Waste : : one Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret

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Call Number: 363.72 Fl
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	363.72 Fl	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Catherine Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that's been called "Bloody Lowndes" because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it's Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowers's life's work. It's a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets, and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America's dirty secret. In this powerful book she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions, not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. Flowers's book is the inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. It shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards, and not only those of poor minorities"-- Provided by publisher.

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Rural Southern US History & Environment submitted by sdunav on June 11, 2021, 11:16am Raw sewage and hookworm in the rural south: not a thing of the past. Environmental justice starts at home with one of the most basic human needs - sanitation.

This is also memoir of growing up Black (and fighting for an education) in Lowndes County, Alabama, and the role that area played in the fight for civil rights in the U.S.

It's an important book, but there is a lot of name-dropping you may not be interested in. Skim over that and it's fine. The Covid-era epilogue adds a sad and unsurprising update to the story.