Cities
Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.
This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.
Hazel Johnson (1935-2011) is considered by many to be the mother of environmental justice. For more than 30 years, she pressed local officials and corporations to clean up toxic waste and pollution in her southeast Chicago community of Altgeld Gardens. (Courtesy of People for Community Recovery)
She was a community activist.
She was an ambassador of Altgeld Gardens.
She was an early mentor to Barack Obama.
She was a thorn in the side of the Chicago waste industry.
She was a wife and mother of seven children.
She is the mother of the environmental justice movement.
For more than 30 years, Hazel Johnson worked to clean up her corner of Chicago s southeast side. Her relentless advocacy made her a fixture in local news, and her story has been told in profiles and books and kept alive among her peers in the struggle for environmental justice. But one aspect of her life that s been less explored is her faith.