Hazel M. Johnson

 The environmental justice idea that's being tossed around, as a mere seven-beat refrain in opposition to an opus of destruction, has been born on the backs of the poor for a century.  While production, and dividends, and compound interest ring in ears of the rich and well-connected, the poor, with vertebrae emanating from thin skin have hunched their ways through this mayhem, hanging clothes in the smog of my 401k, while their daughters and sons have set on stoops pushing tricycles through lead-laden grass on soil inundated with the catalysts for my polyester pullover.  

This olive-brown, mahogany-red, and every-shade-in-between-history month, I want to pause at the meniscus of my consciousness to think of Hazel M. Johnson, whose big body bore the burden of telling the world that she was not just another nonsensical number.  Hazel M., in her Altgeld Gardens house in the 1960s started to string her consciousness from cough to cough, from wheeze to struggled wheeze, from cancer in her neighbor to the right, to the cancer in her neighbor to the left, to the Chicago City Office, to Washington D.C., to new laws and policies for all of her people.  

Hazel M. refused to believe that cancer was by happenstance and early death but trivial.  She saw another truth.  Then the sun came up in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982, where a protest of more olive and oak and mahogany backs rose up with sullen stalwart syncope and stood against the opportunistic open dumping of toxics in their neighborhoods.  So many of their kindred were willing to go to jail that change happened and the leader of this nation signed new orders which led to new laws.  Hazel M. is the reason that the Church of Christ study in 1987 went forward, and would demonstrate that 3 in every 5 black and latino persons in that same nation were living in communities surrounded by toxic pollution.  

Hazel M. watched her husband die of lung cancer, and countless babies of young mothers around her.  She became the thorn in the side of the waste management officials in Chicago.  Hazel M. took the world given to her, a turnip wrapped in gold-colored foil, that toxic donut, and she transformed the existence of millions.  I imagine her as intrepid, standing on the steps of City Hall, or clutching her hard-won award at the White House, watching herself in photos or soaking up a new spotlight later on. 

 Harder, though, to ponder is what she was thinking those long years raising her children alone, being threatened and beaten down by the powers that be, told that her science was wrong and that her math was undone.  What about the fear she swallowed on the city bus as she held a hand of her child on one side, and white-knuckled a bar on the other, bags flung over her shoulder with permission slips and PTA memos, along with cancer statistics and health corollaries, the maps of Sherwin Williams paint dump sites and Ford Motor factory diagrams.  

Hazel M.'s face is the one I see this month.  It's the face I think of when I consider the myriad contributions from persons of color who have poked a hole in the wealthy facade we like to project of this tired old country of contradiction.