





































Author 
ELIZABETH GRENNAN 
BROWNING 
IU Environmental 
Resilience Institute

IU Bloomington 
Department of History 

Research Fellow at the 
IU Environmental 
Resilience Institute

Adjunct Assistant 
Professor in the IU 
Bloomington 
Department of History

City Care
Historical and Contemporary Lessons from 
Environmental Justice Coalition-Building 

ELIZABETH GRENNAN BROWNING

ABSTRACT
This article examines the historical 
roots of the challenges facing 
contemporary climate justice 
advocacy campaigns, and draws 
lessons from this history regarding 
how to more comprehensively 
address racial equity in resilience 
planning and environmentalist 
advocacy. As the modern US 
environmental movement gained 
momentum in the 1970s, fault lines 
developed between environmentalists 
and civil rights advocates. A key 
source of tension was debates 
over whether urban environments 
were deserving of the same kinds 
of environmental protections as more 
traditional and pristine forms of 
“nature.” African Americans’ 
prioritization of economic equity 
alongside legal equality also 
led to a critical dialogue about 
economic growth and the economic 
externalities of regulating industry 
and safeguarding the environment. 
This article draws on environmental 
justice and environmental history 
scholarship as integrated lenses 
for analyzing racialized debates 
during the early years of the modern 
American environmental movement. 

I trace how public deliberations 
played out regarding the first Earth 
Day in 1970, and the City Care 
Conference of 1979—the first 
national conference that brought 
together major environmental 
groups such as the Sierra Club 
and civil rights organizations such 
as the National Urban League to 
deliberate the linkages between 
racial equity and environmentalism. 
Finally, I connect these historical 
analyses to recent data from the 
Indiana University Environmental 
Resilience Institute’s Hoosier Life 
Survey in order to better 
understand contemporary racialized 
disparities of climate change 
vulnerability, and relatedly, of 
climate change opinion. 

KEY WORDS 
• environmental justice

• environmental racism

• civil rights

• US environmental movement

• coalition-building

• vulnerability

• climate change opinion

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Over the course of the past year, Black and Brown 
communities have experienced disproportionate 
burdens from the health and economic effects of 
the global coronavirus pandemic, and the national 
pandemic of police brutality. Now perhaps more 
than ever in our lifetimes, we have seen the 
contours of structural racism rise violently to the 
surface. These intertwined crises have led to a 
moment of racial reckoning, of accounting for the 
long-standing effects of racial inequality in our 
communities, and how we discuss these issues in 
our public forums and teach about them in our 
schools. By structural racism, I mean to recognize 
how both white privilege and racial oppression 
against BIPOC communities manifest not just in 
individuals’ behaviors, but in our public policies 
and our public infrastructure, broadly defined—
from access to quality education, clean water, 
uncontaminated environments, and safe housing 
that protects families from the hazards born of 
anthropogenic climate change, including extreme 
heat and flooding. 

Environmental justice scholarship offers a 
comprehensive, holistic view of the many layers 
of racialized injustices that plague communities 
of color. (Sze 2020). These environmental and 
public health problems did not emerge in situ, 
but rather bear the mark of historical legacies 
of public policies and practices that facilitated 
unequal treatment, including Jim Crow segregation 
laws, restrictive covenants, racial zoning, 
redlining, and the use of eminent domain in urban 
renewal measures (Pulido 2017). Climate justice 
advocates must examine the history of coalition-
building between civil rights and environmental 
organizations to better understand our current 
challenges and devise more effective agendas 
and strategies for creating just and resilient 
communities. 

In this article, I analyze coalition-building between 

civil rights activists and environmentalists 
during the 1970s, as the modern environmental 
movement gained momentum in the United 
States. The 1979 “City Care” national conference 
is an especially important benchmark to measure 
both the progress and continuing challenges of 
environmental justice movements in the United 
States. I then draw on data from the recent 
Indiana University Hoosier Life Survey (conducted 
by a team of social scientists in 2019 to better 
understand Hoosiers’ opinions about climate 
change, mitigation, and adaptation) in order to 
underscore the importance of approaching climate 
change resilience practices from a lens of racial 
equity. 

City Care, 1979: Coalition-
Building Among Civil Rights and 
Environmental Advocates

The origins of the modern environmental 
movement are clear from examining the roots 
of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Senator 
Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin was the main force 
in bringing the national teach-in together, but his 
success was only made possible from the broader 
national cultural and political context at the time. 
Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring in 
1962 had stirred a widespread sense of concern 
about the post-World War II chemical regime 
and its effects on wildlife and habitats. An acute 
precursor to Earth Day’s activism was a set of 
environmental disasters in 1969: first, a major oil 
spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in January, and 
second, the polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland 
catching fire in June. Growing concern about 
pollution and biodiversity loss led to a bipartisan 
commitment to environmental protection, with 
Republican President Richard Nixon signing major 
pieces of environmental legislation in the early 
1970s, including the National Environmental 

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Policy Act, and the creation of the Environmental 
Protection Agency (Rome 2013).

However, as the environmental movement got 
under way, fault lines quickly formed around issues 
of race, class, and the dilemma of determining 
which environments were deserving of protections. 
Whitney M. Young, Jr., Executive Director of the 
National Urban League (a civil rights and urban 
advocacy organization founded in New York City in 
1910), pointed to these fissures in his syndicated 
newspaper column several days after the first 
Earth Day celebration. Young explained that the 
recent wave of environmentalism cohered around 
Americans’ concerns about their “quality of life.” 
He was concerned that white people who had 
suddenly discovered the problem of pollution were 
mostly focused on improving the plight of the 
middle class. Noting that people living in the lily-
white refuges of white flight—America’s suburbs—
sought to preserve their clean air and water, Young 
flipped the definition of pollution to emphasize 
Blacks’ unique concerns which often went 
unremarked by white liberal environmentalists: 
“if their town is segregated, if it bars blacks from 
buying homes, or has zoning laws that keep low-
income people out, it is polluted in a far graver 
sense.” 

Young expressed hope that the environmental 
campaign would succeed in cleaning up the 
nation’s air and water, but worried that this 
would all just become another fad, and an 
additional distraction from the most important 
issues that American society needed to confront: 
racial injustice. He pointed to how the civil 
rights movement’s white allies had become 
distracted by the anti-Vietnam War movement, 
and the campaign for campus democracy led by 
the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). 
Environmental activists, Young argued, needed 
to consider the social ecology of America: “if the 

relationship between men and fishes has come 
to be such an important topic, then surely the 
relationship between blacks and whites is even 
more pressing.” He went on to explain, “We 
must be concerned about air pollution from auto 
exhausts and from factory smokestacks. But we 
must also be concerned with the far more insidious 
pollution of poverty that poisons the lives of 30 
million Americans. We should be concerned about 
chemical deposits in the food we eat, but also about 
the millions of Americans who go hungry; whose 
diets are perched on the thin line of 
malnutrition” (Young 1970).

Several years after the first Earth day, in September 
1973, evidence of the racialized schism in the 
environmental movement was again brought to 
the public’s attention by Vernon E. Jordan, who 
succeeded Young as the National Urban League’s 
Executive Director. Jordan reflected on the ten-
year anniversary of what was a watershed moment 
for the civil rights movement—the March on 
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, organized 
by A. Philip Randolph. On August 28, 1963, the 
March convened a quarter of a million people at 
the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, in a 
profound demonstration for equal rights. It was the 
highwater mark of civil rights advocacy, and helped 
lead to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights 
Act of 1964. But, as Jordan warned, the great 
progress that advocates had made to secure African 
Americans’ legal rights was only a precarious 

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We must be concerned 
about air pollution from 

auto exhausts and from factory 
smokestacks. But we must also be 

concerned with the far more 
insidious pollution of poverty that 
poisons the lives of 30 million 
Americans.

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victory because Blacks still did not have economic 
freedom, among many other persisting racial 
inequalities. Echoing Young’s concerns from several 
years before, Jordan called out “the fair-weather 
friends who have moved on to other causes—
pollution, ecology” and various other short-lived 
trends. Jordan implored these former allies to 
return to the cause of racial equality. As Blacks’ 
civil rights continued to suffer, those who were 
most closely devoted to the cause of racial equality 
sometimes saw the environmental movement as a 
zero-sum game, with urban communities of color 
losing out. (Jordan 1973).      

This persisting divide between civil rights and 
environmental advocates was the focus of a 
groundbreaking coalition-building national 
conference held in April 1979 titled “City 
Care,” which brought together representatives 
from the National Urban League, the Sierra 
Club, the Urban Environment Conference and 
Foundation, and several federal agencies to discuss 
environmental health hazards facing communities 
of color, as well as environmentalists’ expanding 
definition of the “environment” to account for 
urban spaces (EPA 1979). In describing the 
goals of the conference, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. 
emphasized that “groups working for constructive 
change…in creative coalition efforts” needed 
to approach their collaboration from a space of 
mutual understanding, and that allies needed 
to acknowledge and respect their partners’ 
distinctive priorities. The priorities articulated 
by Jordan and other civil rights advocates for the 
City Care conference remain relevant for today’s 
conversations about climate justice and resilience. 

• Prioritizing Economic Equality through
Job Creation. Jordan critiqued slow- and
no-growth economic theories, arguing that
perhaps Blacks’ only chance to gain economic
parity was “through expanding the national

economy and getting a bigger slice of that 
growth.” He offered solar energy as an example 
of a successful story of uniting environmentally 
sustainability with economic opportunity and 
job creation for the urban poor.

• Ensuring Racial Equity in Environmen-
tal Regulations. Jordan criticized political
demands to curtail federal oversight of envi-
ronmental regulations, reminding his audience
that Black neighborhoods were “most affected
by pollution,” and Black workers were “of-ten
locked into the most hazardous jobs that are
most liable to result in health and safety risks.”
The notion of “environment” needed to expand,
Jordan argued, to account for “all external
factors affecting people—economic and social,
as well as physical.” Creating a more
sustainable environment needed to include
finding solutions for poverty, unemployment,
and unsanitary housing conditions in Ameri-
can cities.

• Cleaning up environmental toxins and 
contaminants in minority neighbor-
hoods. Jordan identified children’s lead con-
tamination from polluted air and auto exhaust
as a uniquely urgent concern for low-income
neighborhoods. As the City Care Conference
was under way in Detroit, the Three Mile Island
nuclear accident occurred near Har-risburg,
Pennsylvania, spurring skepticism about
nuclear energy among environmentalists
gathered at the conference. Jordan suggest-ed
that nuclear energy was not the best path
forward because of the potential disproportion-
ate health impacts that it presented for poor
communities.

• Fighting for Energy Justice. Jordan un-
derscored the inequities of the nation’s energy
consumption patterns: “Poor people use less
energy but spend more of their incomes for it.”

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The spiraling cost of utilities exacerbated the 
economic vulnerability of low-income minori-
ties, and degraded their quality of life as well as 
their physical safety. Jordan identified energy 
justice as “an issue this emerging coalition 
can run with,” and a “key test of whether the 
concerned groups can move beyond rhetoric to 
effective advocacy for the urban poor.”

Jordan’s key takeaways from the City Care 
conference remain front and center in today’s 
climate justice activism. In fact, they map 
directly onto the NAACP’s contemporary 
Environment & Climate Justice Program’s 
main objectives: reducing harmful emissions, 
advancing energy efficiency and clean energy, 
and strengthening community resistance and 
livability (NAACP 2021). As we’ve seen over the 
past few years, the environmental movement has 
increasingly reckoned with its history of racism, 
including mainstream organizations’ neglect of 
environmental justice issues and exclusion of 
marginalized minorities. (Finney 2014, Taylor 
2016). We have begun to witness some small 
degrees of change. For example, the Sierra Club 
elected the first African American president of the 
organization—Aaron Mair in 2015—and in 2020, 
the first Latinx president, Ramon Cruz. However, 
there is clearly still much work to be done to ensure 
that voices from low-income communities of color 
are represented in environmental organizations’ 
and government agencies’ leadership ranks. 
Nonwhite researchers, naturalists, and outdoor 
enthusiasts have been critical to disrupting 
stereotypes within environmental research 
and activism and to ensuring that BIPOC 
researchers lend their expertise to public policy 
(Thompson 2020). New appointees in the Biden 
Administration, including Shalanda Baker as 
Director of the Office of Minority Economic 
Impact in the Department of Energy, recognize 
that the energy system operates with racial 

disparities across the board, from the economic 
impact of utilities pricing to pollution from energy 
production and waste. (Baker 2021). We must 
approach resilience planning in all its facets with 
a critical reflexivity that keeps us attuned to the 
question of “resilience for whom?”—which will 
remind us to prioritize fairness, environmental 
justice, and equitable access to resources. (Cutter 
2016).

Former Sierra Club president Aaron Mair pointed 
to Wendell Berry’s 1989 book The Hidden Wound 
as a valuable resource for reflecting upon how 
America’s democratic institutions and social 
organization have resulted in the unintended 
degradation of both the environment and 
humanity, and the importance of focusing on the 
intersection of race and environmentalism. When 
Berry started writing this book in 1968 during 
the civil rights movement, he said he was trying 
to understand his own identity with respect to the 
“crisis of racial awareness.” Berry’s book attempted 
to allow him to reckon with his ancestors’ history 
as slaveholders, with Berry’s own personal 
history growing up on a farm in the segregated 
South, where he developed a commitment to 
environmentalism. In doing so, he links racism and 
environmental degradation: “the psychic wound 
of racism has resulted inevitably in wounds in the 
land, the country itself.” (Berry 1970).

Hoosier Life Survey Findings: 
Climate Justice in Indiana

For over a century, the Midwest—and Indiana in 
particular—has been mythologized in the popular 
imagination in the United States and beyond as 
the “heartland” of the country, a quintessentially 
American place, where rural and small-town values 
have long abided, and the nation’s so-called core 
identity appears intact and pristine. If we look 
closer, however, we see that this idea of a pristine, 
isolated, heartland is a myth. (Hoganson 2019). 

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Even with the understanding that this cultural 
construct of the Midwest has never been true—
and that the Midwest has always been deeply 
interconnected with a global network of places—it 
is important to recognize that this mythology is still 
very important, because it affects how people think 
about this region, and how residents understand 
their communities and their own identities. The 
longstanding heartland imagery is especially 
poignant when it comes to understanding 
Midwesterners’ climate change beliefs. While 
many onlookers, and even Midwesterners 
themselves, invoke the idea of a flyover country 
with an inordinate amount of skepticism about the 
scientific consensus surrounding anthropogenic 
climate change, social science research has 
helped upend this narrative, and reveal that 
Midwesterners are a much more diverse lot than 
we generally assume.

In late 2019, Indiana University’s Environmental 
Resilience Institute conducted the Hoosier Life 
Survey to help Indiana’s policymakers and citizens 
better understand how Hoosiers think and learn 
about climate issues, what steps they are taking 
to mitigate climate change risk, and what tools 
they would like to better adapt to the effects of 
climate change in the future. The survey had 
nearly 3,000 responses (a response rate of 29.4%), 
and represented a cross-section of the state, 
with responses from 90 of Indiana’s 92 counties. 
(Houser and Sandweiss, et al. 2020). The survey 
design deliberately oversampled for members 
of racial minority groups to ensure that their 
viewpoints were represented in the data.

Lower-income households and communities 
of color face higher environmental risks from 
pollution and toxins, and these disproportionate 
burdens are also felt when it comes to climate 
change impacts, including extreme weather 
events such as heat waves and flooding because 

these populations do not have the resources to 
adapt their lifestyles or homes to mitigate these 
risks. And these factors then snowball into other 
adverse health effects—including Covid-19’s 
disproportionate rates of infection and death 
among people of color. The Hoosier Life Survey 
has provided important insights into how the social 
variables of race and economic status (among 
others) affect Hoosiers’ personal experiences of 
climate change impacts, and their perceptions of 
climate risks. A majority of Hoosiers think climate 
change is harming people in the US right now, and 
69% believe climate change will hurt people in 
Indiana. However, respondents of color were twice 
as likely as white respondents to agree that climate 
change will harm them a great deal and 25 percent 
more likely to agree that climate change is harming 
people in the US right now. Respondents from 
lower-income Hoosier households were also more 
likely to report that they believe climate change will 
harm them personally a “great deal,” compared to 
higher-income households.  

These signs of higher concern about climate 
change also extended to questions about whether 
climate change is happening. Seventy-six percent 
of Black Hoosiers and 86 percent of non-Black 
people of color agree that climate change is 
happening compared to 72 percent of white 
Hoosiers. Furthermore, responses about policies to 
mitigate climate change impacts revealed similar 
patterns. African Americans are more likely to 

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The environmental 
movement has increasingly 

reckoned with its history of racism, 
including mainstream organizations’ 

neglect of environmental justice issues 
and exclusion of marginalized minorities.

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live in urban heat islands, and thus have a more 
difficult time escaping extreme heat. In the survey, 
Black respondents were about twice as likely as 
white respondents to support measures that would 
reduce heat-wave risks, including public funding 
for air conditioning, health services, and text-based 
early warning systems during heat events. BIPOC 
communities’ disproportionate experiences of 
vulnerability to the effects of climate change have 
in part led to both their higher rates of belief in 
anthropogenic climate change, and support for 
mitigation and adaptation policies..

CONCLUSION

The monumental challenge that lays before our 
collective society is coming to terms with the 
difficult but unavoidable reality that responding to 
climate change requires major societal changes—
and these changes must address the historical 
legacies of racial inequality. It is not sufficient to 
say that engineering technological fixes will save 
us. Even more important is the need to address our 
social perspective, and how we interact together as 
a human society and with the nonhuman world.

In order to build our society’s resilience to climate 
change, we must reconsider our social values 
and norms that support over-consumption and 
perpetuate inequalities in access to environmental 
goods and environmental decision-making. The 
fragile and yet integral coalition-building between 
environmentalists and civil rights activists in 
the 1970s reminds us that our current battles 
for climate justice must establish room for 
understanding the unequal burdens that climate 
change inflicts on BIPOC communities. Protecting 
those most vulnerable to our climate crisis requires 
that we first understand how we came to where we 
are as a nation today, and take accountability for a 
past that has long hindered moving forward toward 
a resilient future.

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