When we talk about legacy, most people think of inheritance, focusing on family homes, heirlooms, or perhaps a recipe passed down through generations. Still, across the South, another kind of inheritance is shaping lives: polluted air, poisoned water, and communities fighting for the right to breathe clean air on the same land where their ancestors were forced to work.
That is the truth behind “Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward,” a new multimedia storytelling series from the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC). The project draws a direct line from plantation slavery to today’s environmental injustices and does so with haunting clarity. Through photographs, maps, and the voices of residents from North Carolina to South Carolina, the series reveals how the remnants of systemic racism still determine who lives safely and who does not.
For Chandra Taylor, senior attorney and leader of SELC’s Environmental Justice Initiative, the work is both professional and personal. “Slavery was based on people not being valued as people,” she said in an interview with EBONY. “That carried over into our laws. Segregation was legal, redlining was legal. Those systems determined who could own land, what kind of land they could access, and what communities would be most exposed to harm.”
That harm, Taylor explains, did not end with emancipation. It evolved. The same low-lying, flood-prone land once designated for enslaved people and later for Black sharecroppers became home to generations of Black families and to toxic industries that saw these neighborhoods as expendable. “African Americans are 75 percent more likely than white Americans to live near a polluting facility,” Taylor added. “That is not a coincidence. That is history doing what it always does when it goes unchecked.”
When the Future Pollutes the Past
Take South Memphis, for example. Once a thriving Black community with deep cultural roots, it is now battling a twenty-first-century problem that looks a lot like nineteenth-century exploitation. A facility run by Elon Musk’s xAI is releasing harmful emissions into the air without proper permits in a neighborhood already plagued by decades of industrial dumping. The turbines, powered by methane gas, emit hazardous chemicals such as formaldehyde and smog-forming ozone, exacerbating asthma rates in a city that already receives an “F” for air quality.
What makes this story sting even more is its familiarity. “South Memphis’ predominantly Black communities are unfortunately no stranger to dirty air,” said Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney with SELC. “Every day those turbines are operating, they are doing significant harm to families in South Memphis.”
Taylor calls this the “data divide,” a new era where tech innovation is celebrated but its pollution lands, quite literally, on the backs of Black communities. “The drive for more data centers means more gas pipelines,” she explained. “That gas goes through communities of color and underserved neighborhoods, bringing with it all the risk and land loss.”
Fighting for Air and Accountability
The Plantations to Pollution project does not stop at storytelling. It is part of SELC’s broader push to help residents advocate for themselves using legal, policy, and regulatory tools. Taylor describes it as empowering, not rescuing. “Communities already have power,” she says. “Our job is to amplify their voices and help them engage in the processes that protect their own health and homes.”
This might involve helping residents file Clean Air Act complaints, training them to attend zoning hearings, or ensuring that real estate disclosures warn new homeowners if their property has a history of flooding. In other words, ensuring that the fine print no longer obscures the truth.
But even as communities fight forward, Washington seems determined to take several steps back. Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced plans to dismantle the EPA’s environmental justice offices, undoing three decades of progress. “Eliminating these offices helps no one,” said Dr. Margot Brown of the Environmental Defense Fund. “It means EPA will no longer be able to protect the families and communities most exposed to harmful pollution.”
This regression is more than policy; it is personal. “We still need laws that acknowledge the disparate impact of environmental harm on the most vulnerable communities,” she insisted. “We cannot back off from telling the story of what the harm is.”