By Joshua Bynum:
Cheryl (Left) and her Mother Hazel (Right)
At One Earth Collective, we have something special for our readers today. In honor of Black History Month, we had the privilege of speaking with a true trailblazer in the environmental justice movement, Cheryl Johnson. Cheryl is the daughter of Hazel M. Johnson, widely regarded as the mother of the environmental justice movement and a local Chicago icon. Although Hazel Johnson is no longer with us, her legacy continues through Cheryl, who has been tirelessly advocating for environmental equity on Chicago’s West Side for over 40 years. We are incredibly grateful for the opportunity to hear from such a monumental figure, and we hope her insights will inspire our readers to take action and engage in their own communities.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced in advocating for environmental justice in your community?
A: This is a loaded question because, after being in this movement for over 40 years and experiencing all that we've gone through, we’ve come to where we are today. The challenge now is that we’re being forced to go back 40 years to where we first started. Back then, we had no voice and no justice, and the community had no way to engage with federal officials. For example, the EPA 40 years ago had no mandate to work with communities, only with organizations and institutions. Through organizing, we’ve made progress, but now those gains are being rolled back, putting all of us at risk and diminishing our quality of life. The industry is getting away with it. There are no more checks and balances, and all the work we fought to change is being undone with a simple stroke of a Sharpie.
When you talk about environmental justice, you're talking about the quality of life and how it will be impacted. This movement was started by the people and for the people. These issues affect everyone—no one wants dirty air, dirty water, or any of the other harmful effects. The people making these decisions are not immune to the impacts. This is an assault on humanity.
Q: Can you share an example of a local environmental issue that has disproportionately affected marginalized communities, and how your work has addressed it?
A: Let's go back to the basics and focus on an issue that affects all communities. Lead-based paint is present in many older homes on the West Side, and many of these homes have not been updated to remove asbestos or old lead-based paint. Fortunately, in the 90s, we fought to address this issue in public housing by threatening to sue the Chicago Housing Authority. While they eventually demolished these older homes, they simply buried the lead and potentially contaminated the soil. While it was a positive step to remove these toxic homes, it created a new environmental problem. Now, not only are we dealing with lead-based paint poisoning, but also lead pipes carrying water and potential soil contamination. Most people don't consider the risks of bathing in contaminated water, and we haven't fully eradicated the poison that our children are consuming. They may think we don’t notice these hazards, but we do.
Q: How do you balance grassroots efforts with working with government agencies or corporations that may have conflicting interests?
Cheryl Johnson Advocating Environmental Justice
A: Industries are a major cause of our problems; they are the ones who build facilities that claim to “protect” the public to the best of their ability. Yet, they continue to invalidate their mandates, and as long as this persists, we will continue to face issues. If I run a red light, I get a ticket, but when they break the law, nothing happens. They find loopholes to avoid consequences unless it’s something unavoidable, like an explosion. But we want to prevent the explosion from happening in the first place, so we aim to empower our community to learn the laws and understand their rights. We must stay vigilant and challenge the current administration, as we’re already seeing the consequences in places like California, Louisiana, and South Carolina. If we don’t get it right, Mother Nature will show us a lesson we can’t ignore. Our community must continue to challenge the government—we can no longer allow things to happen to us. The government’s role is to research ways to protect us and create laws that safeguard us. Therefore, we must push back and hold them accountable, because if we don’t, they will continue to create and pass lax environmental laws. All of this means nothing if our lives are threatened by poor water and air quality. Resources are not available to poor communities to combat these issues, while those with the means to protect themselves don’t live in our neighborhoods. It’s simply common sense that’s lacking, and replacing it with sensationalism in this country will only get us killed. We can’t even buy a carton of eggs right now, and people are buying individual eggs just to avoid the high prices. This is what the movement is about—it’s about equal protection for all, including animals and the environment. I say all this to emphasize that we must be sensitive to issues that are critical to life and humanity.
Q: Looking back, what do you wish you had known when you first started working in environmental justice?
A: When I first started, my mother pushed me into it, but I now wish I had started on my own, because I truly understand how important this work is. It wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I fully grasped why my mother encouraged me to get involved. I often imagine how much more of an impact I could have made, and how much more refined my perspective would have been if I had been aware of the importance of this work when my mother first pushed me at 16. I believe I would have been able to educate my community at a much younger age.
I understand that movements don’t happen overnight. It took 40 years for the Civil Rights Act and 40 years for voting rights. It takes decades to get the public to recognize an issue and to implement laws and policies that address it. When we look back, we see that we wasted a lot of time in our lives, and after passing those acts, we felt like we had made it—but it was just the beginning. We thought we were free, but now we understand that as Black people in America, we are never truly free.
We must try not to diminish our community. As someone who has lived long enough to witness these changes, I believe the biggest mistake we made was becoming fully dependent on government assistance for our livelihood. Once that happened, we lost our morals, values, and work ethic.
Q: What do you hope to see in your community’s future when it comes to environmental justice? What does environmental equality look like?
Cheryl Addressing Community in Local Meeting
A: It is not just about fighting, it is about change and it is about living, breathing, and knowing that your water is not poison, and knowing the land under your feet isn’t poisoned either. If all those things existed we should have the right and ability to clean it up. Learn about what it is and train how to remove it and benefit economically from it. We need to learn what is dirty now and how to clean it up before we even entertain a new business/plant coming into our community. They say they cleaned the old steel mill to “residential standards” but we need to figure out what level of clean is truly clean. We could’ve built a hospital but instead, they are bringing in a computer building and that costs a massive amount of energy and water to maintain. Who says that what they try to fix does not create new problems and that we are now responsible for how to clean this new problem? How do we clean our air, how do we clean poisoned soil, how do we sustain our community, and how do we promote better education? How we teach our community to clean up has to start as young as possible. Our public schools took out these programs (trades) to teach us how to fend for ourselves. We need to get back to those types of principles to create environmental restoration in our community. You go to school to be in debt but you don’t go to a trade school to enrich the community on a grassroots level.
Q: Anything else you would like to say to our readers before we conclude?
“Toxic Donut” Map on https://www.peopleforcommunityrecovery.org
A: I want to share that I live in public housing and have been fighting for 40 years to improve my home. We fought back and were planning to purchase an old school building in our community that was set to close. Now, we’ve stopped that plan and are working to use the George Washington Carver C Building as a hub for restoration in our community. We had hoped to secure a federal grant, but now that seems unlikely, so we are exploring other ways to purchase and repurpose the building. Our plan is to rename it the Hazel M. Johnson Institute for Sustainability and Environmental Justice. The work we’re doing is rooted in the early efforts of George Washington Carver and many other environmental scientists, and it’s now ironic that we’re trying to continue his legacy through a different name.
I ask your readers to please visit our website at https://www.peopleforcommunityrecovery.org and to continue fighting for change—not just for your community, but for all communities facing environmental inequality.
