Living in a Far South Side ‘toxic doughnut,’ Hazel Johnson fought for environmental justice

Hazel Johnson wasn’t out to bug the bureaucrats when she tried to speak at a meeting of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in 1984. She just wanted to say something about the facts of life for residents of Altgeld Gardens, a public housing complex on Chicago’s Far South Side.

The air she and her neighbors breathed there was palpably unhealthy. Their homes were surrounded by smoke-belching industries.

Yet Johnson was put off with an admonition from the EPA’s staff. To bring a problem to their attention, she was told she had to respect their ground rules and “follow proper procedures.”

“Two weeks later, a packet containing a dozen citizen complaint forms arrived in the mail,” she told Tribune in 1995. “I guess they thought they’d never hear from me again.”

The bureaucrats were banking on the traditional demography of environmentalism: Middle-class children learned about it in school. Upper-class people thought it a worthy cause. The working class was resigned to pollution as a curse it had to bear.

But Johnson, family members and friends photocopied and distributed more than a thousand of the EPA’s forms. “As Johnson predicted, the informal survey showed many suffering from asthma, chronic respiratory conditions, cancer, allergies, difficult pregnancies, and complicated childbirths,” the Tribune noted in the 1995 story.

Johnson’s documents were submitted to the agency, which responded with a letter saying there was no evidence of health hazards in Altgeld Gardens, the Tribune reported.

“They probably threw all those complaint forms away,” Johnson said. “But I couldn’t stop there. My husband died because of pollution, and I wasn’t going to let others lose their loved ones the same way.”

She went on to break through racial, class and gender barriers in the environmental movement.

“It’s all very well to embrace saving the rain forests and conserving endangered animal species, but such global initiatives don’t even begin to impact communities inhabited by people of color,” Johnson said.

After that initial run-in with the EPA, Johnson went on to be invited to scientific conferences, won numerous awards, and met with foreign dignitaries. Presidents sought her counsel. But she died penniless, though she got Social Security survivor benefits because her husband had died before her, succumbing to cancer in 1969.

Johnson used the money to finance projects of the People for Community Recovery, an organization she founded in 1979 in a strip mall adjacent to the Altgeld Gardens.

“She paid for buses for residents to go down and protest. She paid to print flyers,” her daughter Cheryl Johnson told the Tribune when her mother died in 2011. “For years she didn’t know anything about writing grant proposals to get funding. She paid out of her pocket.”

Johnson was the eldest of four children in a family living in a section of New Orleans known as “Cancer Alley” because of the deleterious health effects attributed to the surrounding chemical industry. She alone reached adulthood. A brother was stillborn. Another died of meningitis as a 9-month old. A 2-month-old sister died of pneumonia.

She married John Johnson, a construction worker, and they left New Orleans for Chicago in 1955. Altgeld Gardens, where they eventually lived, was built to house workers in World War II defense plants and then returning veterans, most of them Black. It went up on top of land once used as a dump by the Pullman railroad car company, and sat between heavy industry in South Chicago and northwest Indiana.

That she wound up living in what locals described as a “Toxic Doughnut,” an analogue to the New Orleans of her youth, wasn’t an accident, Johnson felt.

“I definitely believe I’ve been chosen by a higher power to do this (environmental) work,” Johnson told the Tribune in 1995.

Her activism initially was triggered by the falling plaster and lack of water pressure in her Altgeld Gardens rowhouse. When there was water, it was a bronze color and had a funny smell. In 1982, she saw a television news report that her neighborhood had the highest incidence of cancer in the city. Four little girls died in a brief span, and while older residents often suffered from cancer this further fueled Johnson’s activism, her daughter told Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice in 2010.

“It wasn’t just old people dying that way. So that became my mother’s passion, to find out what was going on,” Cheryl Johnson said.

Cheryl Johnson had studied chemistry in college. She quit her clerical job at the Argonne National Laboratory in Batavia and brought to her mother’s quest a working knowledge of the lingo of scientists.

Together, mother and daughter discovered that Altgeld Gardens had the highest cancer rate in Chicago and why. It was surrounded by 50 landfills and 250 leaking storage tanks. Public officials had turned a blind eye. Those in Maryland Manor, just south of the Altgeld Gardens, were nothing short of criminally liable.

“For 25 years, the people had been paying city taxes for a sewer line and a water line they never had,” Cheryl Johnson told the Tribune. “We lobbied the city and state and got water lines installed as well as a sewer line.”

Soon Johnson was attracting attention far afield. In 1991, she was invited to the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington. There she was proclaimed the Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement.

The next year she was invited to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Others spoke to scientific and political issues. She described what those issues look like to workaday people.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton invited Johnson to witness his signing an executive order committing the federal government to address the environmental problems of minority and low-income Americans.

She’d long known Barack Obama by the time he was elected president. Between college and law school, he’d worked as an intern in her campaign to get asbestos removed from Altgeld Gardens.

That forlorn housing project, tucked away in an obscure corner of Chicago, was never out of Johnson’s mind. She returned to it from every conference and award ceremony.

Johnson lacked the luxury of activists in middle-class communities. They could turn a campaign over to lawyers who would fight the next round in court. Or hire a public relations firm to keep the issue in the media.

All she had was a ragtag army. Sustaining its morale on the scarred battlefield of Altgeld Gardens was tough. Yet even as her health was failing, she kept on ringing doorbells, as a Los Angeles Times reporter observed in 1993.

“Battered by crime, crack and unemployment, most of them have trouble putting food on the table and don’t worry about landfills,” he wrote of Altgeld Garden residents.

“Hazel? Yeah, I know Hazel,” says a young mother, dragging three kids through the project to a doctor’s appointment. “But I don’t have time for what she does. It’s all about air, right?”

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