African-American History: 1865 to the Essay

The oil spill in North Carolina caught her attention along with the fact that "Forty-one states send [toxic] waste to Emelle, Alabama, where 86% of the population is African-American" (Kaplan, p. 378). The skill that Burwell showed in pushing the issue that there was clearly a strategy to place dangerous toxic waste dumps -- that give off cancer-causing PCBs -- in areas where minorities lived was impressive. "Dollie, determined at all costs to keep her neighborhood from becoming a dump, never thought of herself as a leader until this time," Kaplan writes (p. 383). Kaplan concludes that "Not since the civil rights movements had African-American People in the South Mobilized in such large numbers to demonstrate that they had reached the end of their rope and wouldn't have their human dignity and their very lives discounted because they were black and poor" (Kaplan, p. 386).

Works Cited

Brown, Elsa Barkley."The Labor of Politics." The Work of Reconstruction.

Cook, Fields, et al. "African-Americans in Richmond, Virginia, Petition President Andrew

Johnson, 1865.

DuBois, W.E.B. "The Souls of Black Folk." Three Negro Classics. New York: HarperCollins,

1965.

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought.

New York: The New Press. 1995.

Kaplan, Temma. "When it Rains, I Get Mad and Scared: Women and Environmental Racism."

Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements. New York:….....