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WASTE WASTE One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret Catherine Coleman Flowers Foreword by Bryan Stevenson For Taylor, K

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WASTE WASTE One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret Catherine Coleman Flowers Foreword by Bryan Stevenson For Taylor, K.J., and seven generations to come Contents Foreword by Bryan Stevenson Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Epilogue Acknowledgments Foreword Our planet is dying. It is not a death from natural causes or some inevitable decline. Instead, we are slowly killing our future through greed, abuse of precious resources, reckless consumption, and irresponsible behavior. The environmental crisis—like most crises—will victimize the poor and vulnerable the most. In the United States, Black people, indigenous people, and communities of color will bear the heaviest burden of avoidable disease, degraded quality of life, and unnecessary suffering. This has sadly become the American story. For too long, the impact of environmental neglect on the poor and people of color has gone unaddressed, which is why the advocacy of people like Catherine Flowers is so important. Policymakers in our nation are painfully ignorant about the multiple ways low-income communities suffer from avoidable illness. Elected officials who believe we eradicated hookworm infections in the U.S. decades ago know nothing about what we’ve documented in Lowndes County, Alabama. Our policymakers have heard about asthma, lead poisoning, cancer, and a multitude of other sicknesses resulting from toxins, contaminants, and industrial waste, but there has been no appropriate response to the burden of these diseases on the poor. Our collective failure to invest in adequate sanitation, clean drinking water, and effective responses to pollution is taking life from the most vulnerable and marginalized among us. In Alabama’s rural Black Belt, the evidence of our neglect and exploitation of the poor can be seen everywhere. I met Catherine Flowers many years ago when impoverished Black residents in Lowndes County were being arrested and criminally prosecuted for not having functioning septic systems—even while being denied basic services and the infrastructure needed to install an effective system. It’s a familiar dynamic Black people have endured since being forcibly trafficked to this continent from Africa. Policymakers create structural inequality and then criminalize those most burdened and at risk who fail to meet the demands of that structure. The good news is that the work of Catherine Flowers demonstrates that there is more to this narrative. The children of the formerly enslaved in this region, the people terrorized by convict leasing and lynching, excluded by segregation and Jim Crow, don’t just live in the rural South—they persist with an unparalleled determination to survive and fight for equality and fair treatment. It is critical that we understand their stories if we are to save our planet. I grew up in a poor, racially segregated rural community. Managing wastewater was a long-term challenge in our home. My brother and I spent years pumping raw sewage onto the same backyard where we played football and baseball. Flushing a toilet, taking a shower or a bath was perilous and came with unknown hazards for the household. Some of our neighbors relied on outhouses with no indoor plumbing to manage. As I’ve grown older, I now realize that the worst part of these conditions is that we were made to believe that this is acceptable—just the way things are—in the wealthiest nation in the world. It is this orientation to environmental abuse, this accommodation of poverty and racially biased management of toxins and contaminants, that may be the most insidious aspect of our current crisis. Too many believe that we have no choice; this is the best we can do. Catherine Flowers tells an important story and reminds us that we do have a choice, we can do better. Over the last thirty years, a movement has emerged to change the way we talk and think about environmental justice. Environmentalists have not always been as responsive to the perspective of the poor and the impact of environmental abuse on communities of color but through tireless advocacy and important work like the efforts detailed in this book, that is changing. There is a new chapter in the quest for environmental justice that is long overdue. America’s dirty secret is a secret no more and I pray that we all have the courage to act and to save the Earth’s most precious possession, its people. Bryan Stevenson WASTE Chapter 1 My story starts in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. It’s part of Alabama’s Black Belt, a broad swath of rich, dark soil worked and inhabited largely by poor Black people who, like me, are descendants of slaves. Our ancestors were ripped from their homes and brought here to pick the cotton that thrived in the fertile earth. I grew up here, left to get an education, and followed a range of professional opportunities. But something about that soil gets in your blood. I came back with hopes of helping good, hard-working people rise up out of the poverty that bogs them down like Alabama mud. Little did I know that the soil itself would lead me to my life’s mission. A big part of my work now is educating people about rural poverty and environmental injustice—how poor people are trapped in conditions no one else would put up with, both in Alabama and around the United States. Those conditions—polluted air, tainted water, untreated sewage—make people sick. They make it hard for children to thrive and adults to succeed. I tell people about the ways climate change is making those conditions even worse, and even more widespread, and that now they’re starting to afflict people who aren’t used to that kind of misery. I speak to audiences around the country and even abroad. But when I’m home in Alabama, I take people to see such conditions for themselves. We visit families crowded into rundown homes where no one should have to live, where people lack heat in the winter and plumbing in all seasons. We visit homes in the country with no means of wastewater treatment, because septic systems cost more than most people earn in a year and tend to fail anyway in the impervious clay soil. Families cope the best they can, mainly by jerryrigging PVC pipe to drain sewage from houses and into cesspools outside. In other words, what goes into their toilets oozes outside into the woods or yards, where children and pets play. Pools of waste form breeding grounds for parasites and disease. Moving to town isn’t necessarily a solution. We meet families who pay for wastewater treatment in the towns where they live, only to have raw sewage back up into their homes, saturating rugs and carpets, whenever it rains—and it rains a lot in Alabama. We see firsthand the conditions that led to a resurgence of hookworm, an energy-sapping tropical parasite that northern newspaper headlines called “the germ of laziness” in the early twentieth century when it was rampant in the South. It was considered eradicated by mid-century, when indoor plumbing was commonplace. Nobody gave it much thought until a few years ago. That’s when I convinced tropical disease experts to test Lowndes County residents for parasites, and they found that hookworm was back. That finding was ominous because Lowndes County isn’t unique in its poverty or its geography. No one knows yet how far the hookworm infestation has spread. Before I take anyone to Lowndes County, we start in nearby Montgomery, the state capital and one-time capital of the Confederacy, with a history lesson. Maybe it’s the former history teacher in me, but I believe that you can’t understand how rural Alabama wound up with raw sewage in people’s yards without first learning about how African Americans were brought here as slaves to work the soil. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Montgomery was a hub for the domestic slave trade, largely because cotton in those days was such a laborintensive crop and grew so well here. The clay soil holds water better than it drains it, keeping the roots of the cotton plant well hydrated. What was good for cotton turned out not to be so good for plumbing, as we’ll see later. Today, reminders of the slave trade and Alabama’s racist history appear all around downtown Montgomery. The First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis lived briefly in 1861, is a tourist spot on Washington Avenue now. Then there’s the white-columned capitol, where Governor George Wallace famously declared in his 1963 inaugural speech, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Some landmarks of the old South and Jim Crow era have taken on a whole new life. There’s the old Greyhound station, where a mixed-race group of mostly young people called Freedom Riders stepped off a bus they’d boarded to protest segregation on public transit and into a violent mob in 1961. Now it’s the Freedom Rides Museum. The Rosa Parks Museum stands on Montgomery Street, where Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. On Commerce Street, the former site of holding pens for slaves awaiting auction now houses the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), founded by attorney Bryan Stevenson to secure justice for marginalized people. The EJI may be best known for exonerating death-row clients such as Walter McMillian, whose story Stevenson tells in his memoir Just Mercy, but its work goes beyond challenging unfair convictions and laws. It works to achieve criminal justice reform more broadly, to share the history of racial injustice, and to help poor families who have been criminalized for their poverty. I serve there as rural development manager. Just behind the EJI offices, facing Coosa Street, is the Legacy Museum, an EJI project that documents the connection between slavery and mass incarceration in America. Visitors there learn, among other things, how convict leasing—or selling the labor of inmates often arrested and jailed on bogus or minor charges—kept slavery alive long after the Civil War. They watch recorded interviews with modern-day inmates, including Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent twenty-eight years on death row for murders he didn’t commit. His conviction was overturned in 2015 because of EJI’s representation. Nearby, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also created by EJI, stands as the first-ever lynching memorial in the United States. EJI has documented more than 4,400 lynchings of Black people between 1877 and 1950, including fourteen from Lowndes County. At the memorial, victims’ names are etched on eight hundred six-foot steel slabs—one for each county where a lynching took place—suspended from above. At first, the slabs meet visitors at eye level. Gradually, the floor slopes downward, until visitors crane their necks to read names. By the end of the pathway through the memorial, the monuments seem to hang as high as the victims they honor once did. Plaques along the way narrate the victims’ alleged offenses: “Drinking from a white man’s well,” “organizing black voters,” “complaining about the recent lynching of her husband,” or just “standing around” in a white neighborhood. The memorial is a powerful reminder of a not-so-distant past and a chance to pay respect to men, women, and children so horrifically robbed of dignity, compassion, and humanity. It’s a quick drive from downtown Montgomery to the Lowndes County line as our tour continues, but in many ways we could be stepping back in time. For me, it’s always a homecoming. I live in Montgomery now, but my heart is in the country. It’s peaceful and beautiful, with cows grazing in green pastures on gently rolling hills, and moss dripping from shade trees. I love this area despite its tortured history. I feel my ancestors in this soil, and that’s what keeps bringing me here. This drive always reminds me of who I am. We drive along Highway 80, the path of the historic march from Selma to Montgomery led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 to campaign for voting rights for Black people. Most of the fifty-four-mile march passed through Lowndes County, where not a single Black person was then registered to vote, even though African Americans made up a majority of the residents. White landowners made sure of that through intimidation and force. At the town of White Hall on Highway 80 West, we pull into the Lowndes Interpretive Center, a National Park Service site commemorating the march. Exhibits also portray aspects of sharecropper life and the infamous “Tent City” where Black families lived in the mud and muck for up to two years when white landowners evicted them for daring to register to vote after the march. The Black Power movement was born in Lowndes County, led by Stokely Carmichael, a charismatic young field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Carmichael was impatient with the gentler philosophy of Rev. King. He believed electoral power was a surer way to equality than moral persuasion, and he didn’t see a future with Republicans or Democrats. Democrats, after all, backed Governor Wallace. Instead, he helped create a new party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Its logo, designed by SNCC volunteers Jennifer Lawson and Courtland Cox, was a snarling black panther that would soon be familiar across America. Inspired by stories of the movement in Lowndes County, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, and adopted the logo as its symbol. Lowndes County’s new party didn’t last, but it lived long enough to get Black candidates on the ballot and to be taken seriously by local Democrats. Armed with courage, persistence, lawsuits, and the enforcement power of the federal government, Black residents finally got to exercise their franchise. In 1970, they elected three Black candidates to public office, including the county’s first Black sheriff. The struggle didn’t end there, though. Cotton was no longer king, and had become a highly mechanized crop anyway, requiring far less labor than before. The economy, built on a nearly free, unskilled workforce, stagnated. There are only two traffic lights in the whole county. Wastewater treatment ranges from inadequate to nonexistent. The same is true of internet and cable television service in parts of the county. Rural hospitals are sadly lacking. A lack of modern infrastructure left Lowndes County on the sidelines when companies looked for places to locate. Politically, Lowndes County, like other counties in the Black Belt, never had a chance. Voting power in a place as sparsely populated as Lowndes County— about 11,000 people at last count—doesn’t translate into clout beyond the county’s borders. County residents still suffer from widespread poverty and neglect, even though Montgomery is just a few miles down the road. That brings us to the present. An estimated 90 percent of Lowndes households have failing or inadequate wastewater systems, although no one took the time to count until my organization, then called the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE), organized a door-to-door survey. The head of one of those households for years was Pamela Rush. Pam, a forty-two-year-old mother with a cautious smile and a hint of shyness, greeted many of my tour groups at the door of the faded blue single-wide trailer she shared with her two children. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, as well as famous activists like Jane Fonda and Reverend Dr. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign, traveled down the dusty road to Pam’s home, where they saw a picture that was hard to shake. The trailer barely protected Pamela and her children, now ages eleven and sixteen, from the elements. Gaps in the walls had let opossums and other wild animals from the surrounding woods squeeze in, so Pam had stuffed rags in the holes and set traps outside the front door. Visitors were cautioned to watch their step on the sloping, flimsy floors, which were soft under foot in spots. Pam’s monthly checks—less than $1,000 a month from disability and child support payments—didn’t stretch far enough to cover repairs. Still, she did her best to make a comfortable home for her children, shopping secondhand at the Salvation Army. The trailer was musty, poorly ventilated, and dimly lit, with water-stained popcorn ceilings and exposed electrical wiring. But Pam had arranged an old sofa and chairs in a cozy semicircle around the television set and hung framed prints on the mildew-streaked walls. A mobile of three brownskinned angels, bearing the words “Angels live here,” hung from the wall. In Pam’s daughter’s room a different kind of adornment hung from the headboard—a mask for a CPAP machine—until that room became unlivable. The child suffers from asthma and needed the machine to breathe at night amid the mold thriving in the damp walls. At the rear of the home, overlooking a small yard and dense woods, was a collapsed deck. Beside the deck a pipe spewed raw sewage onto the ground. The toilet paper and feces told a story of the lost American dream much more clearly than Pam ever could. The pride and independence of home ownership came to rest there, in that stinking pool. Visitors walked through Pam’s house and left shaken. Everyone agreed it was unacceptable and that somebody should do something. Someone eventually did, but that comes much later in our story. People ask sometimes why someone like Pam doesn’t just move. A look at her mortgage papers provides one reason. She paid about $113,000 for the trailer in 1995, with an interest rate of 10 percent. Twenty-four years later, she still owed $13,000, but the trailer was worthless. Despite this, payments came due each month. And buying a septic system was out of the question. New ones in Lowndes, with its impermeable soils and high water tables, can easily cost more than $15,000, and nearly twice that if there is a need for an engineered system. This does not include the cost of perc tests—tests that determine whether the soil can absorb fluids—or design. We recently received bids for $21,000 and $28,000 for an engineered system on a half-acre of land. That’s an example of the structural poverty that traps good, hard-working people where they are. This shouldn’t happen in twenty-first-century America. Yet it does, and not just in Lowndes County. Poor people in rural areas around the country face similar problems. Too many Americans live without any affordable means of cleanly disposing of the waste from their toilets, and must live with the resulting filth. They lack what most Americans take for granted: the right to flush and forget. I call it America’s dirty secret, and I’m bringing it out in the open. I came to this fight accidentally, but looking back on my life, everything pointed me this way. My parents, Mattie and J.C. Coleman, were active in the civil rights movement. Our house was a place other activists, including icons like Carmichael, would visit to talk about strategy and issues of the day. I loved those front-porch conversations, and I soaked them all up. Maybe organizing is in my blood, because I’ve been fighting for what’s right since high school, when my father and I campaigned successfully for the removal of a principal and superintendent who were racist and substandard. I went to college, got married, joined the Air Force, taught school in Washington, DC, North Carolina, and Detroit, worked in a congressional office, and got my master’s degree in history. Yet my roots kept pulling me back. I had strong family ties that stretched back over generations. My parents were still here, and so were my ancestors. Go to any cemetery in this county and you’ll see the graves of my people. I sense their blood and sweat in this fertile soil. I’m still a country girl at heart. I grew up living close to this land, raised on homegrown food and steeped in country values. Nobody had much, but everyone shared. You didn’t visit someone without being pressed to take something they’d grown, cooked, or made. We were in tune with nature in ways most city people will never understand. I wanted my young daughter to look at the night sky and see stars away from the glare of city lights. And I wanted to help hard-working people who hadn’t had my opportunities. So in 2001, I became a consultant in economic development for Lowndes County, and it didn’t take long to realize the challenges I was up against. We needed jobs, but companies weren’t eager to invest in places without infrastructure, where they would have to spend their own money on improvements that the local tax base could never afford, unless the companies were looking to locate something nobody else wanted, like a landfill. At first, I was focused on business and didn’t realize how many households lacked the most basic plumbing. Then a convergence of events changed the trajectory of my life. I’d been looking for outside help for our county, and I found it in Bob Woodson, the conservative founder of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, now called the Woodson Center. I had met Bob years before in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at Stillman College, where he spoke at the 21st Century Youth Leadership Camp. I had taken students there from the school where I taught in Washington, DC. Woodson was a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient and an expert on urban issues. He advocated for public-private partnerships connecting community leaders and organizations with training and funding to uplift their neighborhoods. While I didn’t disagree with his approach, I did take issue with some of the politics associated with it, and during our first meeting I let him know—it seemed to me that he disregarded history and expected people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they had no boots to begin with. Then, after the presidential election of 2000 ended controversially, I saw Woodson on television speaking on behalf of the Bush campaign. I don’t know why, but somehow I knew he was going to help me. First, though, I had to reach him. I found out he was scheduled to speak in Washington, DC, and I scraped up enough money to go. At the summit, I waited for Woodson to finish speaking, and I followed him when he left the stage. He stopped and listened to me as I described the challenges of economic development work in Lowndes County. I told him that we were between Selma and Montgomery, where throngs of wellmeaning people passed each year to commemorate Dr. King’s march. Yet along the route, folks were still living in third-world conditions, and nobody was fighting for them. I described how hard it was to draw attention to the problems of poor rural communities. He said he was an urban guy, accustomed to finding solutions for the challenges of urban poverty, but he would be interested in learning more. Eventually, he agreed to come to Lowndes County, where he would surely get that education. I had some sites mapped out for Woodson’s visit when I got a call from Marzette Wright, a county commissioner. She said there was a family out in the county that I needed to see. They’d been written about recently in the daily newspaper Montgomery Advertiser because they had a terrible problem. Their septic system wasn’t working, and they’d been threatened with eviction and arrest because of the raw sewage flowing from their home. The cost of fixing it was far beyond what they could ever afford. I added them to the route. I grew up poor in the 1960s, when people in our community still used outhouses. At night, we used “slop jars” so we didn’t have to go outdoors to relieve ourselves. In the morning, we’d empty the jars in the woods or an outhouse. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for what we would see on our tour. I didn’t yet fully grasp how little things had changed in Lowndes County since I’d been gone, or that in some ways they were worse. But I was about to find out as our caravan of cars pulled off the main road and headed toward the home of Mattie and Odell McMeans. The McMeanses were a middle-aged couple with a large family. They lived in a sort of compound of five white trailers with a small country church nearby. Eighteen family members lived there at the time. The homes sat on an incline, and as we approached, we were shocked to see raw sewage streaming alongside the sloping road. We had barely parked our van near the houses when the pastor from the little church came to greet us. He was crying. He’d been notified his congregation could no longer worship in the building, which had no septic tank. Sewage was straight-piped outdoors from the church. Not only did the pastor have to suspend church services, but he had also been threatened with arrest if he didn’t fix the problem. In Alabama, failure to maintain a permitted septic tank is a criminal misdemeanor. It was heartbreaking. The McMeans family did have a septic tank, but it was broken. Like the pastor, they’d been ordered to rectify the situation. And like the pastor, Mr. McMeans cried because he couldn’t come up with the money. We left Mr. McMeans and the pastor and went to the courthouse to see the judge who oversaw the case. She agreed there was a better way to handle it and said she’d try to help, which she ultimately did. After the Montgomery Advertiser article, donations began pouring in. The McMeans family was out of immediate jeopardy. Meanwhile, though, a firestorm was brewing. In all his work with urban poverty, Bob had never seen anything like what he saw that day, and he was horrified. Well connected in Washington, he took action. He called Washington Post journalist William Raspberry, and he must have made a compelling case. Raspberry wrote powerfully about the criminalization of Lowndes’s poor people in his syndicated column on March 18, 2002. He quoted Woodson: It just blew my mind…. People living without sewers or septic tanks, with waste running off into an open ditch. A third of the residents living in trailers, which start losing value the day they buy them, because they can get loans for trailers but not for houses on land they own. Kids attending ramshackle schools with coal-fired furnaces and as many as a third of them spending time out of school with respiratory illnesses…. I’ve just talked to a man whose 90-something-year-old father is about to be evicted from a place he owns because he doesn’t have a septic tank. It will cost the county more to take care of him after his eviction than it would cost to put in a septic tank for him. Woodson called the problem a failure of the civil rights movement. I disagreed. I saw it as a failure of government to address the needs of the rural poor, another chapter in a long history of the marginalization of poor minorities and rural residents. While my theory differed from Woodson’s diagnosis, I appreciated his concern and his effort. And I agreed with him on one important point. “We need to declare what’s happening in Lowndes County a ‘virtual hurricane,’” he told Raspberry. “You know what would happen if a real hurricane struck the area and wiped everything out. We would go in with engineers, builders, truckloads of septic tanks. The government, volunteers and the private sector would all come together to do what needed to be done.” The column got the kind of media attention that rural communities seldom see. It marked the first time the county’s sewage situation made the national news, and the story didn’t stop with the Washington Post. I called the Associated Press to report the story, and the story of people in Alabama being arrested because they couldn’t afford septic tanks went out on the news wires across the country. The story was assigned to a reporter who wrote, “Human waste dumped outside of trailers and houses can become breeding grounds for everything from diphtheria to cholera, health officials said.” At long last, this caught Washington’s attention. But nothing moves fast in DC, and the squeaky wheel usually gets the grease. It’s taken us years to be squeaky enough, but we’re finally getting there. Maybe because of my parents’ example, I can’t just stand by and watch an injustice. After that visit to the McMeans home in 2002, I knew I had a new fight on my hands. I stayed in Alabama, working for Woodson and the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise for several years as a consultant in rural development. I founded the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE), which has evolved into the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ). Our mission is to reduce health, economic, and environmental disparities and improve access to clean air, water, and soil in marginalized rural communities. We aim to influence policy, inspire innovation, drive research, and amplify the voices of community leaders, all within the context of a changing climate. My team organized community meetings and door-to-door surveys that confirmed the McMeans family’s situation was far from unique. We secured funding for septic systems for those in need and even donations of new homes. I published articles, conducted media interviews, and spoke everywhere I could to keep the issue alive. We pressured state officials to stop criminalizing poverty by threatening people with arrest for failing to maintain working septic systems. Eventually, they backed off. Despite all that, by 2014, Lowndes County still hadn’t achieved the “virtual hurricane status” that Woodson spoke of and Raspberry wrote about. However, another community did. Flint, Michigan’s urban water crisis captivated the country’s attention and our lawmakers’ intentions when the news hit that Flint’s children were drinking water contaminated by lead. Once the people in power there finally admitted the problem, they were forced to take strong action. It was a crisis of major proportions, and there was no ignoring it. Flint gained attention because infrastructure failed. In places like Lowndes County, however, there’s no infrastructure in the first place. But in Lowndes County, as in Flint, a public health crisis has emerged. It’s arrived in the form of hookworms. Although hookworms aren’t fatal, they can slow physical and mental development in children, lead to intestinal diseases, and cause various other forms of misery, from fatigue to abdominal pain and diarrhea. Researchers are just starting to look into how far they might have spread across the Black Belt. But the hookworms might have evaded discovery completely if not for a chance happening one day. I had made the mistake of wearing a dress to visit a family with a hole in the ground full of raw sewage in their yard. Mosquitoes were out in force, and my legs were soon covered with bites. Later, I developed a mysterious rash. When doctors couldn’t diagnose it, I began to wonder if third-world conditions might be bringing third-world diseases to our region. I contacted Dr. Peter Hotez, a renowned tropical disease specialist and founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, to see if he’d be interested in investigating whether that might be true. He and his team came through for us with a peerreviewed study. In a sample of fifty-five adults and children, 34.5 percent tested positive for hookworms. Now we are preparing to expand our studies seeking evidence of soil-transmitted helminths—parasitic intestinal worms—to other areas. It’s very likely that we’ll find that raw sewage is the cause not only of hookworm’s return but also of other tropical diseases right here on American soil. Ever since news of the hookworm infestation broke in 2017, public interest has surged. I’ve testified before a United Nations panel in Geneva, Switzerland. I’ve even consulted with members of Congress about legislation to fund a nationwide study of wastewater treatment. We want to know how widespread the problem is, and we want solutions—including new, affordable technology. Three senators, Cory Booker (D-NJ), Doug Jones (D-AL), and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), have introduced bills to address the issue in a comprehensive way. New legislation also authored by Booker, called the Study, Treat, Observe, and Prevent (STOP) Neglected Diseases of Poverty Act, aims to assess the extent of conditions such as hookworm infestation, educate health care providers, and fund research into treatments. Meanwhile, poor people wait. The situation should shock the conscience of all Americans. It certainly made an impression on Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, when I took him on a Lowndes County tour in late 2017. Here’s how he described it later: In Alabama, I saw various houses in rural areas that were surrounded by cesspools of sewage that flowed out of broken or non-existent septic systems. The State Health Department had no idea of how many households exist in these conditions, despite the grave health consequences. Nor did they have any plan to find out or devise a plan to do something about it. But since the great majority of White folks live in the cities, which are well served by government built and maintained sewerage systems, and most of the rural folks in areas like Lowndes County are Black, the problem doesn’t appear on the political or governmental radar screen. I used to think this was just a problem of the Black Belt. Here, those who have septic systems find they’re prone to failure because of the high clay content of our soil. Septic systems are designed for solids to sink to the bottom of tanks while liquids are released to drain into the surrounding earth. But clay holds water rather than letting it drain. Tanks fill quickly, and overwhelmed systems back up and break down. But ours isn’t the only soil that doesn’t absorb wastewater. I started to understand this one day when I took a documentary film crew to a mobile home in Lowndes County where sewage drained from a pipe and into the yard. Normally, people are shocked when I lead these tours, but on this trip, the young white filmmaker seemed unfazed. “I’ve seen this before,” she whispered. “Was it in other rural southern towns of mostly poor Black residents like this one?” I asked. No, she said. It was at her grandmother’s house in rural Southern Illinois. As my travels expanded along with my environmental justice work, I began hearing about, and then seeing, the same problem in places from rural white Kentucky to unincorporated Latinx neighborhoods in California to Native American reservations in the West. It plagues people in Alaska and Hawaii. It happens mostly in the country, where people live beyond the reach of city utilities. But country people aren’t the only Americans living alongside raw sewage. I recently visited Centreville, Illinois, a small, impoverished city in the Greater St. Louis area. It’s a mostly Black community where untreated waste streamed alongside homes even though residents pay for municipal wastewater service. Unjust as it may seem, it’s not unusual for residents of poor and marginalized communities to be forced to pay for infrastructure that doesn’t work. Nationwide, the problem has been ignored by policymakers on all levels. Local, state, and federal governments fail to invest in rural infrastructure. They fail to protect poor consumers from buying and installing shoddy equipment pitched by unscrupulous contractors. And they fail to encourage the development of new technology that might provide long-term, affordable solutions. Now it’s becoming too big a problem to ignore. Climate change, with its rising sea levels and heavy rains that saturate soil, threatens to bring sewage to more backyards, and not only those of poor minorities. In Florida, for example, a study found that 64 percent of Miami-Dade County septic systems could malfunction by 2040, threatening water supplies. It’s a crisis that deserves the attention it’s finally getting. That’s where I come in. I’ve been called the “Erin Brockovich of Sewage” and the “Empress of Effluent,” titles I never aspired to but I’ll gladly accept if it helps. I want to show as many people as I can what this crisis looks like, feels like, and smells like. I want you to meet the people who live with this every day and to see what scores of people—politicians, journalists, health officials, activists, students, industry executives, billionaire philanthropists, celebrities, and filmmakers—have seen on my tours. And I want to show you how we—and I— got to this point. We’ll start in Lowndes County, once again Ground Zero for a movement. Chapter 2 I was born in Birmingham and lived for a time in Montgomery, but my parents wanted to raise their family in the country. My father was from an unincorporated area called Gordonsville in Lowndes County, and in 1968, when I was ten, we settled nearby in the tiny community of Blackbelt. My parents, my three brothers, my sister, and I lived in a concrete block house with a big yard in a neighborhood full of poor families with big dreams and lots of faith. We children had to be creative and industrious. When the boys decided that it was time to have a basketball court, they went into the woods and cut trees for the post. Pool was a favorite pastime, so one of the neighborhood kids made a miniature pool table from a NeHi soft-drink crate, and somebody brought marbles to use for balls. That pool table provided endless hours of fun. Even in 1968, indoor plumbing was a luxury. Most families had outhouses. For water, neighborhood children would walk to Miss Nell’s house with buckets to use her hand-operated pump. It was time-consuming, but the water was so cold and delicious that it seemed worth it. We had an electric pump at home—I guess there were degrees of poverty—but I enjoyed the ritual at Miss Nell’s anyway. It felt good to carry water home after I’d pumped it up from the earth. In the evenings we’d sit on Miss Shug’s front porch and listen to the latest R&B music from Ernie’s Record Mart on WLAC radio out of Nashville. If you grew up in the South when I did, you know the importance of front porches. That’s where people would gather to catch up on gossip, swap stories, and share news. In the days before air conditioning, it was cooler on the porch in the evenings, and children could listen to music or play in the yard while grown-ups talked. Most people had big families then—I was the oldest of five children—so there was plenty of company. Miss Shug was still young then. She was a beautiful woman and hip for her time—I remember her wearing jumpsuits, which are back in fashion today. She was not only a community mother to us all, but also an activist. She’d tell stories of mass meetings and organizing and getting out the vote. She talked about the social and savings clubs that I later realized were the foundation from which the original Black Panther Party grew in Lowndes County. Years later, she’d play a big role in bringing me back home to Alabama. Friends were always stopping by to visit my parents, including people from the “Movement.” I heard names like Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Kwame Nkrumah. I met people like Bob Mants, John Jackson, Willie “Mukasa” Ricks, and Stokely Carmichael. They were people who were working across the globe toward a new vision of justice. At the time, I did not realize I was not among common men. I learned about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). And most of all, I learned about serving my community for the greater good. My parents functioned much in the same way as jailhouse lawyers: people came to them for help, maybe because they’d lived other places. My father gave sound advice, and my mother drafted letters, interpreted government correspondence, filled out applications, and even did taxes. When the courts ruled that the school district had to educate special needs children, my mother became the trusted person who could convince parents it was okay to send the children to school. The school district hired her, she drove a bus, and she was also a teacher’s aide. My parents exposed us as best they could to things not everyone in our neighborhood commonly knew about. When I’d meet people who were white and educated, sometimes they were surprised by what I knew. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my parents were giving me the foundation to find common ground with all kinds of people. I still remember how my father’s love of bigband music helped me make conversation at my first Washington, DC, cocktail party. Both my parents grew up in the Jim Crow era, when Black people in the South survived by keeping their heads down and never complaining no matter how bad things were. But times were changing. My father was especially affected by the lynching of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy who was beaten, mutilated, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly flirting with a white woman while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955. My father resolved that he would not live his life in subservience. He became even more determined after serving in the military and seeing more of the world that he was not going to be denied freedom when he returned. The conversations I heard at home helped me put together pieces of things that had been worrying me. Growing up in the sixties, especially in the places we lived, meant living with upheaval. In 1963, we were living in Birmingham, where my father worked for Hayes Aircraft. I remember the teenagers in my community going to jail for demonstrating. My mother even demonstrated. I felt the tension in the air before my five-year-old mind could understand it. On November 22, 1963, my father came home from work and told my mother, “They finally got him,” before beginning to cry. He was talking about President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated that day. Later, he talked of moving the family to England, where he had served during the Korean War. We watched the funeral on TV, and it seemed to last for days. I still remember little John John saluting his father’s casket. Little did I know the role the Kennedys would indirectly play in my life. On April 4, 1968, my mother returned from work earlier than usual. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, and businesses were closing for fear of rioting. By then we were living in Montgomery, where my father worked at Maxwell Air Force Base. The ever-present tension thickened. The next day in school, the principal played Mahalia Jackson’s song “Precious Lord” over the intercom, and I started to cry. A classmate and I hugged each other. We had not been close friends before that day, but we shared the pain of something we did not quite understand. My father always listened to the news. At five in the evening, the entire family would sit in front of the television, glued to The Huntley-Brinkley Report, the nightly NBC news program. The local news would broadcast the names of soldiers who had died in Vietnam. Breaking news bulletins were common. One of those bulletins announced another assassination, this time of Robert Kennedy. Again, the tension hung heavy in the air. I began to wonder what I could do to help bring peace and brotherhood to the world. I started writing songs and poetry. If the world was not the way it was supposed to be, maybe I could make it so in my writing. I read voraciously, hungry to learn about the rest of the world and places I had never seen. Race was not something I thought of much when I was younger. Blacks and whites lived separately, and that was the way it was. But things were changing. It was a time of firsts for Black people. Muhammad Ali refused to go to Vietnam in protest as a conscientious objector, and the Ali–Frazier fight was a big deal in my house. We would crowd around the television to see Black actors in starring roles, which were slowly increasing. From Julia, starring Diahann Carroll, to The Flip Wilson Show, TV was starting to provide glimpses of different ways life could unfold for us. The Jackson Five were all close to my age, and they represented infinite possibilities. I wrote a song called “You Got to Have Soul” and sent it to an address in an ad in my mother’s True Story magazines. They sent me a contract, and I dreamed of promoting my music on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Later, I realized they probably sent everyone a contract along with a bill to make the song into a record. I would walk along the red dirt roads or between rows of cornstalks and marvel at the splendor around me. I imagined building my own community, complete with a church, school, and hospital. In the summer I’d pick plums and blackberries or break off an ear of corn from a stalk, sinking my teeth into its sweet milk. You could say I grew up close to nature, but we didn’t call it that. It was just our world. I guess I knew I was different when I couldn’t cook like other girls. I made biscuits so hard the dogs rejected them. I was no better at sewing. I couldn’t understand why I had to take home economics when it wouldn’t help me get into college. Then life started opening up to me in unexpected ways. ••• One day, a group of people came to visit my parents in Blackbelt. The group included Norman Lumpkin, a Montgomery television news reporter, Sue Thompson of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a reporter and crew from the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in London. They were visiting because my mother had been sterilized at John A. Andrew Hospital in Tuskegee after she gave birth to her fifth child, my little brother. Apparently, many poor pregnant women were coerced into submitting to sterilization before the hospital’s physicians would deliver their babies. This became a public concern when it came to light that two Black teenagers, the Relf sisters, were sterilized because they were deemed mentally incompetent and thus unfit to be parents in the future. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit, and my mother became a spokesperson for these women in rural communities. It was the second time Tuskegee was associated with unethical medical practices toward poor African Americans. Tuskegee was also the location of the infamous syphilis experiment, a forty-year study in which Black men with syphilis were neither told their diagnosis nor treated while researchers observed the long-term effects of the disease. The afternoon of the interview, our entire family was seated in the front yard with the BBC reporter. My mother mentioned that I wrote poems, and Norman Lumpkin asked to see them. I gladly brought him stacks to read. He said that he was going to tell his friend Tracy Larkin about me. At that time, Tracy hosted a weekly television show on WSFA in Montgomery called Focus. Shortly after that, I was invited to recite my poetry on Tracy’s show, and I began appearing regularly. I was in the tenth grade. My parents continued to be active in the community. My father even ran for sheriff against an incumbent he’d supported in the past. John Hulett was a leader in the struggle for voter registration in Lowndes County, and in 1970 he became the county’s first Black sheriff. Hulett had received many death threats while he was running, and my father personally guarded him. But after his election, Hulett began cutting backroom deals with white power brokers and building a political machine. Believing Hulett had turned his back on his people, my father declared his own candidacy for sheriff. He lost the election, but not his standing in the community. My mother was active in the National Welfare Rights Association, among other things. Our home was a stopover for many students and civil rights activists who came to visit my parents from around the country. This only fed my hunger to become a force for change. I was beginning to realize how substandard my education was. After an appearance on Focus, I was asked to write an article for a newsletter. I wrote about my high school, Lowndes County Training School, where I was a junior. The resulting uproar changed my life. Lowndes County Training School had been the Black school during segregation. In those days, white school boards typically named Black high schools “training schools,” a degrading term. The school system was still mostly Black because once white parents saw that integration was unavoidable, they enrolled their children in newly created private “academies.” The principal of my school was Dr. Robert R. Pierce, a Black man who’d achieved popularity among white people for openly opposing the civil rights movement. It was alleged that he had fired a weapon into the house of a local Black activist while riding with the Ku Klux Klan. Movement leaders had campaigned to have him removed as principal in the 1960s, to no avail. He received little supervision from the white school superintendent or the state. The education of Black children was not a priority. He had also been accused of supplying young Black girls from Lowndes County to white men in Montgomery and the surrounding area for sex. When a nine-year-old Black girl was found dead in Montgomery with a pajama bottom wrapped around her neck, rumors swirled that Dr. Pierce was involved, but he was never charged. In my article, I told how classes stopped at our school around midday. After lunch, Pierce threw dance parties. Students who didn’t go to the dances would find other ways to occupy their time, as teenagers will. Once, Pierce sponsored a showing of The Mack, an R-rated blaxploitation movie about an Oakland pimp, at the high school during school hours. Students from seventh through twelfth grades paid two dollars each to view the movie. That part of the article grabbed the attention of the people from the American Friends Service Committee. I received a call from Freddie Fox of the AFSC. He was the founder of the Alabama Students for Civil Rights and a senior fellow at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation. He came to meet with my parents and me, and brought Jack Guille-beaux, director of the Montgomery office of AFSC. I gave them details. The afternoon that Freddie and Jack visited my school, a dance was going on, and most students were headed there. The halls were so crowded that school officials had no idea Freddie and Jack were in the middle of the chaos. The students who opted to stay in class mainly just sat talking to friends or to the teachers, who tried to make the best of a bad situation. Freddie and Jack came away even more determined to take action. They instructed me on Alabama school law, showing me how to document infractions in a small notebook that I guarded carefully. I filled pages rapidly. My parents, along with Reverend Arthur Lee Knight and his family, started Concerned Parents and Students for Quality Education in Lowndes County. Arlinda Knight and I were the only two student members of the organization, and we became vastly unpopular. Our peers felt that we were disrupting their good times. They had no idea that a worthless education could disrupt their lives forever. The backlash at school grew dangerous. The Concerned Parents group held public meetings, and one time several high school students attended. Our guest was an army recruiter who talked about how graduates of our school had trouble meeting requirements to enter the armed services. Then it was my turn to speak. I said that it was time to end ignorance, that ignorant parents have ignorant children, and I did not want my children to be ignorant. The students in attendance were outraged. They misinterpreted what I said to mean that they were ignorant and their offspring would be as well. The next day in class I heard a commotion in the hallway. A crowd of students had surrounded Arlinda Knight, and some were hitting her. I was called to the office over the intercom and told to leave the high school and go to the office of the elementary school principal. When I arrived, a distraught Arlinda was already there. I called my father, and he said to stay there while he located Arlinda’s father. We were petrified. This was the first time either of us had feared for our safety. We were sent to wait in the classroom of Mrs. Sarah Logan, who was not only a relative of mine, but had served as an original member of the Lowndes County Freedom Party. When she and another teacher, Dorothy Hinson, were fired for their participation in civil rights work, they became plaintiffs in a landmark case against the state. They won when an appeals court found that the Alabama legislature had given Black Belt counties special exemptions from the state’s tenure laws so they could fire Black teachers at will. While we waited, Rev. Knight and my father rushed to the high school and went directly to Pierce’s office. According to my father, Rev. Knight closed the door and my father placed a gun to Pierce’s head and demanded to see us. If there was a scratch on either of us, he said, Pierce was dead. Pierce called for Arlinda and me to come to his office, and also called the sheriff’s office, not knowing authorities were already on their way because my father had alerted them. Everybody knew my father was a veteran and almost always carried a gun. He knew the history of Lowndes County and why it was called “Bloody Lowndes,” and he had received death threats at times. Some people even called him the “high sheriff.” When a deputy arrived at the school, Dr. Pierce asked him to arrest my father because he had pointed a gun at him. Rev. Knight said he was present and did not see anything. Arlinda and I arrived, escorted by the elementary school principal. When we entered the office, our fathers hugged us and asked if were harmed in any way. We both said we were okay. Dr. Pierce looked scared. He said nothing. The deputy told us not to hesitate to call if we felt threatened. He also told Dr. Pierce he was going to hold him responsible for our safety. In the meantime, a few girls told a sheriff’s deputy that some young men had left school to get guns and planned to shoot us. The deputy rounded up the young men and warned them to stay away from us or go to jail. His warning must have hit home because we had no more problems. Concerned Parents and Students took our allegations to the Lowndes County School Board, and three of the five school members voted to suspend Pierce. That set off a ripple effect throughout the school. An acting principal took charge. Teachers who had skated for years now attempted to teach. Others who’d been unhappy with the chaos felt newly empowered to speak. My activism got attention. I was still a regular on Focus, and the Montgomery Advertiser covered our story. Through Alabama Students for Civil Rights, I formed alliances with activists in other parts of the state. The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation took notice of my work as well and invited me to become a Robert Kennedy youth fellow. They sponsored my first trip to Washington, DC, where I was invited to attend the National Education Association’s Conference on Educational Neglect. On the trip, I was joined by Freddie Fox, Joseph Battle, and Nim Russell. Joseph and Nim were high school students in Russell County, Alabama, where Joseph’s mom was a community activist, and Nim was vice president of the Alabama Students for Civil Rights chapter. Our escort in Washington was Michael Hughes, a senior fellow at the RFK Memorial. Michael was a Hopi-Sioux Indian. It was shortly after the Wounded Knee takeover, and I was fascinated as Michael told us about the American Indian Movement and the plight of Native Americans on reservations. Our Washington schedule included tours of the usual sites, such as the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and the Washington Monument, and attending the conference. Jesse Jackson’s speech was a highlight for me that I would recall often once I became a teacher. He said, “Teachers are called to teach, like preachers are called to preach.” Other than Jackson, I found the conference disappointing. Speakers seemed to be whitewashing concerns instead of applying practical solutions to pressing problems. They were wasting time while the clock was running out on my education. I made my feelings known when I got a chance to speak. A small delegation from the National Education Association came to us and tried to appease us, promising support for our efforts in Alabama. I took a wait-and-see attitude. We visited the Memorial Foundation’s offices in an elegant Georgetown townhouse and discussed student rights with some of Robert Kennedy’s old friends and allies. We learned about landmark Supreme Court decisions that guaranteed our rights to free expression and due process. And then we attended a reception at the tony Chevy Chase, Maryland, home of David Hackett, one of Robert Kennedy’s closest friends dating back to childhood. Now he was executive director of the foundation. David was the inspiration for the character Phineas in John Knowles’s coming-of-age novel A Separate Peace, the goodhearted prep-school boy who excelled in everything he tried. David also shared Robert Kennedy’s passion for justice. I later learned that most of the people at the reception were board members of the Memorial. One white couple, the Hacketts, struck up a conversation with me and asked me about my fight in Lowndes County. They asked if I had a wish, and what it would be. I told them that I wanted to leave Lowndes County and go to boarding school. I knew the education I’d been getting wasn’t enough for me to be accepted to an Ivy League university. Adults I knew had told me about feeling unprepared when they got to college, and I wanted to be ready. We left Washington feeling good because we felt we had friends in other places who were looking out for us. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d be back soon. Back in Alabama, Dr. Pierce, the suspended principal, was not giving up without a fight. The Black teachers association filed a federal lawsuit on Pierce’s behalf, and I had to get ready for my deposition. I met with our attorney, Howard Mandell, in the Montgomery office of the AFSC. This was my first time being questioned by an attorney under oath, and Howard was concerned I’d come across like a young Angela Davis, a prominent and controversial activist. It was nerve-wracking as Howard prepared Arlinda and me for the questions we might face. Arlinda had accused Dr. Pierce of touching her inappropriately, and she knew Pierce’s attorneys would try to disparage her character. This was not her family’s first time facing intense pressure. Arlinda’s father was a native of Lowndes County. Like many people before him, he had moved to Michigan during the Great Migration, escaping the Jim Crow South and pursuing economic opportunity. Later, he and his wife and four children became the first Black family to move into Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. However, the violence and intimidation were so great that Rev. Knight moved his family back to Detroit and later to Lowndes County, where they owned property. The depositions went well, and the next major showdown was at a meeting of the Board of Education in Lowndes County. Pierce was there with his lawyers and Joe Reed, a representative of the teachers association. Howard and the board had ample information about Pierce’s abuse of authority. The most damaging evidence would come from the many female students who were prepared to share details of his sexual advances toward them. Before the hearing began, Pierce resigned and the lawsuit was dropped. Reed sent word to us that he had represented Pierce only because his job required it. Pierce had ruled over Lowndes County Training School for forty years. His reign was finally over, and we rejoiced. The summer of 1975 was filled with excitement for me, as I was going to Washington to study the workings of Capitol Hill as a Robert Kennedy youth fellow. I’d be living in Chevy Chase with the Hackett family. David and Judith Hackett lived with their five children in a large, two-story, white stucco home at the top of a steep driveway in a wealthy neighborhood. It was a different world for me. In Washington, people seemed to walk faster than they did in Alabama. In fact, everything moved faster. And I saw women doing jobs that were only performed by men in Montgomery and Lowndes County—driving trucks, working on telephone poles, and patrolling as police officers. I attended Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (BCC)—which was considered one of the top public high schools in the United States—for a course in English as a second language. This class was chosen for me because I sometimes spoke in southern dialect, and I guess I sounded vastly different from my upper-crust Massachusetts-elite hosts. I was convinced the class was necessary for me to be able to get into a good college, so I didn’t feel belittled. The teacher said I didn’t need it, but I enjoyed getting to know my classmates, who were the children of diplomats. I was the only Black student in the class, and the only child whose native tongue was English. Mrs. Hackett was a former ballerina with the London Royal Ballet and still had a British accent. She accompanied me to school on my first day, and when she introduced herself to my teacher, she said I was her daughter. As a child of the civil rights movement in Alabama, I was ready for my international classmates to snicker, but they didn’t. They actually seemed to believe her. Sometimes Victoria, the Hacketts’ youngest daughter, would tell people that I was her sister. Through the Hacketts, I was beginning to see the meaning of Dr. King’s dream of a time when people would be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. On weekdays, I’d take the bus to school. The only Black people I saw on the way were maids. Mrs. Hackett told me that one Black family, from South Africa, lived in the community, but I never saw them. After class, I liked to look at the beautiful homes and buildings, including the National Cathedral. It was so different from the red dirt and dusty roads of Lowndes County. I used to imagine living in DC as an adult. I found it intriguing that I could look at people without immediately knowing their race or nationality. Spending time in such a cosmopolitan city gave me a new sense of the world. The Memorial Foundation was on 30th Street, just off M Street, among the beautiful row houses. Former members of the Kennedy administration visited regularly. I made friends with another intern, Emily Rosen, who came from a wealthy family in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Together, we visited the Capitol several times a week, but one time stands out as the most memorable. Emily and I had developed a proposal for a summer internship project for high school students to serve in the Capitol, and we met with Senator Edward Kennedy in his office to discuss it. It was a special occasion, and we marked it by trading our usual jeans and T-shirts for dresses. We waited nervously in a waiting area until we were escorted into the senator’s office. I had never met a United States senator before, and I’d never met a Kennedy in person. Sen. Kennedy quickly put us at ease. Instead of the usual awards, his office walls featured his children’s drawings as well as some pictures addressed to “Uncle Ted.” Looking directly at me and addressing me by name, he told me that he’d heard about my work in Lowndes County, and applauded my quest for a quality education. He also complimented Emily’s work in photography. But mostly we talked about our proposal. He said he preferred giving internships to college students, not high school students, but we were pleased that he at least listened respectfully to our ideas. The Hacketts often held dinner parties, where I met lobbyists, activists, politicians, and visitors from other countries. On some hot evenings, Mr. Hackett would take the family and me swimming at Ethel Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia. I was fascinated by the size of the house, and a little star-struck too. Mr. Hackett assigned reading material for all of his children during the summer. I remember that Bobby, the Hacketts’ youngest son, was reading Plato’s Republic. The children were expected to discuss what they read with their father, and to list words they didn’t know and look up and then write out the definitions. Mr. Hackett also encouraged my writing, taking time from his busy schedule to read what I wrote, ask engaging questions, and edit my work. One day I arrived at the Memorial as usual, and he asked if I’d like to attend Milton Academy in Massachusetts, his alma mater. I had shared with him my desire to attend Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School. My goal was to be the first Black female Supreme Court justice. Mr. Hackett said I would need to attend a good high school to get into a good college, and a good college to get into a good law school. He said that at Milton, I would live at the school during the week, and on weekends I would stay either with his mother or with Marian Wright Edelman on Martha’s Vineyard. Edelman was the first Black woman to be admitted to the Mississippi Bar, and she had founded the Children’s Defense Fund. Dave said I would meet people from around the world. I asked whether there were any Black children at the school. He said that he didn’t know, but he wanted me to talk to the headmaster, who was Black. The only problem was that I hadn’t taken any foreign language classes and would have to return to the eleventh grade to earn two years of language credits. I’d also have to start preparing for the SAT, something I’d never heard of. The counselor at my high school had never told me about college entrance exams. Excited, I called my parents. They didn’t like the idea, especially the part about repeating the eleventh grade. My parents were accustomed to me being on the honor roll and wanted me to graduate on time. They did not see the benefits and didn’t know about Marian Wright Edelman. Mr. Hackett recommended people I could call who could talk to my parents about the benefits of Milton. I called Kenneth Gibson, who had served in the army with my father and in 1970 became the first Black mayor of Newark, New Jersey. He was the one person who thought I should go to Milton Academy. Others disagreed. Freddie Fox said that people were trying to “de-niggerize” me. He always used words like that. I am certain he said the same thing to my parents. I called Hank Sanders, an attorney and civil rights activist in Selma who’d gone to Harvard Law School after attending a Black college. Like Freddie, he disagreed that I needed to go to Milton. With Freddie and Hank on their side, I knew my parents would harden their stance. They soon began insisting that I return home. Not wanting to concede defeat, David offered another plan. I could go to Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, and live with his family. By this time, however, I knew my parents wouldn’t agree. I wanted to leave Lowndes County Training School. Whenever I would state my school’s name, people assumed I was in a school for bad children. The name had always carried a stigma in the South, where Black kids attended training schools, while white children went to high schools. But I had to return. Before I left, I got to see another side of Washington. A fellow intern, Linda, had had a few encounters with the law and came from a dysfunctional family. She was enrolled in a program to finish high school. Others at the Memorial worried about my spending time with her, but she never tried to persuade me to do anything wrong. She did explain to me the lure of the streets. She also introduced me to local members of the Black Panther Party. I would frequent their office and buy literature. One day while venturing down H Street in the Panthers’ neighborhood, I decided to get my hair cut. H Street had been one of the sites of rioting in DC after the King assassination in 1968, and still held the skeletons of burned-out buildings. I found a Black barbershop and asked them to cut my hair into a short natural. I liked it and thought it fit my increasingly militant beliefs. I was still writing poetry, and on the cover of one of my collections I drew a picture of Jesus in an afro with a Bible in his right hand and a gun in his left. I was a native of the place that gave the world the original Black Panther Party, and Stokely Carmichael always talked about Jesus coming with a sword. When Mr. Hackett saw the picture, he wasn’t pleased. He didn’t say much, but later that year he sent me to a workshop on nonviolence at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. My summer in Washington, DC, came to an end in August, and I returned to the dusty roads and red clay dirt of Lowndes County to begin my senior year of high school. I felt empowered, and I had a plan: I was going to remove Hulda Coleman, the superintendent of schools, and change the name of my high school before I graduated. My parents didn’t recognize me at first when I got off the plane. Besides my new hairstyle, I guess I exuded a new confidence. I must have moved like someone on a mission. I was still a teenager, turning seventeen in a few days, and thinking of prom, graduation, and boys. But I had seen the possibilities that the world held, and I wanted more for myself and others. When I entered Lowndes County Training School the first day of my senior year, the halls appeared narrower and the rooms seemed smaller. The deficits in my education were more glaring than ever. But glimmers of hope were all around in the form of good, earnest teachers. English teacher Coley Whiting looked like a nerd with his horn-rimmed glasses and pockets full of pens, but he was a quiet revolutionary. He brought the classics to life and introduced us to non-traditional literature like The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Johnny Stanford taught algebra I and II, geometry, and trigonometry. His class was so enjoyable that we didn’t want it to end. We’d gather in the library afterward to discuss formulas and do computations. Theresa Gardner Douglas captured our imaginations in physics and chemistry. Sometimes I wonder how many future scientists she would have inspired if she’d had the proper equipment. I did not even see a microscope until my freshman year in college, but I considered a science major because of her. After Principal Pierce’s removal, my popularity grew, and I was elected vice president of the senior class. Outside of school, my father and I regularly attended school board meetings along with Arlinda’s father, Rev. Knight. Our group, Concerned Parents and Students for Quality Education, had formed alliances with three of the five school board members. Two were Black—and I admired their courage, gallantry, and strength. The days of “Bloody Lowndes,” when Black people could be lynched for standing up to white rule, were not far behind us. Many older people had never learned to read and still signed their names with an “X.” Our other ally was Mary Dora Hammonds, the wife of Probate Judge Harold Hammonds, who was the largest landowner in Lowndes County. Unlike many of his white counterparts, Judge Hammonds had seen the writing on the wall and begun to work with newly enfranchised Black voters. Since they made up the majority of voters in the county, his position was assured until he decided to give it up. Mrs. Hammonds was not intimidated by the local white power structure. She was the epitome of an older southern belle. She often called me, and we had long conversations on the telephone. She would even invite me into her home, an old, unkempt southern mansion. When she spoke to me she stood so close that I could feel her breathe. She seemed to feel a level of comfort in my presence that was uncommon among whites and Blacks in Lowndes County. Our group would meet at the AFSC offices in Montgomery or at the home of Sarah Logan, the teacher who’d sheltered Arlinda and me the day Arlinda was attacked at our high school. With her long hair pulled tightly into a bun, she appeared grandmotherly, but she was a warrior who stood fiercely for Black children. We considered who should be the next principal and settled on Mr. Sellers, the longtime assistant principal and the administrator that students most respected. Tall, handsome, and robust, he was a commanding figure. He took an interest in my college plans and my writing and sought my opinion on decisions affecting students. He brought order to the chaos that Pierce had allowed. When he walked the halls, students scattered. Our group’s next priority was replacing Hulda Coleman as superintendent of schools. Coleman’s father had been superintendent of schools before her, and she had basically inherited the position from him. It was common knowledge that her brother had shot and killed white seminarian and voting rights activist Jonathan Daniels during the height of the civil rights movement in Lowndes County, only to be acquitted. Coleman was petite, with a calm presence. She had been Pierce’s ally, but she was cordial and polite to me, in the southern way. She had even hired my mother to work as a teacher’s aide. But she had allowed troubling disparities between Black and white schools during segregation and permitted the chaos at our high school. She only had a bachelor’s degree, while most of the Black teachers had earned master’s degrees. Most people on her administrative staff were white, and resources were not equitably distributed. At the first school board meeting that year, I asked for an investigation of Coleman’s violations of the Alabama School Code. To our surprise, she said she was resigning. She looked across the room at my father and me and walked out of the meeting. Her calm veneer had cracked. We were surprised, but were also prepared with a recommendation for her successor. Euralee Haynes was well respected, came from a family that had been active in the civil rights movement, and had the credentials necessary to do the job. A board majority approved, and Mrs. Haynes became the first Black superintendent of schools for Lowndes County. Although Mrs. Coleman’s resignation was the highlight of the meeting, I stuck with my plan to ask for the name of the high school to be changed. One of the white board members said I should be proud to attend a school that bore the last name of William Yancey Lowndes, the confederate slave owner who had led the walkout of southern states from the Union and for whom Lowndes County was named. One of the lessons I had learned from my summer at the Robert Kennedy Memorial Foundation was to be prepared with counterattacks, so I responded that the name was a vestige of segregation. The board voted to appoint a committee to gauge community support for the name change and to find a name that was acceptable to all. I was asked to serve on that committee. High school had long been a luxury for sharecroppers’ children, and many students in my class were the first in their families to graduate. It was a significant milestone. It was customary for the senior class to leave the school a gift, and the one we chose was close to my heart: we raised money to pay for our school’s new name to be placed on the building. Even more important to me was that my diploma would not say Lowndes County Training School. It would say Central High School instead. A week later, I began summer school at Alabama State University. Chapter 3 Alabama State University (ASU) was not my first choice for college. I wanted to go to Howard University, a private school in Washington, DC. It was often called the “Black Harvard,” and it boasted Stokely Carmichael and other SNCC members as alumni. But my father urged me to attend ASU because it was in Montgomery, closer to home, and it was an affordable state school. As a compromise, I chose to attend ASU for the summer, but accepted a full scholarship in the fall to Talladega College, a small historically Black school about fifty miles east of Birmingham. Recruiters for the school had set their sights on me when I was in the tenth grade. Because of my grades, I could have gone there at the end of eleventh grade instead of returning to school in Lowndes County, but my parents had vetoed that possibility. Knowing that I might have some deficits, I registered for summer school at ASU to get an early start. ASU was founded by nine ex-slaves at the end of the Civil War in Marion, Alabama, as Lincoln Normal School. It was renamed the State Normal School and University for the Education of Colored Teachers and Students in 1873 when it came under control of the state. It evolved into the Alabama State College for Negroes in 1948, Alabama State College in 1954, and finally Alabama State University in 1969. I arrived in June 1976 full of wonder and hope for this new season of my life. My first night on campus, I sat on the block in front of my dorm, Bibb Graves Hall, the oldest dorm on campus. It was named for Alabama governor David Bibb Graves, who was considered one of the state’s most liberal governors of the twentieth century. Two upperclassmen approached me, one from Philadelphia and the other from Detroit. They were members of the university’s famed Marching Hornets band. Philly, as William Boynton was fondly known, was a giant compared to my five feet two inches, and he smiled easily. When he found out I was only seventeen, he told me that my new name was Baby Sister and he would introduce me to everyone that way. Philly’s family had cemented their role in civil rights history. His grandmother, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was a leader of the fight for voting rights in Selma, and was beaten unconscious during Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. His Uncle Bruce was the plaintiff in the landmark case Boynton v. Virginia, which was argued by Thurgood Marshall—later the first Black Supreme Court justice. Bruce Boynton was a Howard University law student traveling home to Selma on a Trailways bus in 1958. When the bus stopped in Richmond, he tried to buy a cheeseburger in the whites-only section of the bus station restaurant. He was arrested and convicted of trespassing in a verdict that was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in 1960. The majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, held that racial segregation in public transportation was illegal. That led directly to the Freedom Rides, launched the next year when mixed-race groups rode buses to the South to test enforcement of the ruling. They incurred brutal attacks in Montgomery and elsewhere until the federal government stepped in. I’d expected college to be a different world from high school, but clearly I would never be far from the civil rights movement. I carried a full load that summer, which was a total of five classes. Some were very small, giving me close contact with my professors. One whom I found intriguing was Miss Bernice Hollinger, a middle-aged English professor who spoke with precise diction. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses and classic suits, she spent the first day of class getting to know her three students. I was the youngest. The other female student worked as a maid while she pursued a teaching degree and raised her children. The gentleman in our class was bright but had learning challenges. I was moved by how much time Miss Hollinger spent with him. She met his enthusiasm for learning with determination to help him reach his goal. Her example would later influence me when I became a teacher. For the class we read Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. I enjoyed the book’s message of finding one’s own way. Jonathan had to choose between conforming to the seagull’s expected way of life or taking flight on a different path. That choice resonated with me. After summer session ended, I went on to Talladega College, Alabama’s oldest private Black college. It began in 1867 as Swayne School in a building slaves had built originally for white students. The charter for Talladega College was issued in 1869, and history lived on in its oldest buildings. Thirty-two of the buildings are listed on the National Historic Registry, and I could practically hear the echoes of the past as I walked their halls. Enrollment was so small that we joked that we could all see and talk to each other at least three times a day. It was friendly and welcoming. The student body was all Black, yet diverse. At Talladega I first became aware of the term “Geechee,” used to describe African Americans from the Lowcountry of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Many students came from Charleston, and their accents were distinctive. Other students were from the West Coast or Midwest, some of them following in their parents’ and grandparents’ footsteps. We were often reminded that Talladega was one of the best colleges to attend to get into graduate school. I was still considering going to law school, so that was music to my ears. Talladega was a small town, and most of our activity outside class was on campus. I joined a group supporting the Wilmington Ten, a group of young Black people wrongly convicted of arson and conspiracy during a night of unrest in Wilmington, NC. They were sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison. My professor and advisor, Dr. Bernie Bray, had taught one of the Ten, and he made sure we knew about them. As a white political science professor teaching at a historically Black university, Dr. Bray had a unique perspective, and he strongly encouraged my activism. His sense of justice was infectious. He had arrived at Talladega in 1971, seven years before I graduated from high school, to develop a political science program. By the time I met him he was legendary. Through the story of the Wilmington Ten, I was introduced to the term “political prisoners.” Their cause attracted international attention as an example of racial injustice in America. That fall, a march was planned in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, in support of the group, and several buses were traveling there from Talladega College. I decided to go. We left for North Carolina early in the morning. I slept most of the way, until we stopped at a truck stop for a bathroom and food break. When one of the students was served coffee in a dirty cup, we were rounded up to return to the bus and leave. It was a sign of what to expect once we arrived in Raleigh. The crowds in Raleigh were very large. I had never seen law enforcement so massively armed, and it was intimidating. We had been told not to engage in violence, and I do not recall even any civil disobedience. We heard from an array of speakers, and near the end of the day, a popular entertainer, Billy Paul, came to the mike to speak and perform. He was best known for “Me and Mrs. Jones,” a number one hit in 1972 and a Grammy Award winner. I liked it because I love smooth jazz, but I wouldn’t get to hear the whole song. The sound was cut off mid-song, and I wondered if that was intended to be a provocation. Fortunately, it was near the end of the day. Everyone retained their composure and returned grumbling to the buses. The Wilmington Ten’s convictions eventually were overturned. One of them, Benjamin Chavis, wrote two books during his ten years’ imprisonment, and went on to earn a master’s degree in divinity from Duke University and a doctorate in ministry from Howard before becoming executive director of the NAACP. I wasn’t at Talladega College for long. The time I spent at ASU had made me a fan of the band and the football team, and Talladega had neither. It seemed like every weekend ASU played a home game, I was in Montgomery, and the trips back and forth by Trailways bus over narrow roads and bridges were hard. When my father asked if I wanted to return to ASU, I jumped at the chance. Soon I’d change colleges again. I was only at ASU for one semester when I had a chance to attend Howard University, my dream school. David Hackett arranged for me to receive a stipend from the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial that would cover the cost of tuition, room, and board. My father was not happy, but I packed my bags the fall of 1977 to move to Washington, DC. Howard was everything that I dreamed it would be, with students from around the world. It was my first time encountering wealthy Black students. As much as I enjoyed being a student there, I became incredibly self-conscious that I was poor and very rural—a country girl. Many students dressed in designer clothes and drove luxury cars. While sitting in the lounge, I could hear them talking about their summer excursions to Europe. This was foreign to me. I was trying to figure out where I fit in when I saw a flyer advertising a seminar about the Allan Bakke case. Still very much an activist, I decided to attend. The Bakke case challenged affirmative action in higher education. Allan Bakke, a white student, applied to medical school at the University of California at Davis and was rejected. He sued, alleging discrimination because Black students with lower test scores and grades than his were admitted. There was concern this case would undo affirmative action on college campuses nationwide, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about it. The speaker that night was Dr. Herbert O. Reid, a professor at Howard’s law school. He talked about the legal implications of the case and also referenced a case at Alabama State University. I asked questions during the seminar and mentioned my past activism. Afterward, I introduced myself. Dr. Reid looked at me attentively as I told him I was from Lowndes County and had attended ASU. He said, “Young lady, there is a case involving Alabama State University that could have similar implications for affirmative action.” The case was Craig v. Alabama State University, a class action suit alleging discrimination against white employees in promotion and tenure decisions. Dr. Reid said that many people did not realize how important this case was and it would be great if I could help people understand the threat to Black institutions of higher learning. I told him that I would be happy to return to ASU to help with this cause if I could, but school had already started and I would have to wait until the spring. He said that Dr. Levi Watkins, the president, was a friend of his, and he asked for my contact information. The next day, I was sitting in my dorm room waiting to go to class when my phone rang. Dr. Watkins was on the other end. He had served as ASU president during some turbulent times in the fight for civil rights. If I had been there then, I would surely have been one of the students he suspended for participating in civil disobedience. Yet now he was calling after hearing about me from Reid. He told me that the future of ASU was being threatened and he wanted me to help in the fight to save the school if I returned to ASU. He said to see him if I decided to come back. In a few days I was on a bus returning to Montgomery. I went to see Dr. Watkins, and he cleared the way for me to re-enroll at ASU. We began to meet about once a month in his conference room. Dr. Watkins was a handsome middle-aged Black gentleman who was so light-skinned that at first glance he appeared to be white. He would peer over his wire-rimmed glasses, which were en vogue at the time, and talk in his deliberate cadence about his tenure at the university. We often talked about the Bakke case, and he also discussed the incredible strides his children were making. His son, Dr. Levi Watkins Jr., was a gifted cardiovascular surgeon, and the senior Dr. Watkins beamed with pride, recalling how Levi Jr. was offered the chance to practice under heart transplant pioneer Dr. Christiaan Barnard in South Africa. A child of the civil rights movement, the younger Watkins turned down the option to become an honorary white person in apartheid South Africa and instead practiced at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Watkins believed in the importance of historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, in helping Black students who came from school systems plagued with inequalities. He worried that the Craig case threatened ASU’s right to exist as an HBCU. He knew my history as an activist in Lowndes County and during my brief time at ASU, where I once led a demonstration against the student union. He knew students would follow me, and he wanted me to understand his position. A federal court ruled against ASU in the Craig case in 1978. The university survived it, but another threat was on the horizon. Talk was beginning to circulate in political circles about merging the three state-supported universities in Montgomery—ASU, Auburn University in Montgomery (AUM), and Troy State University—into a proposed University of Montgomery. Many of us worried about ASU being dissolved and disappearing. Black teachers and administrators had lost their jobs when Black public schools merged into white ones during desegregation, and we were concerned that this paradigm would play out at the university level if we remained silent. We would lose teachers like Miss Bernice Hollinger, the English teacher who had inspired me that first summer at ASU, and so much more. Historically Black colleges and universities provide a safe place for students to learn with others from similar backgrounds. We learned about the achievements of Black people in a way that was not then taught at predominantly white schools. We treasured our rich culture—including our renowned marching band. I decided to express my feelings by putting pen to paper. A little more than a year after leaving high school, I wrote a letter to the Alabama Journal, one of two daily Montgomery newspapers. The letter was published on November 9, 1977, and entitled “Bad Ole Hornet:” To the Journal: It is to my dismay that every time I pick up an issue of the Journal I see very few positive articles, if any, about Alabama State University. As a student at ASU I would like to shed some light on the real issue concerning my school. In the days of segregation it was not popular for black children to be educated with whites; therefore most of those ended up in inferior institutions called training schools. As recent as 1968 black children went to school in facilities that resembled the old classrooms I saw on display at the Smithsonian Institute. Children from these institutions were not acceptable to white institutions of higher learning, so they had to attend black institutions like ASU. The selection of a president of those institutions was as important to whites as to blacks. First of all, if a radical person was selected, sooner or later, he would be replaced by what many of us term as a “Tom” to occupy the seat. I congratulate Dr. Levi Watkins for being conservative enough to please his white superiors and being smart enough to increase the size of the campus. Tomming is no longer in style and black schools are no longer fashionable. When will everyone realize that the real issue concerning ASU is racism? Never have I seen a negative article about AUM. A clear illustration of racism is the building of AUM while ASU was there all the time. Where were all of the so-called liberals presently screaming merger, when AUM was being planned? I think that it is about time for education to become more important than politics. I am not upholding anyone at ASU in any wrongdoing. I will be one of the first to complain when the quality of my education is endangered. Hopefully, this Bakke mania will phase out soon … All that had happened—meeting Dr. Reed, talking with Dr. Watkins, and learning that ASU could be dissolved—placed me on a course of organizing that was new to me. I had a strong desire for higher education. I was young and loved to dance and write and enjoy all that college had to offer, but my passion for justice would always usurp whatever else was going on in my life. Still very much the free-spirited activist, I was in and out of school based on what movement needed my attention and labor. I began learning how to mobilize large groups, a skill I’d call on later when the need to preserve ASU became urgent. But that would take a few years. Meanwhile, I was still finding myself and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. In 1978, feeling burned out from the fight against injustice and needing a break from school, I joined the Air National Guard, and after basic training and technical school, I joined the regular Air Force in 1979. I became a victim of sexual harassment and left the service in 1980. You could say I was part of the “me too” movement before there was a movement. I returned to ASU as a student in 1980 and found the issue of merging universities still alive, led by then Governor Fob James. I began to know some emerging power brokers in local and state government. John Knight, the public relations director at ASU whose name would become a symbol of education reform in Alabama, was like an older brother to me. I’d talk to him about political action, and he’d try to temper my youthful exuberance, often unsuccessfully. Joe Reed was a Montgomery city councilman who’d later become a dominant figure in the Alabama Democratic Party. I’d met him when I was in high school and, as the president of the teachers association, he’d represented the suspended principal, Dr. Pierce. On campus, I started partnering with Randy Anderson, a student and Vietnam veteran, in organizing students for political causes. Randy’s and my work got the attention of Reed and Knight, and they summoned us to a meeting. Reed had been the strategist behind many court cases that had expanded voting rights to Black Alabamans. Now, facing the threat to ASU, he had developed a strategy that went beyond marching and drew on some hard facts. In 1980, a report from the United States Department of Education Civil Rights Compliance Unit had found that Alabama still maintained vestiges of segregation in higher education. This was not unexpected. At one time, Black college graduates seeking graduate degrees had to leave the state to be educated, at the state’s expense. Autherine Lucy, the first Black student to be admitted to the University of Alabama in 1956, was expelled when riots broke out on campus protesting her presence. In June of 1963, George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door to protest Vivian Malone’s admission to the University of Alabama. He was ordered to move by the Alabama National Guard, which was federalized by President John Kennedy that same month. Now, in 1981, we were still fighting, but at least the federal court offered a fairer playing field, and the federal report gave us ammunition. At the meeting, Randy and I learned we had been selected to be plaintiffs in a lawsuit to save ASU. We would represent students; Knight and professors John Gibson and Alma Freeman would represent alumni. Reed led the discussion, and attorney Donald Watkins was also present. Donald, the son of ASU’s president, Dr. Levi Watkins, had been one of the first Black students to desegregate the law school at the University of Alabama. The lawsuit asked that the two other universities in Montgomery—Troy State and Auburn in Montgomery—be merged into ASU. Instead of the new entity that the governor proposed, there would be one larger ASU. The lawsuit aimed to save ASU and also to end the remnants of segregation that lived on in the separate versions of the same programs provided by the three schools. We were told that the name of the plaintiff listed first on the case would brand the case, and John Knight asked for that position. We all agreed, and the suit was filed in federal court on January 15, 1981. At a press conference that day, Reed pointed out that of the three schools, ASU was by far the oldest, with the most established traditions. ASU was more than one hundred years old, while the other two were newcomers, having only arrived in the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, Randy and I and other friends organized a march to save ASU. We were joined by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as well as students from all of the HBCUs in Alabama. On February 19, 1981, a crowd estimated at fifteen hundred to three thousand people marched from the ASU campus to the state capital. The local newspaper called our march one of the largest in Montgomery since the days of the civil rights movement. This was exciting for us because it was mostly organized by students. The Knight case, as it would become known, would last almost thirty years and expose long-standing racist practices governing education in Alabama. It would ultimately include more plaintiffs, more issues, and more attorneys. It argued that Alabama’s very method of funding K–12 education and HBCUs was discriminatory, and federal courts agreed. The three universities were never merged, but courts ordered numerous changes in state policy. ASU survives today, more than one hundred fifty years after its founding. I feel proud knowing that I had a hand in laying the groundwork for the eventual resolution of the case. My passion for justice was as strong as ever after the march, and I became an active member of SCLC. At that time, the distinguished civil rights leader Dr. Joseph Lowery was president. I was moved by Dr. Lowery’s eloquent speeches and commanding presence. Often, he was surrounded by advisors like R.B. Cottonreader and Reverend Albert Love, and I would watch them, imagining what it must have been like to sit with Jesus and his disciples. I came to Dr. Lowery’s attention when I helped organize the march to save ASU and the establishment of an SCLC chapter on campus. Whenever Dr. Lowery or others from his team called me to mobilize for a demonstration, I organized a student cohort to go there. We marched in Mobile after the lynching of Michael Donald, who was chosen randomly for execution by Klan members who wanted to intimidate the Black community. Members of the United Klans of America, one of the largest Ku Klux Klan organizations in the country, were angry because the trial of a Black man accused of killing a white police officer had ended in a mistrial. In retaliation, they abducted nineteen-year-old Donald as he walked to the store. They beat him, cut his throat, and then hung him from a tree. What happened next shows why activism is so vital to the cause of justice. Local police didn’t look seriously into Donald’s lynching, but demonstrations helped keep the case alive. Finally, two Klansmen were arrested and convicted of the murder. Then, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the United Klans on behalf of Donald’s mother and won a $7 million judgment. That bankrupted the United Klans, whose legacy of terror included brutal attacks on Freedom Riders in 1961, the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 in which four girls were killed, and the murder of civil rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo...