Redefining Residency: Black Environmental Thought in New Orleans, 1929-1998

Abstract

Across the U.S. and world, activists have emphasized not just the global problem of environmental degradation, but also how race in particular shapes one’s access to safe water, air, and land. My dissertation explores Black environmental thought and activism in New Orleans to re-periodize and reinterpret what some call the environmental justice movement: an effort to challenge environmental degradation as a racialized practice. Much of the literature on the environmental justice movement emphasizes the 1990s as its emergent decade and focuses on the federal lobbying efforts of national organizations and churches. Though these are crucial, less is known about the local residents—particularly women—who organized throughout the twentieth century. I look to New Orleans and argue that housing activism laid the groundwork for modern Black environmental thought and organizing. In particular, New Orleans’s activists came to see housing inequities as inextricable from the land on which their homes sat. They understood home both as a house and as the broader ecology in which one lived: a way of thinking I call residency. To illustrate residency from the Great Depression to the 1990s, I draw from several bodies of evidence: oral history interviews, activists’ creative and political writing, newspapers, and Environmental Protection Agency records.