Why did Margie Richard have to travel 4,797 miles to get her next-door neighbor to knock on her door? Steve Lerner explains why in his book, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor.
Margie Richard, regarded as a hero of environmental justice, fought against Shell to protect her community in Diamond, Louisiana. Louisiana Bucket Brigade
Margie’s home in Diamond, Louisiana, is sandwiched between a Shell chemical plant and oil refinery—her next-door neighbors. Streams of toxic chemicals spew out of these plants and poison neighboring residents. Lerner was so compelled by Margie (photographed on the right) and her community’s story that “he felt the need to preserve their voices.” What began as a short oral history project became a compelling book that tells the story of this community’s fight against a powerful multinational corporation.
Citizens of Diamond formed grassroots campaigns and filed local lawsuits to be relocated, but Shell would not accept responsibility for the dangerous conditions. Shell officials from the local levels in Diamond to the headquarters in London all denied, as Lerner explained, “their facilities were hazardous to the health of neighbors.” Margie realized that the Diamond community alone could not successfully fight a huge multinational corporation.
She needed to expose Shell in front of an international audience to see improvements in her community.
Fortunately during her community organizing, Margie Richard gained enough recognition for CorpWatch—a nonprofit organization that monitors corporate behavior—to fund her attendance at the UN Conference on Climate Change at the Hague in the Netherlands in 2001. After Shell’s presentation, Margie confronted them about the situation in her neighborhood. When the chairperson of the Conference opened the floor for questions, Lerner describes that Margie held up a bag of polluted air from Diamond and asked, “Sir, would you like to breathe this air?”
Two weeks after this public confrontation, Shell finally knocked on Margie’s front door.
Unfortunately, such corporate negligence is not unique to Margie’s neighborhood. Robert Bullard, often described as the father of the environmental justice movement, states that “all communities are not created equal.” Diamond residents had to fight hard to improve their living conditions. All they wanted were their basic human rights to clean air and water.
Lerner describes the concentration of poor and black communities surrounding heavily polluting industrial plants as a form of “spatial segregation.” This pattern traces back to a long history of racially biased land-use planning. Zoning rules classify white neighborhoods as residential and black neighborhoods as commercial or industrial. In effect, these laws prevent industries from developing polluting plants in white neighborhoods.
The 70 mile stretch of the Mississippi River dubbed as “Cancer Alley.” Wesley James
Diamond is among dozens of African American neighborhoods in Louisiana located in between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. This stretch of the Mississippi River is so polluted by the oil, gas, and chemical industries that it has been nicknamed “Cancer Alley.” Low-income communities, largely black, like Diamond have chronically suffered the worst consequences of poorly managed industry.
This form of spatial segregation raises the question: whose lives are considered valuable? This question is crucial to the Black Lives Matter movement and civil rights at large. Black Lives Matter has rightfully brought racially charged police brutality into the public spotlight; meanwhile, spatial segregation in the form of selective zoning continues to quietly affect entire communities outside of the public eye.
Lerner illuminates the reality of living along the fence line with a polluting industry by weaving together stories and strife of individuals living in Diamond, including a lifetime resident named Josephine Bering. As a witness to skin problems, unexplained allergies, asthmatic grandchildren, and premature deaths prevalent within her family, 87-year-old Josephine is fully aware of the negative health effects of living three blocks from the fence line of Shell. She laments “I don’t have enough money to get out of here, so I just have to stay and suffer with it.” Many residents do not have the means to move away, especially because the Shell plant dramatically reduces property values.
Residents face chronic exposure to toxic chemicals, and many live in on-going fear of explosions. Many of the chemicals processed within the Shell plant are highly explosive. In 1973 a pipe leak at the oil refinery caused an explosion. The flames caught an elderly woman named Helen Washington’s house on fire while she was napping inside. She was burnt alive. Her grandson ran inside to get her and witnessed the horror of her death. This wasn’t the only such accident. A 1988 explosion released over 159 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, forcing 4,500 people to evacuate.
Following these tragic events, residents turned to Margie Richard, who at the time was a local schoolteacher, to lead a grassroots group in 1990. Margie is in the fourth generation of her family to live in this region of Louisiana. Her family’s roots were deep in Louisiana long before Shell built an oil refinery in 1929 and a chemical plant in 1953. She blames Shell for pollution that damaged her daughter’s lungs and killed her sister prematurely at age 43.
These women—Josephine, Helen, and Margie—matter.
This book is not for the light-hearted. The powerful stories of Diamond residents reveal the petrochemical industry’s ugly underside, the costs it imposes on its neighbors, and how they have fought back. Shell eventually provided Diamond residents with funds for relocation. But these funds do not right the wrong committed against Diamond residents. This community faced far too many obstacles for their most basic human rights to be respected. Racial discrimination in the form of corporate negligence cannot continue to fly under the radar.