Articles on the Web
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Water Action Wednesday: Women's History MonthA webpage citing sources about the history and leadership of women in the environmental protection movement.
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Clean Water Champions: the Women of the Flint Water CrisisThis article shares the impact that the efforts by two women from Flint, MI had during the 2014 Flint Water Crisis.
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Clean Water and Reproductive Justice: Lack of Access Harms Women of ColorThis July 2020 case study focuses on the negative effects not having access to clean and affordable water had on minority and economically disadvantaged communities.
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Lead poisoning (WHO)A 2024 article from the World Health Organization explaining what lead is and the dangers it poses to a person's health.
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The Rise and Fall of Lead in the Workplace (CDC)This article published by the CDC covers the historical uses, studies, and reactions to lead from ancient history to the present day.
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Lead Poisoning (Mayo Clinic)Covers the signs, symptoms, and treatments for lead poisoning.
LaToya Ruby Frazier - Flint is Family (2016)
LaToya Ruby Frazier is an artist who focuses on the interconnectedness of social justice, cultural change, and her commentary on the American experience. She explores topics including industrialism, Rust Belt revitalization, environmental justice, access to healthcare, access to clean water, Workers' Rights, Human Rights, family, and communal history. She practices photography, video, performance, installation art, and creates books.
Frazier's work includes Flint is Family, a photo essay on the Flint water crisis. She traveled to Flint in 2016 to create this work, and during that time met and collaborated with Shea Cobb, a poet, activist and mother from Flint. Flint is Family and the accompanying book Flint is Family in Three Acts is the result of five years of work. The book follows Cobb in her fight for the health and wellbeing of her family and her community.
Below, explore Frazier's Flint is Family body of work on her website, borrow her book Flint is Family in Three Acts via MeL, and watch a TED talk from Frazier about her experience documenting and working to bring relief to those effected by the Flint water crisis.
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Flint is Family (2016)LaToya Ruby Frazier's photographic work Flint is Family (2016) as shown on her website.
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Flint is Family in Three ActsFrom MeL's description:
LaToya Ruby Fraziers Flint Is Family in Three Acts chronicles the ongoing manmade water crisis in Flint, Michigan, from the perspective of those who live and fight for their right to access free, clean water. Featuring photographs, texts, poems and interviews made in collaboration with Flints residents, this five-year body of work, begun in 2016, serves as an intervention and alternative to mass media accounts of this political, economic and racial injustice.
Podcasts
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Tales from the Reuther Library: Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit
Dr. Josiah Rector explains that since the 1880s a confluence of unregulated industrial capitalism and racist practices in housing and employment in Detroit created pollution and environmental disasters disproportionately affecting the poor, working class, and particularly African Americans. He explores the resulting environmental justice movements in Detroit as residents have fought for clean air, water, and improved public health amid government and corporate divestment and Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy. Rector is an assistant professor of urban, environmental, and labor history at the University of Houston and author of Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit. -
Environmental Activism in Deindustrialized Detroit
Brandon Ward explains how Detroit residents, community organizations, and the labor movement, alarmed by the pollution remaining in Detroit’s deindustrialized era that mostly heavily impacted Black Americans and the working class, worked together from the 1970s onward to create a healthier, greener, and more livable city.
Ward is a lecturer at Perimeter College at Georgia State University and author of Living Detroit: Environmental Activism in an Age of Urban Crisis.
Donations to the Walter P. Reuther Library Endowment Fund are gratefully accepted to support this podcast and enhance access to the Reuther Library’s collections.