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The weapon used to steal the Holt’s land and diminish their transformative wealth was not a gun but a nearby leaky county landfill loaded with toxic chemicals. Nevertheless, the results are the same, loss of land. Forty years after Dr. King’s death, there still exists a hidden cost of being black in America. A black tax still stymies wealth accumulation of African Americans who live in our nation’s cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Lacking the “transformative” asset of family wealth, such as land, millions of African American families must rely on their income and personal savings to qualify for homeownership, the greatest source of American family wealth. Almost 80 percent of black children begin their adult lives with no assets whatsoever. The average black family holds only 10 cents of wealth for every dollar that whites possess. Wealth creates opportunity. Theft of black land translates into theft of black wealth. As was the case in Memphis forty years ago, the Dickson case in 2008 is more than a landfill struggle. Again, the struggle of the Holt family and other African American families in Dickson’s Eno Road community is about human dignity and human rights.
www.ejrc.cau.edu Robert D. Bullard directs the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. His most recent book is entitled The Black Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century: Race, Power, and the Politics of Place (Rowman & Littlefield 2007).
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