“Nobody’s is Free Until Everybody’s Free.”
-Fanny Lou Hamer
What is Environmental Justice?
The movement is heavily influenced by the American Civil Rights Movement and focused on Environmental Racism. The movement was later expanded to consider gender, international environmental injustice, and inequalities within all marginalized groups. Today the term Environmental Justice means many things to many people, but we must honor the roots of Black and Indigenous, People of Color in leading the way forward.
POP organizes and hosts the Black & Green Zone at Black Humboldt’s Juneteenth Celebration. This is the 4th year we’ve participated in the cultural festivals, and the second creating a space we center BIPOC communities in the Environmental Justice Movement. Paying special attention for Black community placemaking.
For the 2025 festival, we are expanding the impact of the Black & Green Zone by co-creating the Black Folkways Marketplace. Where we will honor the cultural ways, arts, spiritual practices and herbalist traditions of African diasporic communities.
These cultural lineages strengthen, heal and protect Black heritage and people, from the motherland, through the middle passage into North America, the Caribbean and Latin America. There will be cultural vendors, Black herbalist traditions, a bouquet booth and community altar.
Black & Green Zone
AT JUNETEENTH
Black Roots of Environmental Justice
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Dream it.
Hazel Johnson was an environmental activist on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. She is considered the “mother of the environmental justice movement”. She dedicated years researching environmental issues and connecting industrial pollutants in the air, water and land to the negative health impacts in her community.
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Build it.
Robert Bullard is a professor of sociology and director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. He is known as the “father of the environmental justice movement” for more than 25 years of tireless work on behalf of communities of color who have been victims of environmental racism.