Bonnie Sanders: Camden was just such a beautiful city that you wouldn’t believe it. Years ago it used to have stores on every corner, you didn’t see any vacant lots, houses, it was clean, the water was good, the air was fresh… now the air is bad and the water is poisonous.
Camden has the second highest cancer rate in New Jersey and the eighth highest in the nation.
Phyllis Holmes: The children were sick, they were coming home from the hospital with breathing apparatuses, where years ago, say five years ago, it was only one child coming home with a breathing apparatus, now its four out of five coming home with breathing apparatuses.
Bonnie Sanders: The main complaints are asthma and cancer. Practically every hearse you see pulled up someone done died of cancer.
Olga Pomar: The county which is predominately white and fairly affluent, um, dominates Camden politics in a lot of ways and it started using Camden as the place where the things that no one else wanted, they got put in Camden.
The city is home to 103 toxic sites.
Bonnie Sanders: This is our park for our children to play in, but at one end of the park is the cement plant, St. Lawrence Cement plant, and at the other end of the park is the sewage treatment plant.
Phyllis Holmes: One, the factory runs around the clock. Two, the truck are running, 500, 600 trucks, around the clock. They have this dust, this black dust behind us, they have it sitting out, they don’t have it in containers, if we have a strong wind, or, or a storm or something this dust is picked up and it’s blown all through the neighborhood. It’s all in your window seals, all on the ground, all in your eyes.
Bonnie Sanders: And we found out cement will cause your arteries and your lungs to harden. Cement is cement.
Bonnie Sanders leads the local environmental group, South Camden Citizens in Action. The group organized several community protests against the opening of the St. Lawrence Cement plant.
Janell Byrd- Chichester: I think any community would believe that the statutes of this country would protect the residents and the inhabitants of a community to say that no, no more, we shouldn’t be disproportionately subjected to toxic waste sites anymore than anyone else, just because we are minorities and poor.
The group sued the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, charging racial discrimination.
Olga Pomar: The judge granted a preliminary injunction… which, took a lot of people by surprise and made us very excited… here’s the sixty million dollar facility that was built that’s ready to start operating, and here this little community group stopped it in its tracks.
But five days later, the U.S. Supreme Court made a decision that limited the rights of people to sue on the grounds of racial discrimination. As a result, the Camden case was thrown out of court. Now, in order to prove discrimination, the South Camden Citizens in Action has to find what amounts to a smoking gun.
Janell Byrd- Chichester: For the Camden people, the only arguments really that the court has left for them is that they prove that the people did this for the purpose of harming them. That is a very high bar and it is difficult for us to get into the minds of others and prove subjective intent, unless you wrote a memo or said, “I want to but this cement plant in South Camden because I want to hurt black people.” Now if we had that memo, yeah, you can go to court, but to ask that kind of evidence, the court is saying, “the doors are closed.”
Bonnie Sanders: The children is the ones that’s suffering. The children is walking down the street and passing out. All they doing is more and more every day violating our civil rights.