Through their tireless activism, these five Black environmentalists deconstructed the harmful narrative that climate action is exclusive to white folks. Their work spans across generations, great distances, and various environmental issues, but ultimately shares a fundamental commonality: shifting the trajectory of the environmental movement toward emphasizing inclusion, accountability, and justice.
Read about Colonel Charles Young, Hazel M. Johnson, Margie Richard, Will Allen, and Rue Mapp below to learn more about their contributions to the environmental movement.
Colonel Charles Young
Charles Young was born to two ex-slaves in Kentucky on March 12, 1864. Young quickly learned the nuances of racism as the first Black graduate of an all-white high school in Ripley, Ohio. His high score on a competitive examination coupled with the legacy of his father, who had escaped slavery to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War, earned him a spot at West Point Military Academy. There, Young faced relentless racism, bigotry, and hatred, but persevered to become the institution’s third Black graduate in 1889.
Young’s first assignment post-graduation was with the 9th Cavalry in Fort Robinson, Nebraska, where he rose to the rank of captain in 1903. The same year, he was asked to relocate his troops, famously known as the Buffalo Soldiers, to Sequoia and General Grant national parks (now Sequoia National Park and part of Kings Canyon National Park), where he would serve as the National Parks Superintendent—the first Black person to do so. With the help of the Buffalo Soldiers, Young kept the parks free from poachers and constructed trails that previous troops had failed to actualize.
His later military accomplishments are equally as impressive, including becoming the first Military Attaché to Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1904, earning the promotion to major in 1912, and earning the promotion to lieutenant colonel in 1916. In 1917 Young was further promoted to colonel in recognition of his decorated military career, making him the highest-ranked Black official in the U.S. Army.
Colonel Young recruited and trained Black troops for the U.S. Army until his death in 1922, after which he was honored with a funeral service at Arlington Memorial Amphitheater and buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In 2013, former president Barack Obama formally designated Colonel Young’s home in Wilberforce, Ohio a national monument to honor his achievements and the work of the Buffalo Soldiers.
“Indeed, a journey through [Sequoia National Park] will convince even the least thoughtful man of the needfulness of preserving these mountains just as they are, with their clothing of trees, shrubs, rocks, and vines, and of their importance to the valleys below as reservoirs for storage of water for agricultural and domestic purposes. In this, lies the necessity of forest preservation.“
-Colonel Charles Young
Hazel M. Johnson
Hazel M. Johnson has been declared “mother of the environmental justice movement”, and for good reason. She was born in 1935 in New Orleans but grew up in Chicago. Johnson started her environmentalist journey in her own community: Altgeld Gardens in South Side Chicago. Through the media, she pieced together that abnormally high cancer rates in Altgeld Gardens were being invoked by the toxic landfill that the neighborhood is built on.
Johnson, appalled by this blatant injustice, created the People for Community Recovery organization. To this day, People for Community Recovery stands as a non-profit that works to help people who live in areas with high levels of pollution through legal services, education, health and housing resources, and just general community organization. The creation of this program helped her community find its voice to speak out against environmental injustices that were affecting them and their families.
Johnson believed that environmental justice was an issue on a global scale, not just a local one. She spoke out against businesses and the government, identifying them as culprits of environmental injustice. She is noted for working alongside the U.S. Environmental Agency and a team of other environmental justice activists in order to pressure President Bill Clinton to sign the Environmental Justice Executive Order, an order that placed environmental justice as a higher priority within the U. S. government.
Johnson’s legacy lives on, with environmental justice being an important piece of the environmental movement to this day.
“Every day, I complain, protest and object. But it takes such vigilance and activism to keep legislators on their toes and government accountable to the people on environmental issues. I’ve been thrown in jail twice for getting in the way of big business. But I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop as long as I’m breathing. If we want a safe environment for our children and grandchildren, we must clean up our act, no matter how hard a task it might be.”
-Hazel M. Johnson
Margie Richard
Margie-Eugene Richard, born in 1941, grew up in the small rural community of Belltown, Louisiana. At four years old, her family relocated to Old Diamond, a historically Black neighborhood in Norco, Louisiana. The neighborhood consisted of four blocks nestled between a Shell chemical plant and a Motiva oil refinery owned by a Shell subsidiary. The area earned the nickname “Cancer Valley” due to the high rates of cancer, birth defects, and serious health ailments like asthma and bronchitis among its 1,500 residents.
Richard’s passion for activism was ignited in 1973 when the explosion of a Shell Chemical pipeline detached a house from its foundation, killing an elderly woman and a teenage boy who had been mowing the lawn. Tragedy struck again in 1988, when another explosion killed seven workers and released 159 million pounds of toxins into the air. Richard’s sister, Naomi, developed a rare bacterial infection called sarcoidosis from exposure to the toxins and died at the young age of 43.
In response to the environmental injustices suffered by Old Diamond residents, Richard founded Concerned Citizens of Norco to pursue fair and just resettlements from Shell for her family and neighbors. Over the next 13 years, she spearheaded a community campaign using empirical science and grassroots activism to expose Shell’s environmental crimes.
Richard also served as the plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit against Shell. Although the lawsuit was unsuccessful, she attracted powerful allies like U.S. Representative Maxine Waters who instigated an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigation that found Shell guilty of failing to ensure plant safety and falsifying its emissions reports.
Because of Richard’s activism, Shell agreed to reduce its emissions by 30 percent and improve emergency evacuation procedures. Dissatisfied with the offer, Richard and the Concerned Citizens met with executives at the Shell office in Norco, who agreed to invest $5 million into a community development fund and pay for full relocation of all four Old Diamond streets.
Richard has since passed along the presidency of the Concerned Citizens but remains a renowned activist. She continued to work with Shell to improve the company’s environmental health practices and participated in international delegations to encourage accountability in environmental decision-making. In 2004, Richard won the Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of her hard-won battle for environmental justice.
“Every time we as Black Americans to stand up for what is right, they say it’s for greed of money. It’s a fight for longevity. If we don’t put a face to it, we can’t make change. Truth and justice for the betterment of life, the environment and government is the stairway to upward mobility.”
-Margie Richard
Will Allen
Will Allen was born the son of a sharecropper in Maryland in 1949. When he graduated high school, he became the first African American to receive an athletic scholarship at the University of Miami for men’s basketball. He holds a number of records for the Miami Hurricanes to this day and is part of the University of Miami’s Sports Hall of Fame.
After graduating with a degree in education, he went on to play pro-basketball, playing on the European circuit. While in Belgium on tour, Allen was inspired by local Belgian farmers, which inspired him to think differently about agriculture.
When he returned back to the U.S. Allen entered into the world of sales and marketing, but quickly tired of the corporate grind. He quit his job and took over his wife’s family farm in Milwaukee. The area where the farm was located was one of the last agricultural zoning areas in Milwaukee, so the small farm soon became the only place in the area where locals could buy fresh food. People in the area began asking Allen for advice on how to grow their own fresh food, and out of this grew Growing Power Inc. in 1995.
Allen has had his hands in innovations revolving around several different sustainable agricultural practices such as composting and aquaponics, developing new ways to create high yields with small areas.
As of today, Growing Power has participated in over 70 projects across the world, involving training programs and community food centers. Allen became the second farmer to be granted the John D. and Katherine T. McArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and named a McArthur Fellow in 2008. He has also been a major player in U.S. politics, as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative and was an active supporter of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move Campaign.”
Today, Allen continues to run his wife’s farm on top of running his international non-profit to help promote sustainable farming across the globe.
“My father taught me that the fate of a seed can be predicted by the health of the soil where it takes root. This is true of summer crops. It can be true, in another sense, of people. We all need a healthy environment and a community that lets us fulfill our potential.“
-Will Allen
Rue Mapp
Rue Mapp grew up in Oakland, California, where she lived with her adoptive parents. She attributes her deep connection to nature to weekends and summers spent in her family’s ranch in Lake County, California.
In 2009, Mapp began writing short passages about her love of nature and experiences being the only Black person on many outdoor excursions in a blog called Outdoor Afro. Discovering that her blog resonated with many other Black readers encouraged Mapp to expand Outdoor Afro into a non-profit organization with over 40,000 participants in 30 states.
The organization inspires Black connections and leadership in nature through outdoor recreational activities such as camping, hiking, birding, and skiing. In a society where Black bodies have historically been excluded from or victimized in nature, Outdoor Afro deconstructs the stereotype that “Black people don’t do nature.”
In 2011, Outdoor Afro made history as 11 members became the first all-Black expedition team to hike Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The members, none of whom were extreme athletes, trained for one year in preparation for the hike, which took five days. According to member Chaya Harris, the expedition reverses misconceptions about Black people and alters the narrative to reflect people of color as adventurous.
Mapp has accumulated many awards and honors for her efforts through Outdoor Afro, including: an invitation to participate in the 2010 America’s Great Outdoors Conference at the Obama White House, recognition as one of the most influential African Americans in the country by The Root 100 in 2012 and 2016, the Outdoor Industry Inspiration Award, the Wildlife Federation Communication award, and a feature in Oprah’s 2020 Vision Tour.
“Why Outdoor Afro exists is because we’ve had this history of violence against Black bodies in the outdoors that we have had to overcome and through it find atonement and the chance to tell a new narrative…we all have a connection to nature and we can talk about nature in the way that nature views us.”
– Rue Mapp
Looking Forward to the Future
Whether their work involved the pursuit of environmental justice like Hazel M. Johnson and Margie Richard, or the facilitation of Black connections with nature like Rue Mapp, these five activists dismantled racist barriers precluding Black people from exercising their right to a safe, healthy environment.
Many of these environmentalists have since passed the torch to Black and BIPOC youth, who have continued their work with vigor. At twelve years old, Mari Copeny wrote a letter to former president Barack Obama advocating for environmental justice for her hometown of Flint, Michigan, where water mismanagement resulted in high levels of lead. At sixteen, Isra Hirsi co-founded the U.S. Climate Strike to promote Black and Muslim leadership in the climate justice movement.
The list of Black youth and young adults upholding the messages of environmental justice and representation imbued within the work of earlier Black environmentalists goes on, and will continue to grow as the environmental movement shifts toward equality. Their environmental legacies run deep, and the future of Black and BIPOC environmentalism is brighter for it.
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