Environmental Justice Shaping A New Civil Rights Movement In The South

"A series about how communities are responding to failing septic systems in the rural South contributing to the rise of poverty-related tropical diseases like hookworm. "

"When she was a teenager in 1967, Katherine Egland was one of a dozen students to integrate the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, public school system. As a member of the NAACP youth program, she spent her childhood afternoons with civil rights titans Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.

Decades later, a TV reporter asked Egland if she was afraid to be outspoken against powerful groups. She laughed and said, “I grew up with the Ku Klux Klan. I grew up with bomb threats. This was daily.”

By that point, Egland, a chairperson of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice program, was fighting another kind of backyard terror, what she calls “the biggest civil rights crisis” in the South: climate change."

Katherine Webb-Hehn reports for Southerly Magazine September 12, 2018, in the last part of a four-part series.

SEE ALSO:

Part One: "The Rural South’s Invisible Public Health Crisis" (Southerly)

Part Two: "In the Black Belt, A Template For Fixing Failing Sewage Infrastructure" (Southerly)

Part Three: "These Lessons From Rural Africa Could Help Eradicate Poverty-Related Tropical Diseases In The U.S. South" (Southerly)