The Spirit of Black Lake: Full Employment, Civil Rights, and the Forgotten Early History of Environmental Justice

During the 1970s, activists first popularized the concept of “environmental justice” in the context of growing environmental degradation, racialized urban poverty, and working-class fears of plant closure. To address these problems, leaders in the United Auto Workers and other unions formed coalitions with civil rights and environmental groups, and advocated federal policies that would reduce both pollution and unemployment. This article argues that the defeat of these efforts, and the political marginalization of full employment and other social-democratic goals in the 1980s, resulted in a narrower conception of environmental justice among many scholars and activists. Revisiting this forgotten history calls into question common claims about environmentalism in recent scholarship on the 1970s, and suggests the need to revise conventional narratives of the emergence of the environmental justice movement.