Drawing the Line at Place: The Environmental Justice Project

Artists are working with environmentalists and residents to make a political change in Louisiana, where toxic waste is devastating communities along the Mississippi River. Mat Schwarzman of the Institute for Urban Arts in Oakland, California, writes about what it's like for seven arts groups and eight community organizations to collaborate in The Environmental Justice Project (EJP). Taking part at the time of this article were the following New Orleans organizations: Chakula Cha Jua Theater Company, Christian Unity Baptist Church, Guardians of the Flame, Gulf Coast Tenant Association, Junebug Productions, New Orleans Youth Action Corps, Nkombo, People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, Tambourine and Fan, Twomby Center and the Welfare Rights Organization. They were joined by Carpetbag Theater Company (Knoxville, Tenn.), Roadside Theater (Whitesburg, Ky.) Robbie McCauley & Company (New York), Urban Bush Women (New York) and the American Festival Project, a nationwide coalition of community-based theater groups based at Appalshop in Whitesburg. —Eds.

It was during the Spring of 1989. I don't remember clearly where in New Orleans we were when it happened, maybe Maspero's Slave Exchange. Maybe we saw one of those Mammy dolls beckoning the wary tourists. It might have been right after we'd heard the idea about buying one of the old plantations on River Road to make a museum that really shows what life was like in the "good old days." I really don't remember where we were, but I do remember that Jawole Zollar, the visionary leader of the Urban Bush Women, said, "Somebody ought to do something about purging the demons of slavery here in New Orleans."—John O'Neal

The 90-mile long River Road that runs along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge has been dubbed "Cancer Alley" by environmentalists and many of the residents. In addition to a group of predominately low-income African-American communities, it is home to a concentration of more than 130 major petrochemical plants, grain elevators, medical waste incinerators, solid waste landfills and other industrial operations that account for the bulk of toxic chemical releases in Louisiana. Residents face enormously high rates of cancer, miscarriages, birth defects and other health problems. The population of Cancer Alley is reported to have the highest rate of cancer in the nation.

Soon after his discussion with Jawole Zollar, John O'Neal was invited by Pat Bryant, of Gulf Coast Tenants Association, to an organizing meeting with people living on River Road. O'Neal learned that the map of Cancer Alley is a perfect template for the map of the old Mississippi River plantation system. While the nature of the bondage might have changed, he realized that this form of "environmental racism" was just a new face on an old problem.

So begins the story of the Environmental Justice Project, a multi-year, multidisciplinary, multiracial community-arts project being planned for 1998 by Junebug Productions, an African-American, community-based theater ensemble in New Orleans founded and directed by John O'Neal. "Environmental racism is the modern demon of slavery that Jawole had been talking about," says EJP Project Director Roxy Wright. "Junebug realized that our job as artists was to help these people struggling to exorcise this demon through environmental justice."

The Environmental Justice Project has grown from these initial conversations to encompass the work of seven community-based performing arts groups, eight community-based organizations mobilizing their memberships around issues of environmental justice, and a national network, with combined constituencies totaling in the thousands. While the project is still very much in formation, EJP participants have already met an important challenge facing cultural and political activists today: working together.

A Project About Process

The structure of the Environmental Justice Project is complex and multifaceted, illustrating the multiple goals of the project's creators. It is built around a cluster of partnerships between community-based theater groups and community-based organizing groups. Participants believe that the collaborating organizations, unaccustomed as many of them are to working with each other, have a lot to contribute and benefit from being part of the EJP.

The most visible product of these collaborations will be a festival of new theater works scheduled for 1998 in and around New Orleans. The organizing groups will provide stories and critical feedback to the theater groups. The theater groups will create and perform the new works and continue performing them on tour after the festival is completed.

Through the process of creating and producing these premieres, the work of all the participants will be advanced. They will develop their ability to collaborate with and draw sustenance from one another as an ongoing network of cultural and political organizations. They will increase their audience/constituency base through the crossover and synergy produced by the collaboration. Ultimately, says Ron Chisom of the People's Institute, one of the EJP collaborators, the idea is to try to get the cultural groups, along with the organizing groups, to see how we can begin to work together. The organizers need to know more about the cultural dynamics in their work. The cultural groups need to learn about the difference between just doing a 'community-based project' and how to participate in long-term organizing work.

More specifically, the role of the theater artists is, in Roxy Wright's mind, to provide their organizing partners with the opportunity to have their stories portrayed publicly and proudly, in a fashion that wouldn't be possible otherwise. "Each of these organizing groups has a wealth of stories," said Wright, "but nobody gets to know them, inside or certainly outside the organization. That's what we can make happen." In addition, Junebug and the other theater groups will be able to pass on some of the collective cultural techniques they have created, such as the "Story Circle" exercise, which the organizing groups can use to enhance their membership's unity and self-awareness. "I have seen it time and time again," says Adella Gautier, Junebug's Associate Artistic Director. "When people have the chance to witness their collective stories, they get energized, more critical, and more powerful as a group."

Since these beginnings, EJP participants have worked together in planning meetings, conducted story-telling sessions and theater workshops, and organized public cultural events, including a Juneteenth picnic and local performances by some of the participating theater groups. Donald Harrison, Jr., a jazz composer in residence with Junebug Theater, also composed an original piece entitled "Don't Drink the Water" that Gulf Coast Tenant's Association is using in its organizing efforts. The culminating festival in 1998 will include performances, visual arts exhibits, community education projects and a special training institute for artists, administrators and community activists. It has already been a long time coming, says O'Neal, but it has been worth it. "We've tapped into something larger than either Jawole or I as individuals could have possibly imagined."

Taking the Longer View

There is another place to begin the story of the Environmental Justice Project—the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s. At that time, O'Neal was a part of the Free Southern Theater, a New Orleans-based group allied with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most important and radical African-American-led organizing groups. The Free Southern Theater began in 1963 and was conceived as a "theater for those who have no theater." It supported the work of SNCC by bringing church and other activist groups together, recruiting students for SNCC's freedom schools, and providing a more entertaining form of political education.

During this period, the arts and organizing were inextricably linked. Ted Quant of the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice, another of the EJP organizing groups, remembers:

In the Civil Rights Movement we sang a song [by Cordell Reagon] that went: "I'm here from New Orleans and you're here from Alabama and we're all here together in a Selma County Jail." That lyric and the experience of people singing it together connected everybody to a higher level of commitment and understanding of our collective consciousness than would have been possible otherwise.

Quant believes that "in every revolution, there have been cultural workers. They are the ones who create the cultural and spiritual connection that people are willing to fight and die for."

O'Neal, Quant, Wright, Chisom and Bryant knew each other during this period, and while they never worked together in the field, they developed a deep respect for one another's work. Their relationship forms a vital core to the Environmental Justice Project.

Begun in 1981, Junebug Productions became the successor to the Free Southern Theater, and in many people's eyes, the theatrical legacy of the Civil Rights Movement itself. And yet its work has been different in some important ways. Rather than focusing on New Orleans and the South, Junebug has toured nationally, working in a wide range of rural, urban and suburban communities. This has meant that the relationship between Junebug and the communities they work within has had to be greatly shortened, often lasting less than a week. And while Junebug has continued to create theater about people in struggle and to connect with grassroots communities through residency activities, they have done less and less of the direct-action type of social-change theater that Free Southern Theater was known for. Instead of having community-organizing groups as sponsors and partners, most have been schools, colleges, cultural centers and other types of social-service agencies. These organizations have tended to be oriented more around community development than political enfranchisement, and have validated marginalized cultures rather than agitating for change.

While O'Neal continues to believe this is vital work, it has also begun to feel too safe: "As with many social-change institutions today, our work became more about survival and less about fulfilling our mission." The EJP partnerships, because of their greater focus on direct action, has been a way for Junebug to reconnect, not only with its roots in New Orleans, but also its origins as an organization.

Dudley Cocke, director of Roadside Theater in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and another of the EJP collaborators, calls this "drawing the line at place." "One of the biggest problems in our work [at Roadside] is the lack of context," Cocke says. "Too frequently, there's nowhere for people to go with what they experience or learn in our performances. Even if we generate all the positive energy and righteous anger in the world, what happens if there's no organization to follow through?" He sees this as part of a larger dynamic in our society's "drop-in culture": "As grassroots theater artists, we have a body of ideas, relationships and symbols that we can offer as catalysts for social-change movements. They can't just be disconnected from their roots and served up like fast food." EJP represents the next logical step in community-arts work, according to Cocke, and EJP could turn out to be an invaluable opportunity to explore the issues and create new models for partnerships.

In this sense, EJP is enabling Junebug to "draw its line" differently in two ways: first, by grounding itself more firmly within the fabric of New Orleans communities, and second, by resituating itself and the participating theater groups at a different place within the community, aligned with grassroots organizing efforts directed at systemic social change.

"We Do It By Doing It"

The Environmental Justice Project collaboration has served as a fundamental challenge to many participants' assumptions about their own work and the work of their EJP partners. The connection between theater and organizing is a difficult one for many activists on both sides of the equation. The community organizing groups, no less than the community-based theaters, have had to do serious analysis and soul-searching in order to make sense of their involvement. Ron Chisom of the People's Institute says,

The project is clear to me one day, and then not so clear the next. When I get it, it's crystal clear, but if I am away from it for even a few days, it's like I have to start all over again." After 30 years as an organizer, Chisom admits this is a little unnerving, but believes the confusion points to the radicalness of what EJP proposes: "We took something on that was big, and it turned out to be bigger than we thought.

Many organizers and artists, it seems, hold very different—and frequently judgmental—notions about one another. EJP participants learned about this from tensions that grew between Junebug and Gulf Coast Tenants Association staff. Roxy Wright of Junebug Productions remembers that she and Junebug's Managing Director, MK Wegmann, "began to sense some hostile undercurrents. We had been very careful not to approach the organizing groups with the old attitude—'we're artists, and we're here to teach you'—but it became clear that that's just the attitude Gulf Coast thought we had."

Ted Quant and Bernardette Mills of the Twomey Center were brought in to help mediate the situation. They had each group—the staff of Junebug and the staff of Gulf Coast—draw a collective picture of what they each imagined their relationship to be, from the other's perspective. "The picture showed that the grassroots organizers believed that the artists and the organizers were two separate groups," said Ted Quant. "From the standpoint of the organizers, the artists were an elitist, separatist group in an ivory tower who were not interested in getting their hands dirty. From the standpoint of the artists, the organizers had no respect or understanding for what they bring, and instead wanted to turn them into organizers."

While Quant understands each group's position, he has come to believe organizers "cannot be disappointed with where people are, because that's real. You've got to work with it, no matter how 'correct' you may be." Conversely, he also believes "the artist's attitude cannot be: 'my work has value, and if you don't see it, fuck you.'" Quant says the artists have to be able to stand firm, with integrity and awareness of what they bring to the table, and make no apologies for it. At the same time, artists also have to listen to the organizers and acknowledge that they do have to get down and dirty. The truth of the art will only be reflected through the experience of the artist, so they have to be there to get it.

Pat Bryant, of Gulf Coast Tenants Association, agrees. He knows personally the power of the arts to affect social change:

During the Civil Rights Movement, I would stay up all night and work with other people to change the lyrics to popular songs. There isn't anything that fucks up a target like a gospel choir singing about him using words from a popular song. Killed one guy, J.C. Lawrence, that way. He was a vicious, racist slumlord, and I swear that that song gave him a heart attack.

At the same time, Bryant is concerned about the whole notion of artists going "into" communities. "People—especially African Americans—have been taught to rely on outside experts, as opposed to people in their community. We try to make it clear to people that they have the power to deal with their own oppression. We need people to come, write songs, make t-shirts, do plays, etc., but we don't need any 'artists.' We need workers. They must participate as regular people." It can't just be in the form of a temporary residency, Bryant believes. "It has to have an organic relationship to the work of the struggle."

When EJP community partners have become directly exposed to and involved with their artist partners, a lot of the mystification and tension has been cleared up. When Jennifer Cumerbatch, executive director of the New Orleans Youth Action Corps, first heard about the EJP she thought "the project sounded like it could be beneficial, and it was related to our interest in the environment, but I can't say I thought it was very important."

"For the first year of EJP, it was difficult to stay connected," Cumerbatch told me. "We had an opportunity to be in the audience of a theater performance, we had a chance to travel to Tennessee where Carpetbag Theater [their artist partner] is located, but these things were not directly relevant to what the organization was trying to do." All of that changed when Carpetbag visited the New Orleans Youth Action Corps in October 1995. "Carpetbag's visit was great. Our Corps members loved the exercises, and Carpetbag learned a lot about our organization and how we might work together." The two groups are now considering creating a short play for Youth Corps members to perform in the schools on environmental themes, and Cumerbatch feels more invested now that these possibilities have appeared.

MK Wegmann sees this kind of hands-on cultural contact between collaborating arts and organizing groups as a key factor in determining the effectiveness of the partnerships. "We can't underestimate how strange the notion is for people that the arts are a catalyst for social change. Programs—direct interaction with the staff and members of these organizations—are the best way to get things to 'click.' While planning is important, we do it by doing it, not by talking about it." Because Junebug is an arts organization, "we have to do it from the place of art. The community organizations are going to have to do it from the place where they are. Us trying to be them, or trying to get them to be us, won't work."

The culture of the organizations themselves may be another important factor in determining which organizing groups are most receptive to cultural/political partnerships. One of the most enthusiastic of the community organizing partners has been the Christian Unity Baptist Church. This action-oriented church is already utilizing art and culture more than any of the other EJP community organizing groups. Their membership regularly participates in creating plays, songs and visual arts projects that deal with issues in their community, and brings the diverse poor, working-class and middle-class African-American groups within the church together. They have a number of talented parishioners who teach and model for the others. Rev. Audrey Johnson, assistant to the pastor Rev. Dwight Webster and the church's EJP liaison, says "we have yet to find a tool as powerful as the arts to get people in our church thinking. People are so accustomed to being told by television what they are and are not capable of. Making art themselves helps show people—poor people, especially—just how creative and powerful they can be."

When asked why she thought her organization was so involved in the arts when the others weren't, Rev. Johnson said it is because—thanks to their pastor—the church has become steeped in its African and African-American tradition and history: "His leadership," she said, "has led the congregation to a rich awareness of the power and potential of the arts and culture to make a difference in the community." More generally, she referred to the story of King Jehosephat in the New Testament, and the direction from God for the "righteous to overwhelm their enemies through song," to demonstrate the extent to which the church as an institution is steeped in art and cultural tradition. "You have to be able to take the long view," she said, "in order to see the value of using art and culture to organize people. This is not something we're doing for today. This is something our grandchildren will benefit from."

Without a creative, multigenerational view, Rev. Johnson believes, it may be hard for community organizations in crisis to see the value of changing society over the long haul: "Social change is about doing things we haven't done before. It's about taking risks. If you have never seen the other side, your circumstances will always appear normal and inevitable, and they will never change."

Many of us allow ourselves to be painted into such small boxes, Rev. Johnson believes, "and art and creativity makes us jump out of the box. If we don't see that struggle itself as important," she concludes, "there is little for artists and organizers to even talk about."

"Jumping Out of the Box"

Ted Quant of the Twomey Center believes that "to consciously reassert the role of the arts at a moment when we are being smashed by the right wing, and to bring forward our truth in a creative, expressive way that objective analysis doesn't, seems to be an extremely important project." Both artists and organizers will need to expand their notions about their own work, as well as their partners', in order for this to be possible. It may be difficult, but as the Environmental Justice Project suggests, it can also be immensely rewarding and powerful. "In my wildest dreams," Quant concludes, "I imagine the proverbial organizing discussion of the future: 'OK, now that we've talked about tactics, strategy and analysis, where does the cultural side come in?' Cultural workers will be invited to the table at the very beginning, and they will know how to plug in and do their work."

While community arts are still struggling for recognition in the scheme of things, community artists are finding their efforts more widely understood and validated than they have been in quite awhile. Even as the resources for our work continue to shrink, there has been a relative proliferation of community-arts funding and policy initiatives, writings, conferences and exhibitions, all of which at least begins to suggest our maturation as a movement. [1] It seems incumbent upon us to begin comparing notes, clarifying our approaches and building upon one another's work. The Environmental Justice Project is a bold effort to draw and redraw the lines of our understanding of the issues and opportunities we all face, and we should all eagerly await its fruition.

Notes

1. Kesler, Grant. "Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art." Afterimage magazine, January 1995. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop. Pages 5-11.

This essay originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Summer 1996.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002