Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980By examining environmental change through the lens of conflicting social agendas, Andrew Hurley uncovers the historical roots of environmental inequality in contemporary urban America. Hurley's study focuses on the steel mill community of Gary, Indiana, a city that was sacrificed, like a thousand other American places, to industrial priorities in the decades following World War II. Although this period witnessed the emergence of a powerful environmental crusade and a resilient quest for equality and social justice among blue-collar workers and African Americans, such efforts often conflicted with the needs of industry. To secure their own interests, manufacturers and affluent white suburbanites exploited divisions of race and class, and the poor frequently found themselves trapped in deteriorating neighborhoods and exposed to dangerous levels of industrial pollution. In telling the story of Gary, Hurley reveals liberal capitalism's difficulties in reconciling concerns about social justice and quality of life with the imperatives of economic growth. He also shows that the power to mold the urban landscape was intertwined with the ability to govern social relations. |
Contents
The Perils of Pollution in | 15 |
Tired of Working in Pollution | 77 |
The Rise and Fall of | 136 |
Copyright | |
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Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary ... Andrew Hurley No preview available - 1995 |
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Action to Reverse activists African Americans beach blue-collar Calumet Community Congress CARP Census Tracts Chicago city council city's civil rights Clipping Memory Book coke oven coke plant downtown dump economic Elaine Beck emissions environment environmentalists ethnic federal folder furnaces GAPCD Gary Air Pollution Gary City Gary Parks Gary Post-Tribune Gary's Glen Park Grand Calumet River groups hazardous housing Indiana Room industrial pollution interview Lake Michigan lakefront leaders League of Women manufacturing Marquette Park mayor ment middle-class Midtown neighborhoods Newspaper Clipping Memory NIPSCO Northwest Indiana particulate percent political population postwar Press Clipping Collection private files racial residential residents Reverse Pollution Records Seventeenth Census smoke social steel company steel mills Steelworkers of America Steelworkers Union suburban sulfur dioxide tion Tolleston toxic U.S. Bureau U.S. Department United Steelworkers wastes water pollution western Gary white-collar Women Voters workers working-class World War II