Tucked inside the Altgeld Gardens public housing project on Chicago’s far South Side, there’s a yellow brick wall filled with hundreds of names. It stands as a memorial to the friends and family members in this community who died, often due to disease or other health complications.
The Gardens, as it’s commonly referred to, stands closer to the Indiana border than Chicago’s downtown and is wedged between toxic landfills, old steel mills, chemical factories, and an oil refinery. The housing development was built for Black veterans returning from World War II.
It’s unclear exactly how the memorial wall first began.
“People just started putting up names on the wall for the people who died of cancer and other respiratory problems,” said Cheryl Johnson, who runs the local nonprofit People for Community Recovery.
Rich Cahan
Environmental justice was born here. Johnson’s mother, Hazel Johnson, originally from New Orleans, is celebrated as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” Her lifelong fight to make city and federal officials confront how poor, Black and Latino communities face disproportionate exposure to pollution turned Altgeld Gardens into a launchpad for the national movement.
When President BIll Clinton signed the first executive order recognizing “environmental justice” in 1994, Johnson was standing right next to him. Now, 30 years later, Johnson’s legacy is under siege.
President Donald Trump struck down Clinton’s executive order on his first week in office. In the 100 days since, as part of a plan to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, from the federal government, the Trump administration has launched a campaign to dismantle environmental justice protections and programs across the United States.
Changes have included an emergency order making it easier to fast-track fossil fuel projects while sidelining community opposition, challenges to congressionally appropriated funding for climate and environmental initiatives, elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice, and deep cuts to the federal workforce responsible for protecting communities from pollution.
According to Debbie Chizewer, an attorney with the nonprofit environmental legal group Earthjustice, the Trump administration’s message to environmental justice communities across the country is loud and clear: “We’re not going to do this work anymore.”
Chizewer added that the Trump administration isn’t just making it harder for the federal government to respond to environmental racism, but also for communities to advocate for themselves.
It’s targeting bedrock civil rights protections, Chizewer said, going after Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin under any programs that receive federal funding.
In the past, environmental justice groups fighting industrial pollution have used the provision to get the federal government to intervene in local issues. In Chicago for example, Cheryl Johnson was part of a civil rights complaint that resulted in a 2023 settlement agreement requiring the city of Chicago to fix zoning policies that concentrated heavy industry in poor and minority communities.
The national success of the legal tool may be fleeting.
Joshua A. Bickel / AP Photo
Earlier this month, Trump’s Department of Justice terminated a 2023 settlement agreement that required Alabama’s officials to update a failing septic system which released raw sewage onto lawns in Lowndes County, Alabama. The Justice Department said it was ending the settlement as part of its mandate to end “illegal DEI and environmental justice policies.”
“The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a press release.
“I was not surprised,” said Catherine Colman Flowers, a Lowndes County environmental justice activist who helped file the civil rights complaint that secured the 2023 settlement, given the Trump administration’s track record. Alabama’s Department of Public Health agreed to continue funding the septic replacement program until funds run out.
In the long term, Colman Flowers said the decision to end the settlement means “a lot of families will not get sanitation and will still be living in America with sewage on the ground.”
President Joe Biden had appointed Colman Flowers to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, or WHEJAC, whose mission was to provide poor and minority communities a direct line of communication with the White House and a mechanism for raising awareness of environmental justice issues in their local communities. Earlier this month, she received an email from the EPA notifying her that the Trump administration had disbanded the council.
The ongoing silencing is increasingly evident in the Great Lakes region, where Trump’s “national energy emergency” has fast-tracked federal review of the controversial Great Lakes Tunnel, a massive fossil fuel project that would replace a segment of the Line 5 pipeline that crosses the Straits of Mackinac separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.
Nearby Indigenous communities have voiced concern for years that any potential leaks from the proposed pipeline tunnel, which is projected to traverse their land, could irrevocably impact their life on the Great Lakes.
“There is no national emergency,” said Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, noting that the United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. Critics of the project maintain that only about 10 percent of the natural gas products that run through Line 5 stays in Michigan, while the overwhelming majority continues on back to Canada.
“To see it steamrolled ahead effectively silences the tribes vocalizing their concerns or sharing any of that reasoning with the decision-makers,” said Gravelle.
Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin invited industrial polluters to seek exemptions from federal rules on air pollution, a move Ana Baptista, an environmental policy professor at The New School in New York, called “a cue to industries that they have free reign.”
President Trump will then decide whether heavy industry, oftentimes located near environmental justice communities, will be able to leapfrog standards for toxic pollutants like mercury, arsenic, and ethylene oxide.
“It feels like we’re going back to the era where people denied the existence of environmental injustice and communities were really on their own,” she said. The only difference this time around, Baptista added, there’s now more than 30 years of empirical evidence documenting how poor and minority communities are stuck with the brunt of pollution and its dangerous health effects.
Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco
Back on the South Side of Chicago, where the environmental justice movement took its first steps, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson surveyed the Altgeld Gardens Memorial Wall on Earth Day, calling it a potent reminder that the ultimate goal of any good policy is “to create equal environmental protection for everyone.”
Mayor Johnson introduced an ordinance named after Hazel Johnson to the Chicago City Council earlier this month that would require the city to investigate the pollution impacts of new industrial projects before approving them.
“Even with the attacks coming from the federal government, we’re going to do everything in Chicago to protect working people.” Johnson said. “It also is an effort to double down in our work to ensure that environmental justice prevails.”