![]() ![]() They opened their home to activists such as Stokely Carmichael, who helped start a Black political party called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Both were deeply involved in the local civil-rights movement. The civil-rights leader John Lewis was born one county over, near Troy, where his parents were sharecroppers.įlowers’s mother, Mattie, worked as a teacher’s aide and drove a school bus her father, J.C., was a stock handler at an Air Force base in Montgomery, until he was injured on the job. A decade later, Martin Luther King, Jr., led marchers to Montgomery from Selma, fifty-four miles away along Highway 80, to push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. Montgomery is where Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in 1955. I couldn’t buy my children stuff for what they need.”Ĭatherine Coleman Flowers grew up surrounded by activism. “I got raw sewage, and I don’t have no money,” she said, looking at the politicians as if they needed help understanding something simple. As she explained her situation, Warren nodded sympathetically. “I live in a mobile home with my two kids.” She started to cry, and put her hand up to shield her face. “Hi, my name is Pamela Rush, and I’m from Lowndes County, Alabama,” she began. The next day, she sat before the senators, wearing a patterned blouse and a necklace with a cross on it. “This is not a sight that one normally sees,” he said. A United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty, visiting in 2017, said that the sewage problem was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world. coli and fecal coliform throughout the Black Belt, in wells and in public waters. is not on a municipal sewer line.) Floods carry sewage across people’s lawns and into their living areas, bringing with it the risk of viruses, bacteria, and parasites that thrive in feces. Instead, Rush, like her neighbors, used a pipe to empty waste into the grass outside-a practice, called straight-piping, that is not uncommon in much of rural America. But installing a new system can cost as much as twenty thousand dollars, which is more than the average person in Lowndes County makes in a year. Rush’s sister Viola was once arrested for a sewage violation. Residents can be fined as much as five hundred dollars per citation, evicted, and even arrested. In Alabama, not having a functioning septic system is a criminal misdemeanor. In Lowndes County, at least forty per cent of households have an inadequate septic system or none at all. Yet, in a region with a high water table and intense rains exacerbated by climate change, the mounds frequently erode and the tanks fail, sending sewage back through toilets, sinks, and bathtubs. For these conditions, the state recommends a “mound” system, which uses piled-up dirt to filter waste. But conventional septic tanks, which store sewage until it can be filtered by the earth and consumed by microbes, are often defeated by the dense soil. The state of Alabama mandates that anyone who is not on a municipal sewer line-which includes eighty per cent of Black Belt residents-invest in a private waste-management system. ![]() Now the problem is more often with sewage. It sits in a thin layer atop impermeable clay-laden soil, which, in the early days of agriculture there, frustrated farmers trying to dig wells. The dirt in the region, ideal for planting cotton, isn’t good for much else. Lowndes County, which includes Collirene, is one of the poorest counties in one of America’s poorest states. Now the farming that was once done by enslaved people and sharecroppers is mostly done by seasonal workers and machines. Rush’s home is in a part of Alabama known as the Black Belt, named for its rich, dark topsoil, which in the years before the Civil War made cotton the state’s main source of wealth. Her total income-including disability payments and some support from the father of her children-was less than a thousand dollars a month. Because Rush’s mortgage had exceptionally high interest, she had paid for hers twice over already: a hundred and fourteen thousand dollars, with some fifteen thousand still to go. Trailer homes often begin losing value as soon as buyers take them off the lot. ![]() To save money, and to keep out rodents, she stuffed rags into holes and set traps outside the door she kept a running tally of the opossums she caught. The walls were porous, and in hot weather the energy bill came to more than three hundred dollars a month. But Rush hesitated to invite visitors inside her trailer. ![]()
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