From the Archives: Taking on environmental racism: Chester Residents for Quality Living v. Seif
In the 1990s, we represented community groups in Chester, Pennsylvania, who were taking on environmental racism and the concentration of polluting facilities in their low-income African American community.
On January 19, 1993, Reverend Horace Shrand attended a Delaware County Council meeting after he and 50 Chester, Pennsylvania residents waited two weeks for a phone call from a councilperson about the cluster of waste plants polluting their community. At the meeting, Shrand, with a white rotary phone and a dead rat in tow, testified that the Westinghouse Electric Corp.’s trash-to-steam plant in his West End neighborhood caused sanitation and health concerns because of the noise and black fumes emitted from its trucks, the sinkholes it created in streets, and the proliferation of rats near residences. Michael Hull, a former employee of the plant, testified that Westinghouse never recycled, insteadburning tires, dead pets, and plastics that eventually polluted the air with noxious odors in predominantly low-income, African American communities. Years later, Chester residents continued to express concern about the health effects of pollution such as asthma, cancer, and infant mortality. Activists like Zulene Mayfield publicly stated to news reporters this issue was a result of racial discrimination where “society views [the people] as expendable or an acceptable risk.” By 1996, residents united to form the Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, selected Zulene Mayfield as their chairwoman, and sought a lawsuit against the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for committing environmental racism.
In the lawsuit, attorneys Michael Churchill and Jerome Balter of the Public Interest Law Center argued that DEP’s choice to issue a disproportionately high number of waste facility permits to corporations w locating the polluting sites in Chester (a city whose population was 65% African American), rather than within predominantly white towns in Delaware County was racially biased and a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Law Center presented evidence that Chester had the highest concentration of industrial facilities in Pennsylvania. They showed that facilities in Chester incinerated all solid waste and treated at least 85% of the raw sewage and sludge of Delaware County. Essentially, Chester was forced to live among the waste of its more affluent and white neighboring communities. Since 1987, five waste facility permits were granted within Chester, while only two permits were issued outside the city in Delaware County. The two waste facilities located in majority white communities together had a permit capacity to treat 1,400 tons of waste per year, while the five waste facilities in Chester had a total permit capacity to treat over 2.1 million tons of waste per year.
Later that year, U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell dismissed the lawsuit as being a case of “discriminatory effect rather than discriminatory intent.”. In 1997, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling and reinstated the lawsuit, arguing that discriminatory effect can be a valid case against federal administrative agencies that do not regulate environmental risks. In 1998, the case was declared moot by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the proposed facility that had sparked the case—Soil Reclamation Services—was denied its operations permit, and did not open in Chester. Despite the mixed results of Chester Residents for Quality Living v. Seif (1996), the case not only inspired the waste plant Delcora to reduce its pollution levels and fund a community-based lead poisoning prevention program in Chester, but was also a groundbreaking case that sparked attention to the issue of environmental racism in other communities.
Written and researched by Dr. Menika Dirkson
