In neighborhoods shadowed by pipelines, oversized gas turbines, and leaking landfills, residents confront daily environmental hazards – chronic asthma, water tainted with industrial runoff, and cancer rates far above the norm. Sowing Justice, based in Memphis and founded in 2021, tackles these threats head-on through community activist training, voter registration drives, and citizen science initiatives that measure lead, volatile organics, and methane emissions.The group equips families – especially Black, low-income residents near Superfund sites and petrochemical corridors – to speak at permit hearings and shape policy. That includes neighborhoods like Boxtown, a historic Memphis community long surrounded by toxic industry and emblematic of many others facing the same legacy of environmental neglect. As founder Marquita Bradshaw says, “We are fighting for the right to breathe clean air and live without fear.” Guided by the motto If you reap what you sow, we will sow justice, the grassroots group transforms exposure into action and demand into lasting change.
Photo courtesy of Marquita Bradshaw.
Sowing Justice is led by Marquita Bradshaw, a fourth-generation Memphian shaped by her family’s decades-long fight against pollution from the Defense Depot Superfund site. The Black-led group, operating with a four-person staff and six-member board, grew from Bradshaw’s groundbreaking 2020 U.S. Senate campaign into a grassroots force confronting the roots of pollution and political exclusion. They have partnered with Memphis Community Against Pollution to mobilize over 1,000 public comments and organize teach-ins opposing Elon Musk’s xAI gas turbines in Boxtown. With the Sierra Club, they helped install heat pumps, providing a cleaner, more affordable energy alternative in South Memphis neighborhoods long burdened by pollution, aging infrastructure, and high utility costs. Sowing Justice offers organizing tools, leadership training, and coalition support that connect local efforts to a broader movement for change. No longer sidelined, these communities are building collective power and shaping the legacy they deserve.
Marquita Bradshaw (center), founder of Sowing Justice (Photo courtesy of Marquita Bradshaw)