More than 50 years ago, despite a storm that was brewing in Memphis, an overflow crowd of hundreds gathered to hear a rousing speech from Martin Luther King, Jr., who encouraged the city’s striking sanitation workers not to give up their struggle for safer working conditions and better wages.

Now, as skyrocketing unemployment is predicted to increase poverty rates and widen racial disparities, these same communities find themselves in the crosshairs of COVID-19. In Chicago, African Americans represent 60 percent of the city’s COVID-19-related deaths, despite only comprising 30 percent of the city’s population. African Americans in states such as Michigan, Illinois, and Louisiana have also been disproportionately killed by COVID-19 — and early data suggest the disparity could be widest in the South.

The disparities send a clear message: The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a health crisis, it’s an environmental justice crisis.

Over the past month, I’ve seen in my reporting why many of these populations are so vulnerable: Farmworkers toil in unsafe conditions before returning home to overcrowded mobile homes, apartments, and houses where they cannot self-isolate. Residents who live near or work in warehouses in the nation’s logistics hubs already suffer fragile respiratory health conditions — conditions that will only worsen as pollution threatens to spike during this crisis. Environmental justice advocates who work in these communities are not surprised that the hardest hit populations are found in areas that are also overburdened by pollution, poverty, and illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, and cancer, as well as asthma and cardiovascular disease. So, when governors across the country order residents to stay home during the pandemic, these residents are not retreating to safety — they are retreating to toxicity.

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