Fre’Drisha Dixon can still recall the laughter that once spilled across the playground of the now-shuttered Clyde Woodworth Elementary School in Inglewood. Just as clearly, she can conjure up the loud banging of the bulldozers that plowed through the school’s classrooms last year. Today, both sounds are drowned out by talk of turning that barren […]
Adam Mahoney
Adam Mahoney is the climate and environment reporter at Capital B. He can be reached by email at adam.mahoney@capitalbnews.org, on Bluesky, and on X at @AdamLMahoney.
Posted inHistory, Politics & Policy
Ghana’s President Calls Slave Trade ‘Greatest Crime,’ Pushes U.N. for Reparations
In a first coordinated African-led effort at the United Nations, leaders have declared the Transatlantic Slave Trade as “the greatest crime against humanity” and called for reparations. African leaders recently took the global stage at the U.N.’s General Assembly in New York, where Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, announced plans to submit the first formal […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice
An Explosion Left a Black Town Contaminated. Politics Are Stunting the Cleanup.
On the banks of the Tangipahoa River in South Louisiana, thick oil slicks and chemical odors ripple across the water. Five weeks after an oil and lubricant facility exploded, sending oily soot as far as 40 miles away, Black residents still complain that the chemical smell is so strong that it wakes them up in […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice
In This Black Louisiana Town, Forests are Browning and Animals are Dying
The forests that once sheltered the small town of Roseland are turning brown. A month after a sprawling oil and lubricant facility exploded and rained down slick black droplets all over this predominantly Black town in rural Louisiana, the trees are sick. Federal officials said there’s no threat to human health; however, independent tests recently […]
Posted inAir Pollution, Climate Change, Environmental Justice, Extreme Weather
Pollution is Driving Climate Disasters And The Government Plans to Stop Tracking it
Homes in Jefferson County, Texas, still bear the scars of Hurricane Harvey: black and blue tarps cling to rooftops. Families in historically Black neighborhoods navigate a slow, unequal recovery from the 2017 storm, and in 2022, the federal government found that the state discriminated against Black and Hispanic residents when doling out flood mitigation funds. […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice, Extreme Weather, Politics & Policy
How a $5 Billion Federal Project Could Sink the Lower Ninth Ward Forever
Willie Calhoun knows how to live with water. His home, cradled between the Mississippi River and a patchwork of canals, is split by the surging, ever-present current. But it wasn’t always that way in the Ninth Ward. Before the largest canal known as the Industrial Canal was built, the stretch of land between the river […]
Posted inAir Pollution, Environmental Justice, Politics & Policy
Soot, Sickness, and Silence: A Black Louisiana Community Is Still Struggling After an Explosion
ROSELAND, La. — For 11 days after an oil and lubricant factory blew up less than a mile from her home, Millie Simmons could not stand outside for more than 10 minutes at a time. “I could hardly breathe,” the 58-year-old child care worker said outside her home on Sept. 4. Soot and an oily […]
Posted inClimate Change, History, Rural Issues
The Army Took Their Land. Decades Later, This Black Community Still Wants It Back.
HARRIS NECK NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Ga. — Over the course of what was a scorching, yet typical May day across Coastal Georgia, Willie Moran made it a point to stop and take a deep breath at every sight of water. Looking out across the estuaries and salt marshes teeming with wildlife, he repeatedly reminded his […]
Posted inAir Pollution, Environmental Justice
Explosion at Louisiana Oil Plant Leaves Black Community Coated in Toxic Fallout
ROSELAND, La. — Tyreik Taylor had barely wiped the oil from his hands when the sky behind him lit up. Fifteen minutes after the 26-year-old drove home, a roar thundered from the plant where he helped mix chemicals for motor oil and had just punched out. Fire consumed the air, the collapsing metal groaning and […]
Posted inCulture, Environmental Justice
This Photographer Preserved Life in New Orleans Before Katrina — With a Polaroid Camera
This is the fifth story in our series chronicling the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. All photos by Polo Silk unless noted. NEW ORLEANS — There weren’t always a pair of security guards standing outside of Big Man’s Lounge in Uptown New Orleans. As a teenager in the early 1980s, Selwhyn Sthaddeus “Polo Silk” Terrell […]