2024 Fall Issue of Urban Land - 57

In 1979, Northeast Houston residents protest the Whispering Pines Landfill. Dr. Robert Bullard conducted a study for the first
lawsuit in the United States that charged environmental discrimination, or environmental racism based on a civil rights law .
have been victimized by environmental
racism, and you are
widely known as the " father of
environmental justice. " What
inspired you to pioneer this
field? What makes your brand
of sociology different from
[that of] the mainstream?
Dr. Robert Bullard: My entry
into this field was more accidental,
and it was not something
that I planned. I'm a
sociologist, and I do research .
. . . My area [of] specialization
was housing and residential
segregation, and I worked with
census data . . . . One day, my
wife, Linda McKeever Bullard,
came home-she's a lawyer-
and said, " Bob, I just sued
the state of Texas, the city of
Houston, and Harris County,
[which] were trying to site a
sanitary landfill in this predominantly
Black middle-class community. "
And she said that she
had filed a temporary
restraining order to try to
stop this permit from being
approved and [the] facility
built, and she needed someone
to do a study and put all
the solid waste landfills and
incinerators in Houston on the
map and tell who lives around
[them].
And my reply was, " You
need a sociologist. "
And she said, " That's what
you are, " and so, that's how
I got drafted [into] doing
this study, way back in 1979.
The lawsuit was Bean versus
Southwest and Waste Management
Corporation, [and it] was
the first lawsuit in the United
States that charged environmental
discrimination-environmental
racism-and challenged
[it] by using civil rights law.
I had 10 students [in my]
research methods class
at Texas Southern University,
where I am now, and I
designed this study, and the
students and I collected the
data, [and] I did the report.
There was no [other] study
like that. There was no literature,
so I had to start from
scratch . . . . What I found is
that . . . from the 1930s . . .
until 1978, [roughly] 82 percent
of all the garbage disposed
in Houston was disposed in
predominantly Black neighborhoods,
even though Blacks
made up only [about] 25 percent
of the population during
that period . . . .
UL: What did you expect to
find with your research, if anything?
Bullard:
I had no idea.
I had a hypothesis, and
a null hypothesis, that says
there's no relationship between
where these landfills are
located and race-Houston
does not have zoning. So, the
idea was, in the absence of
discrimination, you are likely to
have these facilities scattered
all across the city, since there's
no zoning. But what we found
is that, yes, there is a pattern
of where these facilities are
located, and that pattern fits
neatly with the racial composition
of neighborhoods.
The intent, the purpose, was
willful, but we couldn't prove
it in court, because we didn't
know anybody back in the
'30s and '50s and '60s. And
it seems nobody was dumb
enough to write it down or get
caught on tape, [during] the
1970s, saying that Black neighborhoods
in Houston were the
best places to dump garbage.
UL: Who had to sign off at the
city to site the landfills in Black
communities?
Bullard: The city council was
all white, up until 1971, so
where to put these dumps
on line were decisions that
FALL 202 4
URBAN LAND
57
BEST PRACTICES
DR. ROBER T BULL ARD AND THE BULL ARD CENTER F OR ENVIRONMENT AL JUS TICE

2024 Fall Issue of Urban Land

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