Church-based civil rights leaders led early environmental justice protests

Evidence

The spirit and experience of resistance through the Civil Rights Movement was widespread in the southern United States and in many northern urban areas. The movement was strongly church-based; many of its leaders, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, were ministers. When the Environmental Justice Movement began building momentum in the early 1980s, it was church-based civil rights leaders, seasoned in the Civil Rights Movement, who were at its fore. The 1982 protests in Warren County, North Carolina, against a PCB dump were led by local church officials and by the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, a longtime civil rights activist and at that time the head of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Church-based organizing leadership parallels the ritual/institutional thread in The Frankfurt School (religion as norm channel) worth cross-reading. — connects to: Environmental justice history is best framed as converging tributaries — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 123; Environmental justice emerged from fusing civil rights racial critique with anti-toxics economic analysis — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 141

Broader Connections

• Environmental justice emerged from fusing civil rights racial critique with anti-toxics economic analysis #expands (0.90) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 141