The visits to Cairo (Illinois) totally transformed my life. I made my decision on the bus leaving there that I would commit my life to the movement o… - Damu Smith

In the region called “Cancer Alley” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans along the Mississippi river, there’s scores of impoverished, mostly African American and poor communities living in close proximity to oil refineries, plastic production facilities and literally seven days a week, nearly 24 hours a day, those communities are being rained on with some of the worst toxins and chemicals imaginable. So people are very, very sick. Children in those communities miss school because they have high rates of asthma and other severe respiratory problems, and there are very high rates of cancer in that region of the country and in other parts of the country where people of color and poor and working class people are disproportionately exposed to sources of pollution.

You can tell people to go get screened, but colonoscopies cost money, from $700 to $900 every time you go. People who are uninsured, and that’s 44 million people in this country, 40 million partially insured, 164 million people in this country who are in health jeopardy because they don’t have access to some form of health insurance. We’re talking about a situation where people don’t have the possibility of getting screened. So we can’t just talk about getting screened, we have to talk about how we can organize and protest and raise the fundamental public policy issues including the need for national comprehensive universal health care, and that’s what the Spirit of Hope Campaign which has been mobilized around my situation is doing, to raise these issues of universal access and racial disparities in the health care system.

It’s a disgrace that we live in a country where people have to face these kinds of obstacles to quality care.