In Flint, water is a civil rights issue
Access to clean water was hard-won by activists, and then taken away
By Asher Kohn
“The City of Flint has experienced a man-made disaster,” declared the mayor of the ailing Michigan metropolis. Dangerous levels of lead have been found in the city’s water supply, sickening children in the city of 100,000. With a burgeoning health care crisis on her hands, Mayor Karen Weaver has enacted a state of emergency.
Clean running water is a civil rights issue in the United States. Although working pipes and chlorinated water were fought and bargained for in the 1960s civil rights movement, federal budget cuts killed the promise about 20 years later. Ever since Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the water Americans drink has gotten steadily worse.
As part of his administration’s revolutionary “Great Society” program, Lyndon Johnson signed the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act into law in the summer of 1965. The law expanded federal housing and provided rent subsidies for the needy — it also provided generous federal grants to build new sewers, pipes and water facilities throughout the country.
Water issues were important to LBJ. He grew up without running water or electricity in central Texas. He made infrastructure a matter of race and class, lamenting that the Mexican American students he taught as a young man would be unable to go to college if they couldn’t even maintain hygiene. As president, he made it his mission to ensure that the United States “could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.”
Running water meant that Americans could use the toilet and shower, clean their clothes, and cook their food at home — an effective way to save money. It meant people didn’t have to be the next Lyndon Johnson to escape a life of poverty.
The HUD Act pipes, though not quite built to fail, were built with shorter life spans in mind. Donald Vannoy, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland, explains that “in the 1960s, [metal] fatigue wasn’t as well understood as it is today.” And unlike other infrastructure like roads or bridges, there’s no visible wear and tear on water pipes. According to Charles Haas, a professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University, there is just “a low-level and continuous exposure” to unknown and understudied hazards.
The issues that HUD presented could have been patched over with maintenance and innovation, but the US government took the opposite course. Federal infrastructure spending declined 65% from 1965 to 1981, Ronald Reagan’s first year in the White House. Reagan put what he saw as the excesses of Johnson’s “Great Society” programs in the crosshairs, comparing HUD in one 1983 speech to King George III’s 1774 Intolerable Acts against patriotic American colonists.
Unsafe drinking water is one of the quieter aftereffects of the Reagan Revolution. In 1987, amendments to the Clean Water Act replaced construction grants with a loan program.
The United States has been catching up ever since. Clean water was part of the Civil Rights package, but like other elements promised to non-white and non-wealthy Americans in 1960s — the right to vote, the right to be represented in Congress or birthright citizenship — it has been weakened by years of neglect. Catastrophic emergencies like Flint’s and those in other American cities could be avoided. Man-made disasters have become commonplace. What was once a great society is falling apart.
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