Leading from the Ground Up: African American Women, Community Struggles, and the Making of Environmental Justice

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Environmental Movements & Activism

Abstract

African American Women, Community Struggle, and Environmental Justice: An Intersectional Perspective from the Ground Up
Abstract
This paper examines the historic role of African American women in the emergence of movements against environmental racism and for environmental justice, grounding that history in community life, urban governance, and lived responsibility. Drawing on interviews conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s with women leaders of grassroots struggles—many of them speaking at or after the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit—the paper traces how long-standing community struggles over housing, health, infrastructure, and political exclusion were reframed as environmental injustice.

Rather than treating environmental justice as a response to newly discovered environmental harm, the paper shows how African American women understood toxic exposure through histories of racial segregation, political disenfranchisement, and gendered responsibility for care. Community struggles against landfills, incinerators, and industrial siting were initially understood not as “environmental” issues, but as extensions of urban neglect and racialized governance. Environmental justice emerged as a political framework only when women translated these experiences into a language capable of naming patterns of harm across neighborhoods and cities.

Analytically, the paper centers agency as a lived, intersectional practice formed within domination rather than as a secondary outcome of mobilization. African American women’s responsibilities for children, households, and neighborhoods generated forms of knowledge that linked urban space, state power, and embodied harm. Their narratives reveal how community-based labor and interpretation shaped environmental justice from the ground up, positioning African American women not only as participants in the movement, but as key theorists of its meaning.
By foregrounding community, gender, race, and place, the paper contributes to urban sociology by showing how environmental justice grew out of everyday struggles over survival, governance, and belonging in racially segregated communities.

Author

• Celene Krauss, Kean University