Educator and Activist: My Life and Times in the Quest for Environmental Justice

By Bunyan Bryant

Bunyan Bryant grew up in a poor neighborhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the streets were unpaved and where Blacks like him had to step aside when a white person walked by. By the time he was eight years old, his family had moved to Flint, Michigan, where the racism was less overt but the schooling was, if anything, a little worse for this b

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rivertowns Books
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781953943156

Bunyan Bryant

Bunyan I. Bryant Jr. is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. In 1972, he became the first African American member of the School for Environment and Sustainability faculty at Michigan. He is considered a pioneer in the field of environmental justice.In 1990, Bryant organized the first Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards and with several other prominent attendees formed what came to be known as the Michigan Coalition. Their advocacy efforts helped lead to the creation of the EPA's Work Group on Environmental Equity. With Paul Mohai, Bryant co-published Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards (1993), which was one of the first major scholarly books to explore the links between race, class, and environmental hazards. Bryant also established an environmental justice program at the University of Michigan which was the first in the country to offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in the specialty.Bryant's work has been recognized with numerous academic and other honors, including the Environmental Justice Champion Award at the Flint Environmental Justice Summit on March 10, 2017.

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Educator and Activist

Copyright © 2022 by Bunyan Bryant Jr. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Printed in the United States of America . April 2022 . I

ISBN-13:978-1-953943-13-2

ISBN-13:978-1-953943-15-6 (e-book)

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Contents

Foreword by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Prologue

1.A Southern Boyhood

2.Glimpses of a Dangerous World

3.Moving North

4.In Search of a Future

5.Discovering New Worlds

6.Helping Children, Challenging the System

7.From Restless Student to Freedom Fighter

8.Diana, Bill, and the War at Home

9.White, Black, and Gray: Walking the Racial Tightrope

A photo gallery appears following page

10.Building Something New: The Educational Change Team

11.Black Activism on Campus

12.The Peace Team: Nonviolence as a Social Change Strategy

13.Environmental Advocacy: A New Front in the Battle for Human Rights

14.Nurturing Activists: The Illinois South Project and Beyond

15.The Global Struggle for Justice

16.The Michigan Coalition: Bringing the Battle to Washington

17.Amplifying the Voices of the Unheard

18.On the Margins: Surviving Budget Cuts and Academic Politics

19.Continuing the Battle: Flint Takes Center Stage

20.Campfire Seminars

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Source Notes

Index

About the Author

Foreword

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

IT WAS THE FALL OF 2015, and I had just learned about the possibility of lead in Flint’s water. My days and nights were consumed with worry. As a pediatrician, I knew that lead was a poison, and one of the worst kind. It’s a sneaky, insidious, silent neurotoxin that attacks the developing brain. I kept wondering how many baby bottles and sippy cups were being filled with lead poisoned water. How many children’s lives were being forever altered? My worry turned to anger. Why does this same kind of thing keep happening to the most disadvantaged children, to children of color?

This was not a new story.

Over twenty years before, as an undergrad, I’d learned about the concept of environmental injustice. Bunyan Bryant was one of my early mentors. He studied, wrote about, and taught environmental issues and public health in the intersectional terms of place, race, and poverty. His work transformed the study of environmentalism from one narrowly centered on trees, animals, and forests, to one that embraced cities, systems, and people.

And as a Flint native—with family still there—Bryant focused much of his research and advocacy on that city with its long history of toxic pollution in poor and brown neighborhoods. Bryant had even fought lead pollution in Flint decades ago, when a plant that burned lead-painted wood chips was built in a predominately Black neighborhood.

I had the opportunity to take courses, hear lectures, and participate in workshops led by Bryant and other environmental justice academic groundbreakers, including his colleague Paul Mohai. Bryant’s work highlighted, through science, how race and poverty are correlated with incidents of pollution, and showed that racial minorities and low-income communities face an unequal and disproportionate share of environmental and public health burdens. His work taught me that anecdotes alone are not science; that numbers and statistics contain power. And his work taught me that environmental work wasn’t just about science, it was also about action.

Bryant’s story exemplifies that the personal is political. And for him the personal was stark. Bryant’s early life was spent as a little boy warmed by his grandmother’s cooking in segregated Jim Crow Arkansas, with lynching and race riots echoing in the background, and then as a reluctant Great Migration traveler on his way to industrial Flint, with the more-subtle perniciousness of Northern racism at play. He traded the misery and monotony of a grueling factory job for the struggles of a destitute student at Eastern Michigan University, sometimes too weak from hunger to study and often battling persistent housing discrimination. He witnessed and confronted vile discrimination of Black juvenile psychology patients as a social worker. He was a civil rights and antiwar activist at the hallmark moment of the movement in one of its intellectual and activist centers, Ann Arbor. And for most of his career, he was one of a handful of Black professors at the University of Michigan, and for many years the only one at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, seeking respect and operating at the margins.

Yet through it all, his story emanates a sense of optimism and hope. Bryant rightly affirms that hard work and serendipity played a role in his success; but he never forgets who he is and where he came from. That consciousness pervades his work and defines its purpose.

Bryant isn’t one to dwell only on the problems. Whether addressing housing discrimination, the best care for traumatized youth, or clean air policies, Bryant was never an armchair academic. His science was practical and directly applicable. He came up with solutions, he proposed policies, he ran for office, he inspired. He intrinsically understood that a central tenet of environmental justice is that impacted communities must have a voice in the proposed solutions. When people have a say, smarter decisions are made—for both the environment and public health.

What Bryant taught stayed with me as I went on to study medicine and public health, and it was never far from my thoughts as I worked in his hometown of Flint over the years. It was this take-action mantra that helped transform my worry and anger into science-based and community-partnered action that ultimately helped expose the Flint water crisis. Bryant’s work helped me understand that conducting my lead-in-water research wasn’t enough. I had to stand up with that research at a press conference, build coalitions, and fight for lasting change. His work put my lead-in-water research in context, as part of the systemic injustice wrought on Flint by a history of deindustrialization and racism.

A few months after the Flint water crisis was exposed, I had a chance to reconnect with Bryant. Always the professor, he had keen observations to share. We talked about science and policy, organizing and advocacy, and recovery and justice. But more than anything, I just wanted to thank him for the profound impact his foundational work had on me (and hundreds of former students) and, subsequently and serendipitously, on his hometown.

Flint’s water crisis became a national story and finally catapulted the concept of environmental justice into mainstream America. Communities across the nation were opening their eyes to, and acting on, similar injustices, many of them, like Flint, with racism at the center. As horrendous as the water crisis has been, the global recognition of environmental injustice—of environmental racism, using Bryant’s language and conceptual framework—is his legacy.

DR. MONA HANNA-ATTISHA is the C.S. Mott Endowed Professor of Public Health at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine in Flint, Michigan. The text of this Foreword has been partially adapted from her book What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope (One World, 2018).

Prologue

ONE BRIGHT, SUNNY AFTERNOON in May 1952, I found myself standing on the steps of the Rackham Graduate School on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan (U-M). It felt good to be outside. I took a deep breath of fresh air, stretched my arms upward as if reaching for the sky, and then brought them back to my side, relaxing and letting the sun’s heat engulf my body. The view in all directions was beautiful. The campus was grand, studded with large, stately brick buildings, and alive with activity—students carrying books and chatting animatedly as they strolled from building to building, or relaxing with friends on the grass. What a wonderful place to be young, learning, and energized, with a life of exciting opportunities to look forward to.

But I wasn’t a student at U-M. I was a high school senior from Flint, Michigan, a working-class city some fifty miles north of Ann Arbor, dominated by the vast General Motors plant that then employed some 70,000 people. I was at U-M to attend a conference with a group of other high school students from across the state who were preparing to be Junior Legislators for a day at the Michigan state capitol.

I’d never been in an oasis of learning and achievement like UM. In fact, I’d never even imagined such a place, either during my teenage years in Flint or during my earlier life, when I’d lived with my family in a poor neighborhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, where most of the streets were unpaved and where Blacks like me were expected to step aside when a white person walked by.

So it’s little wonder that, as I took in the vista from the steps of the graduate school building, my dominant emotion was one of awe bordering on disbelief—followed closely by the overwhelming conviction that this was not a place for someone like me. After all, I couldn’t help noticing that not one of the students I saw looked like me. I could never compete with these people, I thought. They must be geniuses!

I know that many high school seniors who visit a wonderful university campus come away thrilled with anticipation of their own looming college careers. Not me. The fact is that academics was not that important to me or to the guys I grew up with. Sports was the only magnet that drew us to school. Football, basketball, and track gave us an avenue for competition where we could achieve popularity in school, with the girls, and in our community. Sports was also one of the few places where our color usually didn’t hold us back—unlike the classroom, where it seemed obvious to me and my buddies that no white teacher would ever give a grade of A to a male student with brown skin.

So Black males who couldn’t take part in school sports usually dropped out. University? That was nothing but a dream.

I left U-M that day resigned to my obvious destiny as a factory worker in Flint.

I didn’t know then that my life would take some unexpected turns. I didn’t anticipate how deeply I would hate the boring, mind less work at the Buick plant in Flint—despite the fact that, from day one, I was earning more money than my father ever had. I didn’t foresee how restless and unhappy I would feel at home, stuck in my dead-end job. I would need to find a way out, and again athletics would be the lure. I learned from some of my old high school buddies that Michigan State Normal College might offer me a chance to participate in track and field.

Despite my misgivings, I enrolled at the college. And there I met Roy, a Black student from Detroit who helped me change some of my long-held prejudices about whites. I discovered that Roy was earning top grades in even the most difficult courses. I reasoned that if Roy could excel under white instructors, then maybe I could, too. I began to study hard, and soon I was also earning As.

Just knowing that I would one day be earning my bachelor’s degree would have amazed me that afternoon on the campus of the University of Michigan. It would have been inconceivable to me that I would then return to this very campus, earn two graduate degrees, and go on to teach at this world-class institution, mentoring some of the nation’s finest students, writing articles for peer-reviewed journals, and becoming a respected leader in my field.

And this would be just a part of what life would have in store for me. In the 1960s and 1970s, I was a participant and leader in the movements for civil rights, students’ rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, and international peace. As a young professor, I would combine my academic background with my personal commitment to human rights and equal justice to play a major role in creating a new field of study—environmental justice—within the university’s School for Environment and Sustainability. This new field would include a curriculum of courses, internships, and scientific research designed to train students to be advocates for environmental justice. It eventually embraced U-M’s Environmental Justice Initiative, which I would serve as director. Through this initiative, I would have the opportunity to help vulnerable communities, mostly minority and low-income, learn the dangers of environmental pollutants and fight for fair treatment from businesses and government.

I would go on to travel the world, from Kenya and Senegal to China and South Korea, observing, learning from, and supporting battles for environmental and social justice. I would participate in a national movement to combat racially biased policies that damaged the life prospects of millions of Black Americans as well as other disadvantaged people. I would serve on the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council under President Bill Clinton, helping governmental organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency to craft better rules and policies for tackling problems from industrial waste to climate change. And I would help to train, mentor, and guide a generation of passionate young advocates to carry on the same work, including such leaders as Mona Hanna-Attisha, the physician, educator, and activist named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2016 for her work in combating the scourge of health-threatening water pollution in Flint, Michigan—the very town from which my own long and unexpected journey to leadership had begun.

Looking back, I can see that my story, as it unfolded from that moment on the campus of U-M, was an unpredictable one. Yet I also know that I am far from unique. There are millions of Black youngsters who come from humble backgrounds who need to be nurtured and mentored as I was. Like them, I suffered from a lack of opportunities and the persistent impact of racism. I made it onto the right path with the help of some good fortune, where I found I had a lot of catch-up work to do to overcome my academic deficiencies. Along the way, I was encouraged by both Blacks and whites who wanted me to succeed. This book tells the story of how it all happened.

I hope my readers will include Black youngsters who suspect they may destined to lives of poverty, frustration, and despair. For them, my message is one of hope. Understand the legacy of slavery and its impact. But don’t let it stop you. In our society, white privilege based not upon merit but upon entitlement or unearned assets gives an unfair advantage to millions of our fellow citizens. The benefits provided by programs like affirmative action represent a minuscule portion of the trillions of dollars of debt owed to African Americans after centuries of unpaid labor, Jim Crow, and racial discrimination. It is important for the future of our society that this debt be paid. But we Black Americans can’t wait for that to happen. Most of our valuable time must be devoted to the current struggle to abolish racial discrimination and the structures that maintain it.

I encourage you to draw your strength from history and from the heroes and heroines whose shoulders we now stand upon. I hope you’ll derive some inspiration from these pages, which recount the story of one individual who has walked the same path you are taking now.

1. A Southern Boyhood

IN SOME WAYS, my early boyhood in the American South could be viewed as idyllic.

I was born to Bunyan Bryant and his wife, Christolee Rowe, in 1935 during the Great Depression. I was soon joined by two brothers, Norman in 1936 and Earl in 1938, and we all lived in a small frame house at the top of the hill on West 19th Street near South Pine Street in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was a Black neighborhood sandwiched between two white communities, and at the time our lives seemed remarkably free of racial strife—at least, on the surface.

Until I was eight years old, my world consisted mainly of two square blocks that extended from West 18th to West 20th Streets and from South Pine to South Maple Streets, where many of our family members lived. My Uncle Ollie, my father’s brother, ran his barbershop in a house directly across the street from us. My paternal Aunt Sadie and Uncle Earl Crawford lived two houses beyond the vacant lot next to our house. My maternal grandparents, Daddy and Mama Rowe, lived at the bottom of our hill.

Even beyond my family, the sense of community in my neighborhood was strong. It was part of the social code for residents of the neighborhood to converse with each other, even if they were not acquainted. Adults in my community chastised me if I failed to speak: What’s wrong with you, boy, the cat got your tongue? or Boy, can’t you speak? To converse with friends and strangers alike became second nature to me.

Within this small, close-knit world, we boys had plenty of opportunities for fun. During the day, we built our own scooters by nailing two-by-fours at right angles to one another. On the outer edge or the underside of one of the boards, we attached roller skates. Then we nailed a piece of wood to the upright piece to serve as a handlebar. We used considerable imagination in our decoration, nailing pop-bottle tops to our scooters to give them charm and appeal. We used scrap wood and old wagon wheels to build soapbox derby cars, too, and decorated them in similar fashion. By normal standards, our creations were ugly, but they were beautiful to us. We took our scooters, wagons, and derby cars to Pine Street and raced them on the paved hill, zooming past Smith’s grocery store. In those days, few cars used South Pine Street, even though it was paved; we had it mostly to ourselves.

Across South Oak Street, at the side of my grandparents’ house, was a large vacant field. Teenage boys turned a part of that field of weeds into a softball field. We had a great view of their games from my grandparents’ porch. Because the house was built on the side of a hill, we could stand or sit on the porch, lean over the banister, and look down over the dirt road upon the field as if we had a seat in the bleachers at a stadium. In the hot summer evenings, I used to enjoy watching fabulous softball games side-by-side with my grandfather. The games drew crowds of people, who stood or sat on the grassy sidelines near the road to watch.

All was not play in summertime. Across West 19th and South Oak Streets from where the baseball games took place was another open field with a large blackberry patch. On hot summer days, my brother Norman, other neighborhood kids, and I picked blackberries for our mothers to make cobblers. I usually ate as many berries during picking as I ended up taking home. We never went into this patch alone because snakes lived off the berries. We had to be careful where we put our hands, watchful not only for snakes but also for thorns on the vines.

I had chores to do in the garden behind our house. I hated pulling weeds in the garden; it was always hot, backbreaking work. But my mother insisted we help her, and I remember the beads of sweat running down her face and neck and dampening the upper part of her dress. We got lots of turnip greens, potatoes, green beans, carrots, and onions from our garden, and we stored them on the back porch.

At the southeast corner of West 19th and South Pine was Taylor’s Barbecue. Taylor was a Black businessman who had built a small rectangular structure on the side of his house that looked like a screened-in porch. The dirt floor inside had long tables covered with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and chairs. Even as a kid I thought it odd for a commercial eating place to have a dirt floor, but that failed to spoil my appetite. I thought Taylor sold the best fish and barbecue sandwiches in the world. Often on the weekend, around dusk, my maternal Aunt Tan, who lived with Daddy and Mama Rowe, would send me to Taylor’s for barbecue or catfish or buffalofish sandwiches.

All of us would sit on the front porch of Daddy and Mama Rowe’s house on hot summer nights eating fish and barbecue sandwiches and drinking Dr. Pepper or Royal Crown Cola. We chewed, smacked our lips, and talked about how good the catfish or barbecue was, with a symphony of chirping crickets providing background music. The porch was partially lit by a dim light from the living room, and fireflies lit up the other parts of our universe. Sometimes, we just sat in the darkness and ate, and other times the adults told stories.

Oftentimes, we children became mischievous in the dark. We would place a two-foot length of garden hose in the street and tie a long string to it that extended to our hiding place in the bushes. When people walked up the dimly lit street, we would pull the hose across in front of them, hoping they would think it was a snake. Invariably, they would stop. Some picked up large rocks, ready to crush what they thought to be a snake, while others would quickly figure it out, pick up the string, and follow it. We’d burst out running in all directions, often chased but never caught.

We played hide-and-go-seek in the dark for hours, and we protested vehemently when our parents called us to bed. Every so often, the neighborhood would close off the corner of West 18th and Pine Streets for a street dance. The corner was the site of a poolroom, a barbershop, and a confectionery where combinations of sweets were sold. I remember going to these street dances with my aunts, who were in the market for boyfriends. Music filled the air; teenagers danced, and so did the children. Hot dogs, ice cream, assorted sweets, and pop were in abundance.

MY MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS, Daddy and Mama Rowe, played a big role in my young life. Their story, as I learned it over the years, reflects some of the shifting tides of African American life.

My great-grandfather James Henry Kingfish Rowe was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, during the Civil War. In 1883, he migrated to Little Rock with his wife, Anna Venerable, and their five-year-old son, my grandfather James Rowe. After a rough start working as a laborer, Kingfish learned bricklaying by watching the masons on job sites, and in time the money Kingfish made from his trade allowed his family a life of luxury, compared with that of their neighbors. Kingfish lived in a respectable house, became a member of the Elks Lodge, and had a top-of-the-line horse-drawn carriage. When James Jr. grew up, he and Kingfish worked as bricklayers.

Willie Pullum Rowe, my maternal grandmother, was born in Mississippi in 1893, the first year of one of the worst depressions in American history. She later moved to Little Rock with her father, Tom Pullum, and her mother, Willie Ann, along with her brothers and sisters. The family thought of Tom Pullum as white, although his death certificate claimed he was colored, while Willie Ann was very dark-skinned. Some of their children, including Willie, could pass for white. Although the Pullum name has become extinct, our family pays homage to it, because we like to feel that the blood of this patriarch runs deep in our veins and binds us together as an extended family.

With his seventh-grade education, James Jr.—my grandfather—went on to outdo his father as a contractor, employing as many as twenty brick masons and several laborers. He always claimed he could have become a millionaire if his wife, Willie, had let him invest in land to build houses. With a reputation for being an honest, dependable, and skilled tradesman, James was highly respected among white contractors, many of whom subcontracted to him to complete various jobs. Some would even have fronted for him in applying for bank loans to expand his business, but Willie would have no part of it. Having been born into abject poverty in Mississippi, she did not trust white folks or bankers. For many years, she stuffed money in the post of her brass bed rather than deposit it in a bank.

James and Willie Rowe had six children, including my mother, Christolee, who was born in 1911. There was also a boy who died while very young. Along with her sister Margaret (whom I knew as Aunt Jeannie), my mother helped with the washing, ironing, sewing, canning, cooking, and house cleaning. Except for a few times during the Great Depression of the 1930s, they always had plenty to eat and decent clothes to wear, and they took pride in how they looked. They were all deeply involved in the church. Because of their father’s success in business and his position as deacon in First Baptist Church of Highland Park, the Rowe family had considerable status in the community.

But like millions of other families throughout the land, the Rowe family suffered during the Great Depression. Even my grandfather was out of work. People stopped buying houses, and new construction projects came to a halt. James would leave the house early in the morning in search of work and return at night with less than a dollar, maybe enough for the next meal. He was under a lot of pressure, with five daughters and a wife to feed.

Although James sometimes thought about stealing food, he never did. Instead, he tried whatever he could think of to feed his family. He got the idea of making tombstones, because large numbers of people were committing suicide, and for a while, the Rowe family’s front yard looked like a graveyard with rows of tombstones for sale. But people were too poor even to buy tombstones for their loved ones, and James’s new business failed.

For a while, he resorted to picking cotton. Every morning at four a.m., a truck would leave 18th and Pine Streets carrying a full load of men to the cotton fields, and James Rowe was one of them. He labored for hours in the hot sun. Workers were paid forty cents for each hundred pounds of cotton they picked and a dime for transporting the bags to the truck to be hauled away. And you know, he used to tell me, I could never get a hundred pounds of cotton in a day. Couldn’t get a hundred pounds of cotton to save my life. So after working twelve hours a day for three days, James would bring home only about ninety cents, although his hands had painfully swelled to twice their normal size. He had to give up picking cotton.

The Great Depression also devastated my great-grandfather Kingfish, wiping out his savings. By the time I knew him, Kingfish lived with James and Willie, in a room in the back of their kitchen.

As a small child, I spent a lot of time at Daddy and Mama Rowe’s. During the summer months, on laundry days, Mama Rowe would rise at four a.m. so she could have her washing out on the line by seven a.m., long before the scorching heat. She did her washing on the screened-in back porch, using both a wringer washing machine and a scrub board, which was a rectangular piece of ribbed tin encased in a wood frame with two legs and sitting at a forty-five-degree angle in a galvanized tub. She would take a piece of clothing, dowse it in sudsy water, and then rub it on the ribbed section of the scrub board until it was clean. It was hard, time-consuming work.

Sometimes it seemed as if Mama Rowe was washing away her sins, because as she worked she sang hymns she had memorized over the years (she was a member of the First Baptist choir). Occasionally I would hear her cry out, Great day in the morning, which I took to mean that all was right in her world. By seven o’clock in the morning, her clothes were soaked in sweat. Later in the day, the backyard was cordoned off with lines of white sheets, pillowcases, undergarments, and clothes waiting to be kiss-dried by the sun, as Mama Rowe used to say.

On any given day during the hot month of August, Mama Rowe might turn her kitchen into a steaming hot cannery. The garden behind the chicken coop was bountiful. Starting at four-thirty a.m., Mama