With its bottom-up approach, this movement has re-defined the term "environment" to include the places where people live, work, play, and go to schoo… - Robert D. Bullard

It was very clear that people who were making decisions — county commissioners or industrial boards or city councils — were not the same people who were “hosting” these facilities in their communities. Without a doubt, it was a form of apartheid where whites were making decisions and black people and brown people and people of color, including Native Americans on reservations, had no seat at the table.

The 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was probably the single most important event in the environmental justice movement's history. The summit broadened the movement beyond its early focus against toxics to include issues of public health, worker safety, land use, transportation, housing, resource allocation, and community empowerment. The meeting also demonstrated that it is possible to build a multiracial grassroots movement around environmental and economic justice.

Redlining steals health and wealth. It was bad for America in the 1920s, and its continuing effects are harmful in the 2020s today.