Fall 2003 Human Rights Magazine

Environmental justice is a relatively new issue for the civil rights movement. But the history underlying many environmental injustices has followed the same path as other civil rights issues, calling upon the civil rights movement to extend beyond its traditional areas and embrace environmental justice as a priority.
Janette Wipper, who recently launched the first environmental justice legal program at the NAACP, is a strong advocate of making environmental justice a priority of the civil rights movement. She works collaboratively with the association's 2,000 regional, state, and local units, as well as with grassroots groups, to address environmental injustices across the country.

Wipper formerly served as an attorney with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where she litigated environmental justice cases like Washington Park Lead Committee, Inc. v. U.S. EPA. In that case, Wipper represented the residents of the Washington Park housing project, built in the early 1960s as "Negro housing" on land formerly used as a disposal site for an adjacent, active foundry. The land eventually was designated a Superfund site due to lead contamination. Although the EPA relocated private landowners and rezoned the site and adjacent areas for industrial use, Washington Park residents-95 percent African American-were left on the contaminated site.

In 1998 Washington Park residents filed a class action lawsuit against the EPA and other government defendants, charging that the government perpetuated de jure segregation and its related effects by choosing a remedy that excluded the residents' relocation. Two years later, the Washington Park residents secured a landmark victory when the defendants agreed to relocate all 160 families from their lead-contaminated homes to safe, integrated housing. This was the first time an ongoing Superfund remedy was altered to address racial discrimination in its selection.

Wipper currently represents the plaintiff in Newtown Florist Club v. City of Gainesville. The city of Gainesville was destroyed by a tornado in 1936, and during the rebuilding, the segregated African American community of "Newtown" was established on top of a former landfill. One year after Brown v. Board of Education, Gainesville rezoned the area immediately surrounding Newtown as the only allowable site within city limits for heavy industrial development. Today, Newtown, which remains over 95 percent African American, is surrounded by more than a dozen heavy industrial plants and other toxic facilities; its residents suffer one of the highest incidences of lupus and cancer in the country. In 2003 the Newtown Florist Club filed a class action lawsuit against local government entities, citing the environmental effects of housing segregation and charging intentionally discriminatory land use and zoning policies in violation of federal civil rights laws.

Litigation is not the only successful strategy used by Wipper and other environmental justice advocates, however. Unprecedented community activism during the 1990s in Texas successfully forced abandonment of a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility in a low-income Latino community near the Mexican border. Protesters included a binational coalition of Texas city and county governments, the Mexican states of Coahuila and Chihuahua, the Mexican National Congress, and community residents. In addition, Wipper has worked with Acción Ecológica and indigenous South American communities to secure an international cleanup of oil contamination in the Amazon. As part of the Oilwatch global network, she works with international environmental justice activists to address adverse impacts of oil activity on local populations and tropical forests.

Wipper also has contributed articles on environmental racism to governmental and nongovernmental reports and programs and most recently attended the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, as an official non-governmental organization delegate.

Janette Wipper is currently an attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Baltimore, Maryland.

As published in Human Rights, Fall 2003, Vol. 30, No. 4, p.11-12.