In Mobile, AL, Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJAC) organizes communities most threatened by environmental injustice to defend inalienable rights and ensure community self-determination. MEJAC was organized in 2013 in Mobile’s Africatown, a national historic district founded by the last enslaved West Africans brought to the US. After WWII, industrialists flooded the area with manufacturing, chemical refineries, multilane highways, and crude storage. Now, Africatown ranks above the 89th percentile nationally in 10 of 12 EPA environmental justice indexes that include air toxicity, proximity to lead paint, wastewater discharge, and hazardous waste. MEJAC works with regional partners like Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution and the Sierra Club to fight permits and zoning for polluters and to build community capacity for self-determination. When government efforts fail, MEJAC takes direct action to defend community rights to air, water, soil, health, and safety.
Detail of Cudjoe Lewis marker, Africatown, AL, Creative Commons
Residents feel a special connection to Africatown, in Mobile, AL. It was founded by the survivors of people brought to the US on the slave ship Clotilda 40 years after that practice was made a capital offense. While the land, people, and story of the place could be respected as a historical treasure, they have not received that respect. Instead, Africatown has lived within stinking papermill exhaust, atop gas and oil pipelines, and beside crude oil tanks and a coal ash pond leaking toxics into what American Rivers calls “one of America’s Most Endangered Rivers.” Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJAC) is a coalition of Africatown residents partnering with other groups working for environmental justice in the area, such as GASP and the Sierra Club. They challenge industry’s permits to operate there, demand action to curtail local problems, and have proposed a “Safe Zone” amendment to city officials to restrict new hazardous storage and prevent other industrial encroachment.
Industry near Africatown, Photo: John Sharp