After Katrina, trying to get back to the city was awful for Black people and we still haven’t fully recovered. - Beverly Wright

My thing was, if you’re not going to protect the citizens at least tell them what they need to do to protect themselves. So we started the Safeway Back Home campaign, where people remediated their own properties and planted new grass, and so on.

The Harvard study comes out and I’m like, ‘OK, now I understand.' Black people are dying because of where we live.

I think that black people’s concerns about the environment and environmental justice are synonymous. I believe that black people understand the environment because of the injustices that exist in their communities as it relates to their health and exposure. It all merges around the larger concept of civil rights, and so we have combined the idea of environmental protection with civil rights.