Friend,

Brooke Floyd lives with her husband and twin children on a cul-de-sac in a leafy, middle-class neighborhood in the historic capital city of her state.

Chastity Bass, a single mother, lives with her five children in a considerably poorer section of that same city, in a small apartment that is part of an affordable housing complex.

In the ways income tends to define people in the U.S., Floyd and Bass have little in common. But in Jackson, Mississippi, two things unite them. They are both Black women. And they have both lived for years without something that most people in the richest country in the world expect – the guarantee of clean, clear water.

Over the past two weeks, the attention of the nation has alighted on the catastrophic water infrastructure in Jackson, where the city’s largest water treatment plant failed on Aug. 29, stranding 160,000 people, along with hospitals, fire stations and schools, without safe drinking water. In many cases, these communities had no water service at all. Jackson had already been under a boil-water notice for more than a month. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced this week that the city’s boil-water advisory has been lifted, but residents remained skeptical about the water quality. Advocates encouraged residents to test the water before using it.

For this city in the poorest state in the nation, where 80% of residents are Black and about 25% live in poverty, the crisis is the logical progression of a slowly building disaster at least a half-century in the making. For years, people from all walks of life in Jackson have grown accustomed to having to boil their water every time a storm throws the city’s crumbling water pipes out of whack. Parents regularly add bleach to the water to wash dishes, hoping to prevent bacterial contamination. Over the winter of 2018, a cold snap froze aging pipes in school buildings and children did not go back to school until almost Valentine’s Day. Last winter, the city was under a boil-water advisory for almost a month.

Historians, infrastructure experts and advocates say the water catastrophe in Jackson, like the one that emerged in Flint, Michigan, a few years ago, is the result of generations of neglect by white politicians and policymakers.

“This is the result of deep, historical pain and suffering, and being honest about that is essential to recovery,” said Robert Luckett, a history professor at Jackson State University, a public, historically Black university in Jackson that had to shut its classroom doors last week when the water coming out of faucets on campus started flowing first yellow, then brown.

“People here are resilient, they are coming together with a level of organizing that is rooted in the same communities that fueled the modern civil rights movement,” Luckett said. “But they are living under conditions brought on by systemic racism and just outright hostility to this Black city from the leadership of this state.”

Well-documented neglect

Last year, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael S. Regan presaged the current crisis, visiting the plant that ultimately gave way this August and citing it as an example of what his agency called “long-standing environmental justice concerns in historically marginalized communities.”

On Sept. 7, Regan met with Gov. Reeves, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and other elected officials to discuss immediate steps to improve the city’s crumbling water system. He promised tens of millions of dollars in federal loans to help get the water system up and running. Reeves had already mobilized the National Guard to help run water distribution sites in the city. He and Lumumba talked cooperation.

But the show of unity at the meeting belied years of well-documented neglect by Mississippi state officials that led up to the current crisis.

READ MORE

In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center