How did “Cancer Alley” get its name? Elders like Hazel Schexnayder, who’d long lived by the Mississippi River corridor in Louisiana, know the truth. Schexnayder watched it happen. First, there were plantations. Then, “towering chemical plants and their mysterious white plumes,” and “roadside ditches oozing with blue fluid.” In 1993, she resisted alongside other community members as industrialization destroyed the land—and the ilves of her neighbors.
Residents, many the descendants of the enslaved and sharecropping ancestors who suffered on the land first, now experience high rates of “cancer, heart disease, respiratory illnesses, and autoimmune disease.” Cancer Alley is a “sacrifice zone,” environmental and public health compromised for industrial corporate profits.
Private, community-based organizations like Micah 6:8 Mission continue advocacy like Schexnayder’s, using low-cost air sensors to detect toxic pollution and low air quality from nearby plants. Members even create real-time alerts by flying red flags outside their homes.
But last May, Louisiana passed an ambiguously written law threatening $1 million fines for sharing air quality-related information not up to EPA standards. Environmental advocates were silenced—and that’s why they’re suing.
If advocates can’t “legitimately” prove there’s a problem, it’s easier to pretend the problem isn’t there. And the same legal system that enslaved and degraded us then is culpable now.