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At 75, the Father of Environmental Justice Meets the Moment [nytimes.com]

 
By Cara Buckley, Photograph: Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times, The New York Times, September 12, 2022

The White House has pledged $60 billion to a cause Robert Bullard has championed since the late seventies. He wants guarantees that the money will end up in the right hands.

HOUSTON — He’s known as the father of environmental justice, but more than half a century ago he was just Bob Bullard from Elba, a flyspeck town deep in Alabama that didn’t pave roads, install sewers or put up streetlights in areas where Black families like his lived. His grandmother had a sixth grade education. His father was an electrician and plumber who for years couldn’t get licensed because of his race.

Now, more than four decades after Robert Bullard took an unplanned career turn into environmentalism and civil rights, the movement he helped found is clocking one of its biggest wins yet. Some $60 billion of the $370 billion in climate spending passed by Congress last month has been earmarked for environmental justice, which calls for equal environmental protections for all, the cause to which Dr. Bullard has devoted his life.

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Great, encouraging post. Thanks, Jenna! What a hero Dr. Bullard is. It is wonderful to see him and his work celebrated, despite its being decades late. And I love that it was his wife’s work that led him into environmental Justice.


Reading that Dr. Bullard’s parents had somehow been able to acquire land, build wealth, and send four children to college — all of that an anomaly — makes me wonder what could have been gained had Jim Crow not led to the murder, theft of property, and suppression of millions of other Black people. What a different world we could be living in!

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