s leaders stuck to the road for almost forty years because it was the only option

open to them. There was no money for other road improvements or a mass transit system,

only for the highway. Like many cities, Baltimore had traffic problems. Cars clogged

downtown streets during the day, and trucks tore up residential thoroughfares. Engineers

told city leaders that the only way to solve these problems was with a highway system.

This system of highway planning and design was not only harmful to the physical

and social fabric of the city, it was also inherently undemocratic. Engineers and urban

designers admitted this in the late 1960s, after the freeway revolts had almost brought a

halt to urban highway construction. This system was especially harmful toward the city’s

African American community. Discrimination forced black Baltimoreans to live in the

city’s worst neighborhoods, and refused to give them the job opportunities and access to capital to improve those neighborhoods. Then city and state officials said that because

their neighborhoods were so degraded, African Americans would bear the brunt of the

city’s urban renewal and highway construction efforts. By the 1960s, these injustices

were too much to bear. African Americans responded in a variety of ways – by rioting,

protesting and organizing into anti-highway groups. The city responded with the Urban

Design Concept Team. But this attempt to appease discontent backfired, as Baltimoreans used this olive branch to their own ends. They took the knowledge and counseling of team engineers and planners and established an argument against the highway system and the postwar urban planning process.

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Within this story, the place of environmental critique is key. Baltimoreans felt the injustices of the highway planning, condemnation and construction process viscerally.

The engineers may have argued that the city needed the road to move 10,000 cars a day across the city by 1980. All west side residents knew was that this was another project that forced them to move to another part of town, abandon their homes and neighborhoods, leave vacant lots where it was dangerous for children to play, and cause uncertainty and panic within the community. This would not be a temporary inconvenience. Once the road was built it would be a huge trench in the middle of the neighborhood, spewing fumes and rattling noise from cars and trucks day and night. The environmental problems caused by the highway were the frame through which Baltimore residents both felt their anger and expressed their opposition. This is not to say that they were not cognizant nor critical of the larger social, cultural and economic issues that created ghettos and left them relatively powerless over them. Most were. But by understanding how people used an environmental frame for their critique we can see that the mapping of race and class on to the city is not just an abstract concept for sociologists and historians, but something that people knew and understood at the time, because they lived with its consequences every day.

The relative socioeconomic position of the Baltimore anti-road activists is what makes this story different from other highway fights. Historians have classified other freeway revolts as environmental movements, but their analysis does not take into account how race and class of the protestors shapes their perspective. Anti-road activists in cities like San Francisco and New Orleans wanted to preserve the scenic vistas of San

Francisco Bay or the Mississippi River. The highway was not a direct threat to their

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community – they just wanted to retain an environmental amenity. To many

Baltimoreans, stopping the road meant preserving their community, their home, or their

livelihood, when they had little option to move somewhere else. Like road activists in

Washington D.C., Baltimoreans were concerned about increased air pollution, but not as

a broad, abstract issue. They did not want to save the earth; they wanted to save their families. Air pollution, traffic, empty lots and vacant buildings were immediate concerns.

This is what makes Baltimore’s road fight part of a different strain of environmental activism.55

With the highway fight, Baltimoreans constructed a unique form of opposition

environmental activism. But the environmental nature of that activism also allowed them

to make key alliances across class, but more importantly, racial lines. In the early part of the 1960s, white mothers from Canton had picketed to protest the integration of their local schools. By the end of the decade, they were making common cause with African

Americans from the west side over the highway issue. There are a number of reasons for this alliance. West side members of RAM and MAD were no immediate threat to

Southeastern neighborhoods. And, as middle-class homeowners, they had more in common with blue-collar white Baltimoreans than any sort of civil rights or student group would have. Most importantly, they were all Baltimoreans. Although their identities diverged on race and class, they converged on spatial grounds. This is not to argue that in the 1960s Baltimore’s residents forged a community centered racial utopia.

55 William Issel, ““Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservation of the City’s Treasured Appearance”: Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt,” Pacific Historical Review 68, no. 4 (1999); Barbara Mills, “Got My Mind Set on Freedom”: Maryland’s Story of Black & White Activism, 1663-2000 (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 2002); Mark Rose, “Reframing American Highway Politics, 1996-1995,” Journal of Planning History 2, no. 3 (2003); Zachary M. Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.: The Three Sisters Bridge in Three Administrations,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004); Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities.”

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The events of April 1968 show how deep and volatile divisions within the city were. But the work of MAD, RAM and SCAR shows that race relations in postwar America were more fluid and dynamic than historical memory, or historical studies, would make it seem. Most importantly, these cross-racial and cross-class connections were most easily made over environmental issues. Baltimoreans on the west side and in the southeastern neighborhoods of Canton and Fells Point were all victims of the capriciousness and destruction of highway building. People saw what it could and would do to their neighborhoods. The environmental problems posed by the highway offered a common enemy for Baltimoreans to rally round. However fleeting their alliance was, it is an important part of understanding the fluidity of urban race relations, but also the dynamics of urban environmental activism.56

56 Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980.

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Epilogue: Justice and Environmentalism in the 1970s

Throughout the postwar period, city residents across the country struggled against

the malapportionment of environmental amenities – like safe housing, parks and clean

streets – as well as hazards – air pollution, urban renewal and highway construction.

Much of this activism peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when urbanites used a

variety of outlets, including Great Society programs and the Civil Rights Movement, to

press their demands upon city leaders. This connected urban environmentalism to some

of the most important strains of protest in the postwar period, including the national

environmental movement. This was arguably the most important connection, but it is one

that has gradually been written out of all histories of postwar American

environmentalism.1

For evidence of social justice concerns and urban issues in the national

environmental movement, one need look no farther than the first Earth Day. In the events

held nationwide on April 22, 1970, much of the activism surrounding Earth Day was

focused on environmental inequity. Chapter two discussed “Black Survival: A Collage of

Skits” which was organized by Wilbur Thomas, Ivory Perry, Freddie Mae Brown and

other St. Louis lead activists. The transcript of this performance was published in Earth

Day – The Beginning: A Guide for Survival, a collection of Earth Day speeches that came

out soon after the event. Although the skit transcript was the only selection published in

1 Samuel P. Hays and Barbara D. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Samuel Hays has been the whipping boy for historians of environmental activism for more than a decade. Despite these constant attacks, Beauty, Health and Permanence remains the only extended survey of postwar environmental activism, which speaks to its firm grounding in primary sources and the fundamental strength of many of its arguments, despite some serious flaws. Adam Rome deals specifically with environmentalism and the 1960s, but concludes that “few environmentalists spoke with a passion about the problem a later generation would call “environmental justice.” See Adam Rome, ""Give Earth a Chance": The Environmental Movement and the Sixties," The Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (2003).

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the chapter entitled, appropriately enough, “Black Survival,” a number of other selections

addressed urban and social justice issues. In “A Time to Live,” African American union leader Charles Hayes addressed the hazards that “working people, black people and poor people have known about … this includes the rats which attack their children, the lead in the peeling paints, which poison their babies, the decrepit housing conditions, the inadequate nutrition, the lack of green space.”2 George Wiley, the director of the National

Welfare Rights Organization, spoke to a crowd at Harvard on Earth Day “as a person

who is black, as a person who has been actively involved in organizing poor people for

social and economic justice in this country over the last several years.” Wiley challenged

his listeners to think about how environmental control affects poor people. “You must not

embark on programs to curb economic growth without placing a priority on maintaining income, so that the poorest people won’t simply be further depressed in their condition

but will have a share, and be able to live decently.” 3

Overall, the essays and speeches excerpted in Earth Day – The Beginning,

represent a challenging picture of the environmental movement at the dawn of the 1970s.

It was heterogeneous, and oppositional, and aware of the apparent contradictions of

organizing a movement to curb consumption and growth in a society that did not

distribute its growth equally. Part of this had to do with the organizers of Earth Day, a group called Environmental Action, which also compiled the collection. Earth Day’s founder, Sen. Gaylord Nelson, formed Environmental Action (EA) to coordinate the nationwide series of protests. EA’s first director was Denis Hayes, a twenty-five year old

veteran of student activism who brought the spirit of the student Left to EA and thus

2 Charles Hayes, "A Time to Live," in Earth Day--the Beginning: A Guide for Survival, ed. Environmental Action (Association) (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). 3 George Wiley, "Ecology and the Poor," in Earth Day--the Beginning.

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Earth Day. Protests and events were focused on corporate and government polluters and

consumerism as much as wilderness preservation or other, more moderate issues. For

much of the 1970s, Environmental Action was the only national organization that focused

on environmental issues that were important to city residents. This reflected the group’s origins in the student left of the 1960s, but this heritage also limited the organization’s effectiveness. From its founding in 1970 until its official demise in 1996, EA operated as a collective: all members had to agree before an issue could be decided. They also would not accept advertising in their magazine, and had trouble raising money from charitable foundations, many of which were hesitant to support organizations with radical leanings.4

EA’s attempt to address environmental issues from the standpoint of social justice

made it unique within the emerging advocacy community. During the 1970s, a number of

new environmental organizations formed, and others expanded their membership. While

many of the older groups continued to focus on issues such as national parks, wilderness

and open space, the newer groups were interested in tackling pollution. But they were not

protest oriented. Many, like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the

Environmental Defense Fund, were dependent on lawsuits and lobbying to improve governmental regulation. Even a protest-oriented organization such as Greenpeace was

more concerned about marine life than correcting environmental inequities in urban areas. This speaks to the predominance of natural landscapes – such as the ocean,

rainforests or wilderness areas – over urban ones in the minds of environmentalists.5

4 Christopher J. Bosso, Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 80-81; Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 180-81. According to Bosso, EA disbanded in 1996, but it has since been reconstituted. See www.enviromental-action.org. 5 The information on these groups comes from Bosso, Environment, Inc.

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This lack of a national voice meant that the work of many urban environmental

groups was only known in their own localities. And once the issue was dealt with, the

groups often died off. There was no national organization to continue the fight and see

the group through problems with leadership and funding. The local focus of these

organizations is what makes them so interesting and important, but it also led to their

relatively short life. All three of the movements discussed in this study died out over the

course of the 1970s.

St. Louis

Lead poisoning activism in St. Louis ended for a number of straightforward

reasons. With a shift in federal policy, the government no longer tolerated activism

among social workers. City agencies signed the paychecks of activists like Larry Black

and Ivory Perry. They used their position to try to improve housing conditions. But by the

middle of the 1970s, the focus among social service agencies became service delivery,

not organizing the poor. This bureaucratic shift cut down on, but did not eliminate, activism. Just as importantly, city governments began to incorporate lead poisoning

prevention in their bureaucracies. Testing was inexpensive and widely available, and the

city had clear procedures for removing lead paint from homes. But childhood lead paint

poisoning continued to remain a problem. As Christian Warren has shown this was

primarily due to the banning of leaded gasoline in the late 1970s. As airborne lead levels

plummeted researchers realized that the average human lead burden was much lower than

many had previously thought. During the 1970s and 1980s, the threshold for childhood

lead poisoning dropped precipitously. What had been a “normal” level in the early 1970s

was, by the 1990s, considered dangerously high, which meant that successful abatement

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became tougher and tougher. City agencies could not just demand that a landlord patch

up some plaster or repaint the apartment.6

The real solution to childhood lead poisoning in St. Louis became abandonment.

St. Louis continued to hemorrhage people, both whites and blacks. By the 1970s, the city’s open housing movement had succeeded in desegregating a number of suburbs.

African Americans who could afford to left the city as fast as possible. The African

American population of St. Louis County has increased fivefold since 1970, and is now

larger than the city’s. Many tiny municipalities on the north side of the county, originally

formed to keep out African Americans, are now majority black. There can be no doubt

that much of this continued exodus has to do with better housing opportunities.

Baltimore

During the early 1970s, Baltimore’s Movement Against Destruction was

reinvigorated by a new membership that used a new set of tactics. Early MAD organizers

were trying to mobilize and inform people about the highway, and get politicians and

bureaucrats to listen to people’s concerns. It was more basic, and more idealistic, form of

organizing that focused on expanding democracy and the input of the people into the

planning and construction process. But other than lobbying local politicians, they had no

direct input. In 1972, highway activists in Baltimore had a new tactic at their disposal –

the lawsuit. Revisions to federal environmental and transportation regulations, including

the National Environmental Policy Act, allowed groups like MAD to sue federal and state

officials over a variety of issues such as the proper filing of an environmental impact

statement. This was an important tool that many environmental organizations have been

6 Christian Warren, Brush With Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

199 200 using since the 1970s. But it also shifted the nature of MAD as a social movement. In

1969, highway activists in Baltimore wanted to change city and transportation planning, giving people more of a voice and changing metropolitan priorities. Politicians and bureaucrats were able to look past them and just go on building the road. Using their power to sue, later activists were able to get a place at the table. But these lawsuits only allowed them to stop or alter existing highway plans, not fundamentally change the city’s transportation system.7

MAD’s lawsuits against the highway system were ultimately unsuccessful. The courts first ruled against them in 1973, when they tried to block construction along the

Franklin-Mulberry corridor. The state began construction soon after; under federal law they would have forfeited highway dollars if the system had been delayed any longer.

Other lawsuits were filed, but none of those were successful. A series of appeals were made through 1974 and 1975, but, eventually, the group ran out of steam, as money was spent on attorneys but case after case was lost. MAD held its last meeting in December

1975. Lawsuits gave groups like MAD standing in a host of issues, but they tended to blunt broader protest and community organizing. All that was needed was money to pay the lawyers and a patience to ride out the appeals process, which could take years.

Although the lawsuit might ultimately be successful, it usually only focused on one project, instead of fomenting broader political and social change. This made legal action a favorite tactic of more affluent groups that wanted to keep certain environmental

7 On lawsuits, see Robert Douglas Lifset, "Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism, 1962--1980" (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2005).The highway fight in Washington, D.C. is an excellent example of this shift. That city contained a group of highway activists that were just as sophisticated and committed as the ones in Baltimore, but Zach Schrag argues that it was really high-level federal bureaucrats who stopped and/or altered key segments the District’s freeway system. See Zachary M. Schrag, "The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.: The Three Sisters Bridge in Three Administrations," Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004).

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hazards – dumps, factories – out of their neighborhoods, but gave poor communities few

options.8

Chicago

At its peak, in 1972, CAP claimed to represent more than 500 groups from across

Chicago. How could a group this strong go from wielding great power – stopping the

Crosstown expressway – to defunct in three years? Much of CAP’s strength was a façade.

A number of groups were drawn into the coalition during the Crosstown fight, but they

quickly faded away when the road was defeated. Other groups or people also joined to

address a certain issue and dropped out when the problem was resolved, which was what

happened with the Garfield Ridge Chapter. Although leaders like Leonard Dubi and

Anne Alberts remained committed to CAP until the end, overall interest from

neighborhood residents waned once local air pollution problems were addressed. To

solve this problem, CAP organizers moved relentlessly from campaign to campaign,

trying to keep interest high. This was effective when the targets were locally regulated

polluters. But when the issue was a complex, national problem such as redlining, success

was a lot harder.

This organizing difficulty spoke to was a fundamental flaw in CAP’s strategy.

Like all Alinsky groups, CAP’s leaders would not allow the group to get involved in

electoral politics. Alinsky believed that this would only make a group part of the system,

and thus part of the problem. The goal was to stay outside the system, to be flexible and

nonpartisan, making allies and exerting pressure on an issue-by-issue basis. But as long

as Daley still controlled the city, there was only so much CAP could do. The nature of the

8 MAD Minutes, 14 July 1975, Box I-2 Folder Minutes, MAD Papers.

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Democratic machine meant that the only power residents truly had was in the voting booth. Daley and the board of Alderman took their regular reelection as permission to run the city exactly as they saw fit. The tremendous success of CAP within such a short time period shows that many Chicagoans ached for an alternative. But the goal was never to unseat the government, only force them to address important issues.

CAP’s relatively short life also speaks to the fragile nature of trying to organize a

“middle-class” protest coalition, especially during the early 1970s. CAP’s core constituency was blue collar ethnics just at the border of working-class and lower middle- class. People in this group had a much different identity and political style than affluent urban liberals from the north side of town, who also considered themselves middle-class.

Different again were African Americans from the city’s south side, who were briefly an important part of CAP during the Crosstown fight. In short, the middle class in a large city like Chicago represented a variety of political ideologies, socioeconomic backgrounds and racial, ethnic and religious identities. And they all approached environmental issues differently, which made forming a citywide protest coalition difficult.

###

The demise of these movements in the mid-1970s was obviously not the end of environmental activism that attempted to address issues related to cities or social justice.

This type of activism would reemerge in the 1980s as the environmental justice movement. But what happened in the interim, especially in cities, is what historians need to fully explore.

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Most likely, the decline of urban activism was the result of a variety of issues,

many of which are related to the national disengagement from central cities during the

1970s. Funding for some existing urban programs remained steady, but there was no new

infusion of money. The Nixon administration also shifted funding from programs that

addressed poverty and housing to block grants, which cities often spent on revenue

generators like convention centers. This disengagement was also encouraged by a major

demographic shift. White flight had been a trickle in many cities during the 1950s and

1960s, but became a flood during the 1970s. This abandonment of the city by the white

middle class gave African American communities unprecedented local political power.

This was a boon for activists and community organizers, who now had direct access to

the system. But it was also a hollow victory. Black administrations took control of cities

that were rapidly losing people, jobs and capital investment, while being burdened with a

large majority of any given region’s poor population, which drained precious resources.

As cities became poorer and blacker, surrounding suburban areas went from being

disengaged to openly hostile, rejecting any legislation, funding proposal or busing plan

that connected them to the problems of the city.9

Urban historians are starting to explain this phenomenon, but it needs to be

connected to the larger environmental movement. The demographic reality of many

environmental organizations – their constituency was largely white and middle class –

can only go so far in explaining their relative disconnection from urban and social justice

issues. There needs to be a broader examination of how environmental groups evolved

9 In his examination of postwar Oakland, Robert Self has provided the most compelling discussion of how suburban areas develop a racial identity and political ideology around hostility to the central city. Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). See also Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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over the 1970s and into the 1980s, especially their relationship to grassroots activism.

Environmental justice was as much a reassertion of local activism as it was an attempt to

address issues that intersected with race, class and social justice.

Tracking the focus of national environmental organizations would seem to be a

relatively simple task. But the fact that it has not been done points to the tremendous deficiency in the history of the postwar environmental activism. There have been very few case studies of both local and national environmental groups.10 This will change, as

the historiography of the postwar era matures, and the historical picture of the 1970s and

1980s comes into focus. But the chroniclers of environmental activism need to keep two broader goals in mind. First, historians should make every attempt to connect environmental politics to broader national and international developments. This relates to both studies of both activism and examinations of broader shifts in environmental attitudes. Secondly, equal attention should be paid to local movements, national organizations, and the relationship between the two. The environmental movement was one of the most important strains of social activism in the postwar era, and it is deserving of a deep and complex history that explains its connections to important national and international developments.

10 This is contrast to the African American Freedom Struggle, which has developed a deep and complex historiography, much of which focuses on local activism. For an excellent overview, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," in The Best American History Essays, 2007, ed. Jacqueline Jones and Organization of American Historians. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

204 Selected Bibliography