The author is grateful for the assistance of the journal’s editors, anonymous reviewers, and especially the issue’s guest editor, Andy Horowitz, as well as for the visual contributions of Jeff Whetstone. The author also wishes to acknowledge Malik Rahim for his trust, patience, and generosity over many years.
- Meg Perry Center for Environmental Peace and Justice, press release, July 7, 2010; FluxRostrum, “Bike for the Gulf with Malik Rahim,” June 23, 2010, YouTube video, 6:05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmzq8KkeZZI; Brentin Mock, “The Root Interview: Malik Rahim,” July 15, 2010, http://www.theroot.com/views/root-interview-malik-rahim; “Bike Ride to Save the Gulf,” June 21, 2010, in Evening News, produced by KBOO, 2:43, https://www.kboo.fm/media/9611-bike-ridesave-gulf. On April 20, 2010, less than a month after the Obama administration relaxed offshore drilling regulations, the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and eventually sank in the Gulf of Mexico while drilling at the Macondo Prospect, some forty-one miles off the coast of Louisiana. Eleven workers aboard died as a result of the explosion, which initiated “the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The spill released some four million barrels of oil into the Gulf over an eight-seven-day period, prior to being capped in mid-July. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Enforcement Division, “Deepwater Horizon – BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill,” accessed June 12, 2020, https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/deepwater-horizon-bp-gulf-mexico-oil-spill. See also National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling, Report to the President, January 2011, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-OILCOMMISSION/pdf/GPO-OILCOMMISSION.pdf; and Suzanne Goldenberg, “Barack Obama Reverses Campaign Promise and Approves Offshore Drilling,” Guardian, March 31, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/31/barackobama-drilling-offshore-approves.
- Kate Galbraith, “Environmentalists Use Oil Spill as a Rallying Cry,” New York Times, June 13, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/business/energy-environment/14green.html; “Greenpeace Activists Scale BP’s London Headquarters in Oil Protest,” Guardian, May 20, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/may/20/greenpeace-activists-scale-bp-building-roof; “7 Greenpeace Activists Arrested in Anti-Drilling Protest,” CNN, May 24, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/24/us.gulf.oil.greenpeace.arrests/index.html; Melissa K. Merry, Framing Environmental Disaster: Environmental Advocacy and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (New York: Routledge, 2014).
- J. T. Roane and Justin Hosbey, “Mapping Black Ecologies,” Current Research in Digital History, vol. 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.05; Kimberly N. Ruffin, Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 2–3.
- See, for example, Paul Mohai, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts, “Environmental Justice,” Annual Review of Environmental Resources 34 (July 2009): 405–430.
- David N. Pellow, “Towards a Critical Environmental Justice Studies: Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge,” Du Bois Review 13, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 221–236; David N. Pellow, “Political Prisoners and Environmental Justice,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 29, no. 4 (November 2018): 1–20; Laura Pulido, “Conversations in Environmental Justice: An Interview with David Pellow,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 28, no. 2 (April 2017): 43–53; Laura Pulido and Juan De Lara, “Reimagining ‘Justice’ in Environmental Justice: Radical Ecologies, Decolonial Thought, and the Black Radical Tradition,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1/2 (2018): 76–98; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (February 2002): 15–24. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000); Dorceta E. Taylor, “Race, Class, Gender, and American Environmentalism” (Portland, OR: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, 2002), Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-534; Michael Egan, “Subaltern Environmentalism in the United States: A Historiographic Review,” Environment and History 8, no. 1 (February 2002): 21–41; Brentin Mock, “Are There Two Different Versions of Environmentalism, One ‘White,’ One ‘Black’?,” Mother Jones, July 31, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/07/white-black-environmentalism-racism/. On the postwar evolution of the American environmental movement, see Steven Stoll, U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See Nathan Hare, “Black Ecology,” Black Scholar 1 (April 1970): 2–8. Two decades later, Paul Mohai’s important early study on Black and white Americans’ purported differing attitudes about environmental issues challenged prevailing notions that Blacks cared less about environmental issues than their white counterparts. Paul Mohai, “Black Environmentalism,” Social Science Quarterly 71, no. 4 (December 1990): 744–765.
- Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), chap. 3; Bob Marshall, The Lens, Brian Jacobs, and Al Shaw, “Losing Ground,” ProPublica, August 28, 2014, https://projects.propublica.org/louisiana/; John M. Barry, “Suing Exxon—and the Future of New Orleans,” accessed June 22, 2020, http://www.johnmbarry.com/bio.htm; FluxRostrum, “Bike for the Gulf.” On Hurricane Katrina and the disaster of recovery, see Horowitz, Katrina; Clyde A. Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans, ed. Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Gary Rivlin, Katrina: After the Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Cedric Johnson, ed., The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Jordan Flaherty, Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010); Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke, eds., Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Billy Sothern, Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and The South End Press Collective, ed., What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (Boston: South End Press, 2006).
- “Malik Rahim on His Upcoming Bike Tour from New Orleans to DC,” interview by KBOO Radio, June 19, 2010, in A-Infos Radio Project, MP3 audio, 14:12, http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/43568.
- Rahm Emanuel, “Rahm Emanuel on the Opportunities of Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2008, YouTube video, 2:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mzcbXi1Tkk; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007); Arundhati Roy, “Arundhati Roy: ‘The Pandemic Is a Portal,'” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.
- Mock, “Root Interview.”
- Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). On Black geographies and radical placemaking practices, see Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, eds., Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2007); and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” in The Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (New York: Verso, 2017), 225–240.
- The notion of bringing a new world into existence is captured by the formulation of “otherwise” worlds, which I borrow from thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Ashon Crawley (among many others), who write about and within the Black radical tradition as enunciated by Cedric J. Robinson in his landmark 1983 text Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
- Rahim called his father “one of the greatest men that I knew” and his mother “the essence of love.” Rahim’s mother remarried in his adolescence. Rahim commended his stepfather for helping stabilize the family and fully “accept[ing] us and rais[ing] us.” Malik Rahim, interview by Pamela Hamilton, May 23, 2006, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Interview U-0252 (hereafter cited as Rahim, SOHP interview).
- Malik Rahim, interviewed by the author, July 26, 2011, New Orleans, LA; Rahim, SOHP interview.
- Richard Campanella, The West Bank of Greater New Orleans: A Historical Geography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 213–214. While the white pool was actually nearer to the incinerator, the question of whether the pool for African Americans was built on land once used as a dump remains open. Richard Campanella, email message to author, June 21, 2020.
- Before its official recognition as a BPP chapter in mid-1970, the group was known as the National Committee to Combat Facism (NCCF). Orissa Arend, Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009); Orissa Arend and Judson L. Jeffries, “The Big Easy Was Anything But for the Panthers,” in On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America, ed. Judson L. Jeffries (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 224–272.
- Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Arend, Showdown in Desire.
- Malik Rahim, interviewed by the author, September 11, 2018, New Orleans, LA.
- Arend and Jeffries, “The Big Easy Was Anything But,” 227; Gene Bourg, “Desire Project Incubator for Crime, Report Says,” New Orleans States-Item, September 15, 1970, quoted in Arend and Jeffries, “The Big Easy Was Anything But,” 227; Malik Rahim, interviewed by the author, July 27, 2012, New Orleans, LA; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
- Hare, “Black Ecology,” esp. 2.
- Malik Rahim, interviewed by the author, February 23, 2018, New Orleans, LA.; Jordan Arceneaux, “Former Holy Ghost Pastor Dies at 88,” Opelousas Daily World, April 18, 2016, https://www.dailyworld.com/story/news/local/2016/04/18/former-holy-ghost-pastor-dies-88/83186212/; Luna Reyna, “Black Lives Matter: Don’t Forget the SLOW Deaths from Toxic Pollution,” Red Green and Blue, June 4, 2020, https://redgreenandblue.org/2020/06/04/black-lives-matter-dont-forget-slow-deaths-toxic-pollution/; Mary T. Schmich, “They March to Clean Up a State’s Act,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1988, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1988-11-20-8802170889-story.html.
- Kim Lacy Rogers, Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 92–93; Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
- Rahim, interview, February 23, 2018.
- William Arp III and Christopher Howell, “Black Environmentalism and Gender Differences: An Ethics of Care?,” Western Journal of Black Studies 19, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 300–305. See Steve Lerner, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Revathi I. Hines, “The Price of Pollution: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Mossville, Louisiana,” Western Journal of Black Studies 39, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 198–208; and Richard A. Webster, “The Poisoned Promises of Agriculture Street,” NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune, April 22, 2015, https://www.nola.com/news/politics/article_18f4b255-eeb1-56af-8fe2-874edf331d3f.html.
- United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Superfund Site Progress Profile: Treasure Island Naval Station-Hunters Point Annex,” last modified June 15, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110616054426/http://cfpub.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0902722.
- Rahim, interview, July 27, 2012.
- Rahim, interview, July 27, 2012. The key values formed the basis for the original Committees of Correspondence in 1984 and would be adopted and revised by subsequent Green Party organizations over the next two decades. Jodean Marks, “A Historical Look at Green Structure: 1984 to 1992,” Synthesis/Regeneration 14 (Fall 1997): http://www.greens.org/s-r/14/14-03.html; and Greens, “The Ten Key Values of the Greens,” accessed July 24, 2020, http://www.greens.org/values/. Drawing inspiration from Green parties and movements in Western Europe, the Greens began in the United States in 1984 as the Committees of Correspondence (CoC). Marks, “Green Structure.”
- “Malik Rahim: Green Party Candidate for City Council At-Large,” It’s About Time, accessed July 24, 2020, http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Chapter_History/New_Orleans_Malik_Rahim.html.
- Rahim, SOHP interview. Cycling in and out of jail as a young man, King was convicted of robbery in 1970 and sentenced to thirty-five years. While inside, he encountered the New Orleans Black Panthers, including Rahim, who had been arrested in the Desire police shootout. King would eventually become a party member himself and, along with two comrades, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, formed a Black Panther Party chapter in Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison. Targeted by prison officials for their political activities, the three would each be convicted of murder behind bars on the basis of false evidence, and would spend decades in solitary confinement as a result while they contested their convictions. Starting in the mid-1990s, Rahim helped publicize and cultivate support for the “Angola Three.” King won his release in 2001. crow and Darby befriended King in Austin, where he had settled. Robert Hillary King, From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012); scott crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011); Albert Woodfox, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope (New York: Grove Press, 2019).
- crow, Black Flags and Windmills, 47–67.
- Flaherty, Floodlines, 94–98; Sothern, Down in New Orleans, 273–285.
- Flaherty, Floodlines, 99.
- Flaherty, Floodlines, 100.
- crow, Black Flags and Windmills, 154–156.
- Malik Rahim, conversation with the author, October 28, 2014, New Orleans, LA. See also Lisa Fithian, Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019).
- Rahim, SOHP interview. Some would point to the willingness to work with government as Common Ground and Rahim’s tacit adoption of a neoliberal agenda, a charge that both flattens the complexity of the organization’s influences and misunderstands the nature of Rahim’s politics. See John Arena, “Black and White, Unite and Fight? Identity Politics and New Orleans’s Post-Katrina Public Housing Movement” in The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans, ed. Cedric Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 158–184. Rahim’s faith in humanity and his reputation as an organizer were severely tested at the end of 2008 when Common Ground cofounder Brandon Darby publicly revealed himself to have been an FBI informant. Many in Common Ground had expressed reservations to Rahim about Darby’s behavior at different points over the years, but Rahim had chosen not to act on those suspicions and was shattered by the revelations. See Colin Moynihan, “Activist Unmasks Himself as Federal Informant in G.O.P. Convention Case,” New York Times, January 4, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/us/05informant.html; Austin Informant Working Group, “Common Ground Co-Founder Brandon Darby Admits to Role as FBI Informant (at RNC ’08 and More),” Santa Cruz Indymedia Center, January 2, 2009, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/01/02/18557859.php; Kristian Williams, “Witness to Betrayal: scott crow on the Exploits and Misadventures of FBI Informant Brandon Darby,” Earth First!, December 20, 2013, https://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2013/12/20/witness-to-betrayalscott-crow-on-the-exploits-and-misadventures-of-fbi-informant-brandon-darby/.
- Michelle Krupa and Frank Donze, “Two Candidates Offer Alternative Views,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, December 2, 2008, 6.
- Rahim, quoted in “Malik Rahim for Congress Dec. 6!,” San Francisco Bayview, November 22, 2008; Malik Rahim, speech, 2008 Green Party National Convention, Chicago, IL, July 2008 (transcript in author’s possession).
- Rahim, SOHP interview.