Environmental Injustice: Race, Class, and Toxic Inequality | The Present Crisis
Join us for Part 2 of a three-part series exploring the intersection of racial inequality and the environment. This time we explore the situation today. Leaders from across the country share solutions to environmental crises within their communities and discuss a new urgent challenge – the roll back of fundamental protections at the federal level.
Everyone has the right to equal protection from environmental harm and a meaningful voice in the policies that shape their communities. But this principle rarely matches reality for communities of color and those with low incomes who are disproportionately impacted by flooding, toxic waste, wildfires, drought, and extreme heat—all intensified by reckless development and accelerating climate change.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward was left devastated, Rashida Ferdinand took action. She founded the Sankofa Community Development Corporation to help rebuild and revitalize her community. In Duck Hill, Mississippi, where relentless flooding plagued Black residents, Romona Taylor Williams mobilized her neighbors and young people to build their own levee—ultimately founding Mississippi Communities United for Prosperity.
Joining them is Marianne Engelman-Lado, a longtime environmental justice advocate and former senior official in the newly created Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Biden. She brings a national perspective on how decades of activism have shaped policy—and how current efforts to dismantle those protections threaten the health and safety of vulnerable communities.
Together, these visionary leaders will reflect on the transformative power of community organizing in the face of systemic neglect—and confront the elephant in the room: the current administration’s sweeping rollback of environmental justice progress.
The conversation is moderated by Vann R. Newkirk II, senior editor at The Atlantic and host of the acclaimed podcast Floodlines.
This series is presented with generous support from Con Edison.
Participants
Marianne Engelman-Lado’s career has been devoted to civil rights and environmental justice. She recently joined New York University School of Law to serve as Director of a new Environmental Justice Initiative. During the Biden Administration she served in both the Office of General Counsel and the newly launched Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she focuses on equity, environmental justice, and civil rights enforcement, and carrying out the agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment.
She previously directed an Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law School, which trained students in community lawyering and civil rights enforcement in the environmental justice context, and served as Lecturer at both the Yale University School of Public Health and the Yale School of the Environment, where she supervised interdisciplinary teams of law, environmental and public health students working on climate justice issues.
She has served as senior staff attorney at Earthjustice, where she focused on civil rights enforcement as well as related issues in the areas of toxics, waste, and agriculture, and the effects of contamination on environmentally overburdened populations. Her experience includes ten years as General Counsel at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), a non-profit civil rights law firm, where she directed a legal and advocacy program addressing racial and ethnic disparities in access to health care, environmental justice, and disability rights. She began her legal career as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), where she represented clients attempting to break barriers of access to health care and quality education.
Before joining EPA, she served as co-chair of the Equity and Environmental Justice Working Group of Connecticut’s Governor’s Council on Climate Change, and as a board member of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and the Center for Public Representation, a leading disability rights organization. Marianne has lectured widely and taught graduate, law and undergraduate level courses. She holds a B.A. in government from Cornell University, a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Her publications include “Pipeline Struggles: Case Studies in Ground Up Lawyering,” with Kenneth Rumelt, “No More Excuses: Building a New Vision of Civil Rights Enforcement in the Context of Environmental Justice,” “Unfinished Agenda: The Need for Civil Rights Litigation to Address Continuing Patterns of Race Discrimination and Inequalities in Access to Health Care.”
Rashida Ferdinand is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sankofa Community Development Corporation (CDC) in New Orleans, Louisiana. She earned a BFA from Howard University and an MFA from Syracuse University, with a background in the arts, which informs her approach to community revitalization. A fourth-generation resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, Rashida was displaced by Hurricane
Katrina for more than two years while her home was reconstructed. In 2008, she founded Sankofa CDC to address public health, environmental restoration, and economic development in underserved communities. Her deep-rooted connection to this community has significantly influenced her dedication to its revitalization and environmental stewardship.
Romona Taylor Williams is a seasoned community and economic development (CED) subject matter expert with 30 years of experience of working to develop economically challenged, predominantly African American communities.
She is co-founder and CEO of Mississippi Communities United for Prosperity, MCUP, (formerly N. Montgomery Citizens United for Prosperity), where she oversees the daily operations and is project lead for the Achieving Sustainability through Education and Economic Development Solutions (ASEEDS) Model. The ASEEDS model has gained national recognition for successfully mitigating decades of flooding in Duck Hill, Mississippi using green and grey infrastructure technologies, and for its Creek Rangers program which trains young people from ages eight to eighteen to be stewards of the environment and future environmentalist through the hybrid STEM program, S.M.A.R.T. (Science, Math, Art, Reading and Technology). Since its inception in 2018, seventeen scholars have graduated from the ASEEDS S.M.A.R.T. program and are attending college or university. Two other MCUP youth programs are Mississippi Youth Leadership Institute and Mississippi Youth Organizing for Climate Action and Racial Equity (MS YO-CARE).
Over the years, Romona has also focused on promoting equitable and inclusive applied research and systems analysis to advocate for fair and just public policies and investments in education, climate, environmental health, and social justice. Her expertise ranges from affordable housing development and finance, housing counseling, financial education, fair housing and lending policies, Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and sustainability planning, design and project implementation. As an entrepreneur she focuses on inclusive policies and systems that foster the growth of minority, disadvantaged, and women-led enterprises.
Vann R. Newkirk II is a senior editor at the Atlantic, and the host and co-creator of narrative podcasts Floodlines and Holy Week. For years, Newkirk has covered voting rights, democracy, and environmental justice, with a focus on how race and class shape the country's and the world's fundamental structures, in print and audio. Newkirk was a 2022 Andrew Carnegie fellow, and was a 2020 James Beard Award Finalist, a 2020 11th Hour Fellow at New America, and a 2018 recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editors's ASME Next Award. In 2021, Newkirk received the Peabody Award for Floodlines. In 2024, Newkirk was named Journalist of the Year by the Washington Association of Black Journalists.
