Once a Detroit teacher, world renowned environmental activist sounds alarm for communities of color

The students lucky enough to attend Renaissance High School in the years just before and after the new millennium were witnessing a genius in the making without knowing it.

To be sure, it is Renaissance after all, and that sentiment could apply to just about any student at any time in history at Detroit’s leading magnet high school. In this instance, the would-be history maker was one of the school’s history teachers.

Back in 1999, Renaissance teacher Catherine Coleman Flowers – Miss or Mrs. Flowers to those of a certain age – brought forth an idea to the school’s administration: Take a bus of select students on a field trip to Selma, Ala., to recreate the 1965 Voting Rights March to Montgomery.

The goal, Flowers envisioned, was to introduce a civil rights lesson to Detroit youth by bringing them to one of the most important sites of the movement; connect Detroiters with a state many of us have roots to regardless; and emphasize that at the original march, youth at their stage in life were on the front lines.

Detroit students were used to seeing living representations of the struggle for equality on a regular basis; nearly everyone has a story about running into Rosa Parks everywhere from Farmer Jack to the Freedom Fund dinner. Bringing Midwest kids down south was a new concept entirely.

With the school’s blessing and funding boosts from the Detroit NAACP and other donors, Coleman Flowers pulled off an epic field trip still talked about by alumni – whether they went on it or not — to this day. But for Coleman Flowers, as she reflected during a lecture at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History this month, something about the Selma trip didn’t sit right, or smell right, when she came back to Detroit.

She was born and raised in Lowndes County, Alabama, a rural county near Selma and Montgomery, so the landscape wasn’t unfamiliar. While speaking with locals at the time, however, they complained about an issue that was very familiar: Issues with the sanitation infrastructure, which affects everything from clean drinking water, sewage disposal and garbage pickup.

“I thought that all of that was over. I thought that what I grew up with had changed. And when I went back home [to Detroit], I found out that people were being arrested because they could not afford sanitation,” she says.

Coleman Flowers had been living in Detroit for about 15 years at that point. In 2001, she moved back to Lowndes County and started asking questions: Why are Lowndes residents still living under the unsafe conditions from decades ago, and how did it get to this point in the first place?

Finding the answers to those questions put Coleman Flowers on the path of becoming one of the world’s leading environmental justice scholars, with a focus on rural Black communities like her native Lowndes County. She is now touring her new book, Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope, a biographical volume of personal essays tracing her journey from teenage activist in Lowndes to founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice whose investigations and advocacy have reshaped environmental policy on a national scale.

“I wanted to write about faith. And I wanted to write about the things that inspired me,” Coleman Flowers, who was named a MacArthur Genius in 2020, told the Wright crowd. “I wanted to talk about spirituality. I tell a lot of stories about my life that I’ve never shared before. But I did it for inspiration, because something had told me, if I lived long enough to know that if we did not win the [2024] election, there were gonna be people that would be trying to take us back.”

Coleman Flowers’ talk lands at a critical juncture for Detroit as it relates to the environment. In the search for climate havens, many Americans are making new migration patterns to Midwest cities like Detroit, believed to be immune from major calamites like earthquakes and hurricanes – though this April, frequent tornadoes have swept through the state during a month that usually never sees tornadoes at all, let alone more than one. At the same time, the effects of climate change have worn on the city’s infrastructure – more lately, the torrential downpours every summer that flood basements. Rain or shine, persistent issues like air pollution and contaminated soil have been pervasive here. All these issues hover over the uncertain future of a rapidly changing city that measures its success with utility turn-ons, but not that long ago was infamous for utility shut offs.

“Detroit is what it is because of the people that work real hard to make it,” Coleman Flowers says. “And Detroit should be a lesson to all of us, because when Detroit was down, Detroit kept fighting. And now I see a rebirth in Detroit. And a lot of people are coming back to Detroit. But we should not lose our history.”

A crux of Coleman Flowers’ storytelling emphasizes the strong connection between Lowndes County and Detroit. Ask any Black person in Michigan where their family hails from, and often the answer will be somewhere in Alabama. Over time, Lowndes County would not only represent a significant portion of Detroit’s new migrants, a symbiotic relationship between the two regions would play a role in Black history at large.

“You can’t talk about voting rights without talking about Detroit,” Coleman Flowers says, noting that unionized auto workers in Detroit donated vehicles for Lowndes County residents to canvass in. “Lowndes County is where the original Black Panther Party was founded – not Oakland. And a lot of the people organizing people for the right to vote in Lowndes County were from here in Detroit, because a lot of them had come back.”

Coleman Flowers was born to parents who instilled a spirit of activism – or perhaps resilience – early on. Her father “was a card-carrying member of the NRA” who taught all her brothers how to shoot and defend themselves against attacks on their property and their person – largely because Lowndes County, like several counties in the rural South, was a hotbed for lynchings. Her mother was a survivor of forced sterilization and was instrumental in raising awareness of the practice as more women in the community came together to speak out.

While in high school, Coleman Flowers described a story of how an elementary-aged Black girl was found dead in the county, and rumor spread that the high school principal, who was Black, was part of an insidious ring of luring Black girls into encounters where they’d be raped by white men – “sort of like what’s going on in the Epstein files,” she says. At 16, she pushed for an investigation that eventually led to the resignation of the principal – and the name of the high school to be changed.

Seeing injustice is one thing, but the courage to stand up for it is what’s needed in any sort of push for reconciliation, especially for future activists, Coleman Flowers says.

“I knew that we needed to have the kind of inspiration that I got from my parents,” she says. “I felt like the things that my mother, my father, and the people that were around me shared about their struggle, helped me to be able to push forward, to do better than I was doing at that time, despite the fact that there were so many obstacles that were against me.”

During a question-and-answer discussion with Monica Lewis Patrick, president and CEO of We the People Detroit, Coleman Flowers addressed the crowd on how advocacy for environmental justice today is not that distant from the push for equality she experienced in her formal years.

For one, it’s recognizing that discriminatory practices aren’t limited to voter suppression, segregated schools and other unjust systems one would typically think of when discussing the movement. “[Joe] Biden said he had gone to Selma several times and didn’t know about the sanitation issue,” Coleman Flowers said, recalling when the former president and Sen. Bernie Sanders appointed her to a top-level environmental advisory post.

Second, it’s recognizing that these poor environmental conditions happen everywhere and link several affected communities, rural or not. Building off the Detroit-Lowndes County connection (“I can’t come here and talk about Lowndes County and not talk about what’s happening in Jefferson Chalmers,” she said in reference to the eastside Detroit neighborhood noting that while many communities experience flooding basements when it rains heavily, both places incidentally have raw sewage backing up into basement drains as a result) Coleman Flowers said that sanitation system failures aren’t anomalies when research proves otherwise.

“We’re the richest country in the world, and there is raw sewage on the ground,” she says. “But I remember when the United States withdrew from the Human Rights Council, and the choice of words for aggravated countries was ‘s-hole countries.’”

Coleman Flowers advised paying closer attention to language in policy, especially with newer environmental hazards growing as a threat. Citing data centers as “something we haven’t even talked about yet,” she discussed how interest in sources of clean water could lead to droughts in some areas and land grabs in others, any of which could be backed by an overlooked clause in a deed or a tweak to an existing law.

Above all, Coleman Flowers says, is recognizing that a long-standing problem in a community is most likely connected to another one unaccounted for.

“I believe that the work starts in rooms like this, where we’re intersecting the work with each other,” she says. “The work we do around water justice isn’t separate from food justice. It isn’t separate from reproductive justice. And energy justice. All of those things are interconnected.”