Welcome to Working History, a production of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org. I'm series host Beth English, and today I'm speaking with Ellen Griffith Spears, associate professor at the University of Alabama with a joint appointment in the Interdisciplinary New College in the Department of American Studies. She is the author of Baptized in PCBs, Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Ellen Griffith Spears, welcome to Working History. Well, thank you. It's good to be with you. Can you give us a brief introduction to your book, Baptized in PCBs?
Well, my book, Baptized in PCBs, Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, is about the devastating effects of toxic chemicals and chemical weapons, not only on one small town in Alabama, but also globally. This one small city in northeast Alabama is only about 24,000 people, but it was home to the primary production site of what are known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, chemicals that are so toxic they were banned by Congress in the 1970s. The city is also flanked by military installations, one of which, the Anniston Army Depot, until 2011 housed part of the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons, things like sarin, VX, mustard gas, nerve agents that were designed to kill people.
So, Anniston really represents a paradigmatic case of environmental injustice, both a movement to hold a company that produced PCBs to account for PCB contamination and a parallel campaign for safe disposal of the weapons, owed much to an earlier generation of civil rights activism in the city, until the lawsuits over PCBs emerged and the plan to incinerate the chemical weapons that were stored there hit the national press in the early 2000s. Among the wider public, Anniston was probably most known for one of the worst assaults on nonviolent civil rights protesters. That was the firebombing of Freedom Riders bus on Mother's Day, 1961. Right, right.
And how did you come to this story? You had been researching the topic for several years. So what ended up inspiring the actual writing of the book? Well, there were really several sources of inspiration for this book.
In the 1990s, I had worked on a collaborative oral history documentary project with a pretty extraordinary group of women in Gainesville, Georgia, called the Newtown Flores Club, who had uncovered a pattern of illness they connected to industries surrounding their neighborhood. It was a pattern of environmental injustice in their African-American neighborhood. And by that time, in the 90s, activists and scholars had begun to recognize environmental racism or environmental injustice. And that is really the unequal distribution of hazardous waste sites or other not-just facilities in various low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
The inequality was evident, the National Law Journal said, in the early 90s, also in environmental enforcement. Wealthier, whiter neighborhoods get remediated or cleaned up more quickly than neighborhoods where low-income residents and people of color reside. So I've become attuned to this new wave of civil rights activism that was reflected in the environmental justice movement. And I was particularly interested in how these environmental inequalities get produced over time and how local people were challenging environmental injustice.
But there are other sources of inspiration, too. I mean, really, in environmental history, people like Rachel Carson. Carson had opened her 1962 landmark study of DDT, Silent Spring, with a lovely lyrical passage. It was partly fictionalized.
It was a parable that vividly anticipated the mounting problems that were associated with chemical pesticides. Carson used real examples from several different locales and put them all together in one coherent and powerful narrative to demonstrate the detrimental impact of reckless commercial pesticide use on nature and on human health. She really predicted a dystopia that might result if chemicals remained unregulated. But Carson was abundantly clear.
Not all of these examples happened in one place. They were all true, but they weren't in any one place. In Aniston, the exposures were all in one place. So, like Carson's account, Baptized in PCBs is really making an argument for, still, we need reform about how we manufacture and use and regulate toxic chemicals in the U.S.
But, really, there's one more source of inspiration. In a way, that should be mentioned first. It's the residents of Aniston themselves, because they were standing up to one of the world's largest and most powerful agrochemical companies, and also the U.S. military.
So, why the title Baptized in PCBs? Well, the company that produced PCBs in Aniston for four years, the Monsanto Chemical Company, had carelessly spilled PCBs, which are highly toxic to wildlife and to human beings, let them run off their plant site, sometimes as much as 250 pounds per day in the 1960s. So, these chemicals, really, they were once prized. Very heat-resistant fluids, but they're associated with a series of serious health problems.
Liver disease, immune disorders, neurobehavioral deficits in children. The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have labeled the chemicals probable human carcinogens. But this isn't just a local story. PCBs are ubiquitous.
They lodge in nearly every person around the globe, and the trials that unfolded in Aniston over these chemicals revealed exceptionally high concentrations of these industrial compounds in residents of Aniston. Right. And so, let's talk a little bit about Aniston, where this story unfolds. So, why Aniston, which, you know, is both Southern, but also very much an all-American town?
Well, local places such as this are really sites in which global processes take place. The decisions were made elsewhere, in boardrooms in St. Louis, where the Monsanto Company has its headquarters, civilian and military government offices in Washington, D.C., research labs a star way of Sweden, and business offices in Europe, as well as courtrooms from Birmingham to New York. So, concentrated in this local place was a much larger story.
James Cobb, the Southern historian in Selling of the South, talks about pollution being regarded in many places as, quote, the price of progress. But an immense distance, really physical and social, separated the decision-makers, who deemed pollution a price worth paying, and the people who paid the highest price. And can you talk a little bit about those people? You interviewed more than 100 for your book.
And so, how did the oral histories that you did with the Aniston residents inform your understanding, not only of Aniston, but of this bigger story that your book tells about? Well, oral history, really, I mean, as you know, is a method that really opens up sources to include people in events that the written record may have missed or may have distorted. Rick Bragg, the writer and former New York Times reporter who's from Calhoun County, from this area around Aniston, said, people forget if it's not written down. And so, these stories that local people tell, one of the leaders, for example, in a group that formed around the PCB pollution, was the Sweet Valley Cocktown Environmental Justice Task Force.
And Cassandra Roberts was a leader in that group. She had grown up in Aniston. She lived a few miles away near the Aniston Army Depot. And so, she was at the center of this maelstrom that unfolded once, you know, people didn't learn about the exposures until the middle 90s.
The production PCBs were produced in Aniston from 1929 until around 1972. And the industry knew. There was a meeting held at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1937, at which researchers, Dr. Cecil Drinker, who's then dean of the School of Public Health, told representatives of Monsanto, General Electric, which used a lot of these chemicals in their transformers and electrical equipment.
The Halowax Corporation, which had three deaths of workers who were using these, what are called chlorinated hydrocarbon chemicals in the process, told them that these chemicals had possible systemic toxic effects, that they caused liver damage, that they were the cause of the very severe skin chloracne that workers were experiencing. But people in Aniston didn't find out about this until the 1990s. So you can imagine the anger and the response that local people felt. And so hearing their voices telling the story in their own words is an important part of the book.
Right. And so just to back up, you had mentioned earlier that it was really in the 1960s when this sort of massive dumping of the chemicals was going on. And so by then, it was clear that these were toxic and they were doing damage to the environment and to the residents of Aniston, right? Well, that's absolutely right.
So picking up on that, let's talk a little bit more specifically about the workers who made PCBs. Can you give listeners sort of a baseline of who these workers typically were and what the impact of their work was on them? Yes. Well, during most of the time that PCBs were produced in Aniston from those years, from the late 20s until the early 70s, people in the African-American neighborhood that is on the north and east side of the plant would not have worked at the plant except for as laborers.
So what they were doing was arguably the most hazardous work, bagging and drumming the chemicals, doing cleanup, working in the laundry. Until 1966, according to one of my interviewees, all the laborers who did that work were African-American and no African-American served as chemists and managers. Whites lived kind of south and west of the plant. One of them, I interviewed Opal Scruggs, whose grandfather worked at the plant.
She often met him at the plant gate and walked home holding his hand. And she wonders, you know, if that experience led to the high levels of PCBs in her body today. But as early as 1931, they were seeing a very severe form of skin acne that appeared in residence. And researchers at Emory University in the 30s verified this fact.
Very disfiguring impact. Interestingly enough, the company was sued in the 1930s not only about PCBs but also about another chemical they were making, trisodium phosphate, TSP, which was later banned in 15 states. And a court told the company in 1937 that they had a duty to warn residents about these exposures. But again, you know, no information was shared until it came out in the 1990s.
Right. And so what was then more broadly the impact on the local community? You sort of hinted at this with Oval holding a hand and sort of having that incidental contact. But what was the broader impact as well?
Well, researchers who've studied this in the course of the late 90s and 2000s have looked at the health status of Aniston residents and they say that this population is one of the most highly exposed populations in the world for people who are not occupationally exposed. And in talking about the experience of local people and their exposure to toxic chemicals with the workers and people in the broader community, you use the terms in your book, two very interesting terms, toxic knowledge and slow violence. Can you talk about these and what you mean by them and how they play out in Aniston? On the simplest level, toxic knowledge is just simply the awareness, the knowledge about what a toxic substance will do to the human body.
But it's also used in a variety of disciplinary contexts in a different way. A geneticist and bioethicist deploy toxic knowledge to describe the knowledge that results from learning that one carries a disease that has no cure. Now, PCBs are a whole family of chemicals, 209 chemicals in all, and different ones work on the body in different ways. And so even when people learn that they have a certain level of these toxic chemicals in their bloodstream or in their tissues, it's difficult to predict exactly how it will turn out for a particular person, what kind of impact it would have.
And so, you know, it's very tough with proving cancer, for example, that has a very long latency period. Could be lots of confounding factors. And so it's hard to know. So that kind of knowledge people are now walking around with, that's very scary.
And then there's the, from the literary world, Patricia Yeager, the American Studies scholar, talked about a toxic knowledge of race in place. And what she meant there was the difficult and complex issues that emerge when you bear the unseen but intuitively understood toxic relationships that happen in communities, the unequal social relationships that get marked on particular landscapes. So it had this kind of rich disciplinary, interdisciplinary use. And one of the questions that emerges is, these are very technical questions sometimes.
So how is it that citizens can participate meaningfully when a lot of the scientific knowledge is withheld from them? And slow violence, Rob Nixon uses that term. And by that, he means violence that's the systemic, not just the personal violence, which Aniston witnessed plenty of personal violence, racial violence in the firebombing of the Freedom Riders bus, a vicious assault on nonviolent protesters who were simply trying to enforce federal requirement that African-Americans had equal access to public facilities and bus stations and train stations that were viciously beaten. But slow violence is systemic and it's violence that, quote, occurs gradually and out of sight the wave destruction that is dispersed across time and space.
And in a way, this kind of pollution that builds up in people's bodies over time with definite but sort of unpredictable effects is one of the worst examples of slow violence. Right. And let's shift gears just a little bit to talk about the litigation that then emerges around PCBs. Can you give us an overview of the Aniston PCB cases?
Well, so in the middle 90s, when people found out, the way they found out was because a contractor pulled a very deformed fish out of Choclocka Creek, the local creek, and he actually sent it off to be tested. And that's one of the ways that people found out that there was heavy PCB exposure in this area. So local residents and local businesses filed dozens of toxic tort lawsuits against Monsanto and its corporate partners. The three largest cases actually got the most attention.
In one of the major state court cases, in what eventually became the longest running trial in Alabama history, the jury found Monsanto and its partner companies liable on six counts. And those counts were suppression of the truth, negligence, trespass, nuisance, wantonness, and outrage. Alabama law defines outrage as, quote, conduct beyond all possible bounds of decency, atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society. So after just five and a half verdict that Monsanto had knowingly poisoned the Aniston residents and then hidden the danger from public knowledge.
As this knowledge emerged and as these cases began making their way through the courts, how were environmental activism and civil rights activism connected here? Well, it's very interesting because while the PCB cases were unfolding, there were also big issues around the chemical weapons because in the late 1980s, local residents in Aniston found out two things. One, that the chemical weapons had been stored there at the Aniston Army depot since the early 1960s. And two, that the Army planned to incinerate them on the site.
And so several activist groups emerged around that. Families concerned about nerve gas incineration. And initially, they were just concerned, but they eventually came to oppose that means of destroying the chemicals and wanted to seek a safer method of disposal. Save Alabama's Future Environment formed Burn Busters, which was a guerrilla theater group on chemical weapons issues.
All of those groups formed around the opposition to the incinerator. And then there were groups that formed around the... PCB issues. The Sweet Valley Comptown Environmental Justice Task Force, local residents, people who lived in that community for a couple generations, PAP, Community Against Pollution.
And so they cooperated on some things, but some of the people who were opposed to PCBs were not opposed to incineration. So there was this uneasy collaboration at times. Sure, sure. And what were the methods?
Was it purely through the courts or were there public demonstrations? What was the climate around these cases? There were multiple methods of opposing the PCB problem. People picketed in front of the plant.
People testified at EPA hearings. One of the big issues was that the situation was so serious that when the EPA came in, they decided to press Monsanto to immediately relocate people that were just living right to the east of the plant. So several dozen homes were slated for immediate evacuation. And that relocation plan, which that alerted people to just how serious the problem was.
And then they did a lot of public meetings and hearings, but also then took Monsanto and the other corporate players to court. Right, right. And what about organized labor? Do labor organizations have a role in this anti-PCB campaign?
Well, it's very interesting. There are several unions in the chemical industry. The most aggressive in fighting for better regulation of chemicals was the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, in the 1970s. With Tony Mazzotti as legislative director, OKOL worked very hard to get chemical regulation passed, instrumental in the coalition that resulted in the passage of the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, which banned PCBs.
The Aniston workers were also unionized in the International Chemical Workers Union, the ICWU, which led a few strikes that involved the Aniston plant over the years. Perhaps did not put as much emphasis on the health and safety issues. But still like it nonetheless. Yeah.
The other organization that I would lift up in relation to this is the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Bill Lucey was very involved. You asked about the different kinds of strategies that activists pursued. And one of the strategies led them to Washington to testify at the Senate hearing that was specifically focused on the Aniston PCB situation.
It was convened by Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists was there present supporting David Baker, who was another one of the leaders in Aniston of Community Against Pollution, as he testified before this congressional subcommittee about the hazards that local people were facing. And that hearing was instrumental in getting funding, $3.2 million for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the Centers for Disease Control, to institute health studies of Aniston residents. And what was the end result of these cases? Well, the end result was a massive, whopping $600 million settlement in two of the largest cases, plus $100 million committed to cleanup.
There were also some innovative features of the settlement, setting up an educational foundation, because children who were exposed to PCVs very well could face neurocognitive deficits. Funding was provided for a clinic in Aniston for 10 years through one of the cases. But there were 22,000 plaintiffs in those two large cases. And when you do the math, many people received very modest compensation.
The average was about $7,000, not enough for an elderly person to take on a new mortgage across town. And that major settlement happened in 2003, so the 10 years of clinic funding has ended. And of course, money, people make this point over and over again in the interviews, money does not restore health. So people are left with their health problems and their concerns.
Right. So how do people assess the results of the lawsuits now, beyond what you've said about the small settlements and you still have these lingering health issues? And do people, local residents, see this as having been successful or mixed results? Or what are the thoughts there?
Well, by any measure, the lawsuit results was an impressive victory. I mean, these local people took on some of the most powerful forces in the country, major agrochemical conglomerate, and even the activities against the incinerator. The incinerator eventually was built. It did succeed with relatively minor problems in incinerating all of those nerve agents by 2011.
And so we need to just acknowledge and lift up those victories. But one of the local leaders I interviewed perhaps said it best. He said, it was a magnificent struggle, but we are not at the end. And we need to take a sober look at how we regulate toxic chemicals.
PCBs are referred to as a legacy chemical because for the most part, these products are no longer manufactured. When PCBs were banned by congressional action in 1976, it was considered to be one of the real victories of the environmental movement. But TSCA, as that law is called, was a weak law when it was passed and it was unevenly enforced. According to the EPA, the ban on PCBs left 750 million pounds of the chemicals in place in aging transformers and other applications in the U.S.
alone. So Congress last year, almost 44 years, Congress, both the House and the Senate passed different versions of an update to TSCA last year, and it's going to conference committee soon. But there are limitations on both versions. Some of them make it worse than the existing law.
So we need to seriously address environmental injustice. And that would be meaningful reform would be one way to do that. The other thing is that we need to address the underlying social inequalities too, because so that no population is targeted either directly or indirectly to get a greater share of the burdens of industrial development. Right.
And I think with the lead issue in Flint and a number of other things in the headlines right now, this is really a relevant conversation. What do you want your readers to gain from your book, reading this book? What's the big takeaway you want them to have? You know, the residents in Aniston, the activists who took on the Monsanto company and the army were often challenged.
You know, people have said, you're unpatriotic, you know, you're outside agitators when it was led by people locally. And I think what we need to acknowledge what these local struggles do to make a community healthier and safer. Actually, they should be celebrated and commended rather than vilified. So I think it's important to acknowledge the work of local leaders in bringing these injustices to light so they can be addressed.
Well, Ellen Griffith Spears, you've given us a lot to think about, and you've written a wonderful book, so I hope a lot of people will pick it up. And thank you for joining us on this episode of Working History to talk about it. Thank you so very much. Thanks again to Ellen Griffith Spears, author of Baptized in PCBs, Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
The book is now available in paperback. And thank you for listening to this episode of Working History, produced by the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org and follow Working History on Twitter at Working History.