Ellen Griffith Spears. Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Illustrations, maps. 464 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-1171-6; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-2729-8.

Reviewed by Brittany Fremion (Central Michigan University)
Published on H-Environment (October, 2015)
Commissioned by David T. Benac (Western Michigan University)

The United States is home to some of the most toxic landscapes in the world. Love Canal and Three Mile Island are among the most notorious, but recent scholarship in environmental justice has demonstrated that there are additional sites worthy of our attention because of the grassroots movements and regulatory changes they inspired, like those in St. Louis, Michigan, and Times Beach, Missouri. In Baptized in PCBs, Ellen Griffith Spears adds Anniston, Alabama, to the growing list of US toxic towns.

In an introduction, eleven chapters, and epilogue that use well-placed visuals (maps, advertisements, and photographs), Spears traces the history of Anniston from its founding in 1872 as a model of industrial development in the New South to its designation as “Toxic Town, USA” in 2002 (pp. xiii-xiv). How did Anniston become one of the country’s most toxic landscapes? According to Spears, Anniston became a toxic town as a result of the movement of chemicals and capital, and deeply entrenched racial and class biases, all of which accrued in the city over the course of a century. The two dramas that drive this study are the efforts to identify and contain chemical pollutants (notably, PCBs at Monsanto’s facility), and the army’s decision to dismantle and incinerate Cold War-era chemical weapons (housed at Anniston’s Army Depot).

Even though scholars and activists did not begin identifying environmental racism until the 1980s, Spears reveals how the unequal allocation of environmental hazards extends across space and time. In the first four chapters, Spears explains how Anniston became a model city of the New South and home to the chemical industry, which developed close ties to the US military during the two world wars. In doing so, she unpacks the problematic relationship between the former by explaining how a lack of regulatory oversight led to the tragic contamination of human bodies and ecosystems. As the Cold War escalated, so too did the military’s involvement with chemical development and production, which found a new home at Anniston’s Fort McClellan in the 1960s, “the free world’s largest training center for chemical, biological, and radiological warfare” (p. 94). By placing the modern environmental justice movement within this historical context, Spears is able to show the ways in which privileged toxic knowledge developed among corporations and created hazardous landscapes in Anniston that reflected the legacy of social and environmental disparities in the United States.

Most important, Spears’s work reveals the danger of silence—silence on the behalf of corporate and military interests that made it difficult to obtain information about the toxic chemicals that Anniston’s residents carried in their bodies. By withholding this “toxic knowledge” from residents, the chemical industry and army created uncertainty about what exposure meant and led to local movements that focus on discovering the extent of environmental pollution and efforts to reduce it (p. 13). Conversely, community members’ awareness that they carried levels of PCBs in their bodies that ranked among the highest non-workplace exposures in the world—“four times greater than the average US adult”—produced another form of toxic knowledge marked by anxiety, fear, and stress (p. xiii). In the absence of official statements from Monsanto or the army, residents relied on information they gathered from neighbors and environmental and health studies. Parathion, lead, mercury, PCBs, and Cold War chemicals—tri-choloroethylene (TCE), nerve gases (sarin and VX), mustard agent—created the lethal conditions in Anniston that baptized both people and place.

But Anniston’s residents were not passive victims. In chapter 5, Spears explores the tradition of nonviolent protest in the city to demonstrate that residents owed much to the civil rights movement, which shaped contemporary environmental justice campaigns by linking social justice to environmental issues. Prior to the campaign to hold Monsanto accountable for PCB contamination and the initiative for safe disposal of chemical weapons, Anniston attracted national attention with the burning of the Freedom Riders bus on Mother’s Day in 1961. White and black residents were versed in the language and experience of protest—be it in support of equality or not. Thus the Anniston campaigns also revealed important challenges created by racial and class differences: white middle-class and professional people dominated the anti-incinerator fight whereas the African American community spearheaded the PCB initiative, largely as a result of residential geography. When activists in both efforts joined forces, they did so uneasily. For instance, Spears reveals that the Monsanto campaign linked whites whose relatives and friends had been mid-century instigators of racial violence with residents of color who had sometimes been the targets of that violence. Despite these conflicts, legal victory over Monsanto and the emergence of a national campaign that forced the army to both provide residents with protective equipment and operate with greater transparency revealed the the power of grassroots activism.

In the remaining chapters, Spears explores the rise of PCB as the world’s most notorious chemical and the factors that drove chemical policy reform in the early 1970s, most important, the passage of the Toxic Substances Control Act, which led to the end of PCB production. But as Spears reveals, the aftermath of those reform efforts bred citizen action. In Anniston, Monsanto began burying its chemical wastes and the army announced plans to build a hazardous waste incinerator to dismantle outdated Cold War-era chemical weapons at the Anniston Army Depot. In the late 1980s people locally began to question those practices. Thus, a grassroots, cross-class, and ultimately biracial and bipartisan movement emerged to challenge environmental injustice—activists used coffins to block Monsanto’s bulldozers, staged die-ins, filed lawsuits, and donned hazmat suits at rallies. In her final chapter and epilogue, Spears offers an assessment of their achievements.

Baptized in PCBs follows in the tradition of activist scholarship that characterizes the field of environmental justice. Using nationally recognized and locally owned newspapers, oral histories, local and federal environmental and health studies, trial transcripts and legal briefs, organizational and corporate papers, and countless other archival sources, Spears constructs a thoughtful and nuanced narrative that supports a call for reform in the manufacture, use, and regulation of the chemical industry and military-industrial complex. The author also worked closely with community activists; attended community meetings; and completed a training program for residents living in areas adjacent to the Anniston Army Depot, where chemical weapons were stored, dismantled, and incinerated. After donning a chemical mask with residents and their children during the training, Spears gained “a sense of how threatened local people felt” (p. xvi), joining a long list of historian-activists whose studies are the products of movements they joined.

Baptized in PCBs will appeal to those interested in the history of the American South, institutional and business history, environmental justice, and social movements, and serves as a model for community action groups across the nation.

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Citation: Brittany Fremion. Review of Spears, Ellen Griffith, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. October, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44262

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