Hyde Park Case Study

The Augmentation of Civil and Environmental Rights

Melissa Checker explicates in Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and Search for Justice in a Southern Town how land for Hyde Park residents symbolized more than physical property. After slavery ended and the sharecropping system deteriorated, more African Americans were able to acquire land such as Hyde Park. However, this sense of newfound agency for Hyde Park property owners was soon relegated when they realized that they were encircled in a “toxic donut” of high pollutant factories and junkyards (Checker, 130). In response, Hyde and Aragon Park Improvement Committee (HAPIC) was established and from the 1960s to 90s its platform transformed from fighting for municipal infrastructures to protesting against environmental racism. During the 1960s, HAPIC addressed the infrastructural problems of Hyde Park. Not only was the land in an undesirable location by a swamp—one of the reasons why property was affordable—but also it lacked the basic necessities of a tax paying community. Through protesting, by the 70s “HAPIC activists won water, gas, and sewer lines, streetlights, paved roads, and flood control ditches—infrastructures that most other Augusta neighborhoods had received long before” (Checker, 5). Although the residents saw the

It was by the mid 80s that people started correlating the surrounding factories’ pollutants, such as Southern Wood Piedmont (SWP), and the rampant trend of diseases that community was experiencing. Moreover, Hyde Park was emblematic of a larger-scaled problem of contaminating facilities being disproportionately placed in African American communities. With this recognized incongruity “two important social movements—environmentalism and civil rights—converged” (Checker, 9). This was not solely a municipal issue, but also racial