By Ben Jealous
The state of Alabama destroyed their homes. Your federal tax dollars helped pay for it.
We are checking back in on the historic Black Shiloh community in Elba, Alabama.
Ever since 2018, when the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) expanded a highway running through the town, stormwater runoff floods the homes in this community whenever it rains. It is an ongoing crisis.
Members of this community have lost everything. Some of the families here have owned these homes for generations. Their generational wealth has been wiped out. They deserve justice. They deserve to be made whole. Now, the federal government could be running out of time to help.
Pastor Timothy Williams is a Shiloh community member who has been a leader in the fight to get justice for his neighbors and his own family. Back in March, when I spoke with Pastor Williams, he told me, “My house has already sunk two feet into the mud. I see my inheritance and my children’s American Dream being washed away and stolen.”
Since then, Pastor Williams says things have only gotten worse. He now says the frustration and hopelessness taking root in the community has led to people using alcohol and drugs as an escape, whereas several years ago that would be unheard of in this community.
It speaks to the toll on this community being more than just economic. Watching your home and community be destroyed, and your generational wealth evaporate, has physical, mental, and emotional impacts just like any trauma does. People are watching their homes sink, and living with the danger all this physical upheaval of their land has caused with power lines and gas and sewage pipes. Pastor Williams himself has been warned his sinking house could eventually hit a natural gas pipeline causing a rupture or even an explosion.
Think about the impact this must have not only on the entire community’s mental health, but what it must do to the kids in the community and their ability to succeed in school.
Beyond that, there is the clear racial factor here. This is Alabama after all. The reckless disregard for this rural Black community in the state’s highway project was not something unfamiliar to people who have lived there for decades. Nor were years of inaction and being left behind by the state (and now the federal government) since then. And there have been acts of intimidation by outsiders aimed at community members like Pastor Williams who have spoken up – in March, Pastor Williams told me the restaurant he owns had been the target of a boycott by some local whites. And white people make up most of his clientele.
In a place where the shadow of Jim Crow still looms large, that justice for this Black community seems so elusive seems like no mere coincidence. It is understandable that some in the community believe the storm drainage pipes were aimed at their community intentionally.
In the months since I first spoke with Pastor Williams, I have visited Shiloh. And I have been working closely with Dr. Robert Bullard, known as Father of Environmental Justice and this country’s preeminent voice exposing environmental racism, to build pressure on both the state and federal governments to act. Elba, Alabama is Dr. Bullard’s hometown. It is an example of the pervasiveness of environmental racism, that such injustice could continue in the hometown of a prominent expert who sits on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
Someone else who visited Shiloh the past few months is Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. And on October 4, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) announced a Voluntary Resolution Agreement (VRA) with ALDOT to address the ongoing flooding in Shiloh every time it storms. The VRA is one product of an investigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Title VI prohibits racial discrimination – among other kinds of discrimination – in projects that receive federal financial assistance, like the Alabama highway project that destroyed the Shiloh community.
But the VRA is not a solution for the harm that has already been done to the people of this community. It is an insult to them. The agreement requires infrastructure improvements to mitigate flooding. But these people’s homes are already ruined, their families are traumatized, and their property values are decimated.
Perhaps Army veteran Willie Horstead Jr., who has watched his home sink into the flood-soaked ground similarly to Pastor Williams, put it best when he told the visiting US Secretary of Transportation, “I’ll tell you – I just want to be made whole.”
In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King wrote, “justice too long delayed is justice denied,” paraphrasing an old legal maxim.
Justice has been delayed for far too long for the residents of the Shiloh community. And the clock is ticking.
We don’t know what will happen with the presidential election. But It is possible it could result in some of the same people returning to the US Department of Transportation who originally approved the use of federal funds for the disastrous Alabama highway project back in 2018. Or people willing to have the federal government turn a blind eye to racial discrimination by a state with a deep history of it. Any more delay could mean justice being permanently denied to members of the Shiloh community.
Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
