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  • Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town by Ellen Griffith Spears
  • Sarah Milov
Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town. By Ellen Griffith Spears. New Directions in Southern Studies. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. xxiv, 440. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-1171-6.)

In the late 1970s Clarence Thomas, a young African American lawyer in the agriculture and pesticides division of Monsanto, fretted over corporate practices inside and outside the walls of the company. Thomas observed that talented African American employees were routinely passed over for promotions, while Monsanto pumped poisons into the environment. Like the chemical giant’s personnel policies, its environmental practices inflicted disproportionate harm on the African Americans living adjacent to its Anniston, Alabama, plant.

In Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, Ellen Griffith Spears narrates the struggle of Anniston’s residents, both white and black, to understand, control, and ameliorate the environmental toxins that surrounded them. For most of the twentieth century, residents of northern Alabama lived with two invisible and deadly neighbors: PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) produced at the local Monsanto plant and an enormous stockpile of chemical weapons housed at the Anniston Army Depot. These environmental pollutants were the unrecognized costs of the industrial and economic development of the New South. Spears’s meticulous work is a significant contribution to environmental, legal, and southern history—three subfields that come together too infrequently.

Baptized in PCBs makes a powerful case for considering health and environmental activism as integral components of the long civil rights movement. Beginning with the premise that “social injustice has long been inscribed on working landscapes,” Spears focuses on the ways that local activists sought to address the decades of environmental racism—the “unequal concentrations of noxious facilities and other undesirable land uses in low-income areas and neighborhoods where people of color reside” (pp. 14–15, 10). Poor and African American residents living near the PCB plant knew that they were being sickened, but Monsanto assiduously denied the toxicity of its products. Though it is difficult to predict the disease processes arising from PCBs, prolonged exposures can result in a variety of ailments in humans including cancer and disruptions to the endocrine, reproductive, nervous, and immune systems.

Monsanto knew that its product was dangerous long before the public did. The passage of the federal Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976 banned PCB production, but it was not until the 1990s that Annistonians learned that much of the largely African American side of town “was too toxic for human habitation” because Monsanto (and its successor firm, Solutia, Inc.) regularly dumped PCBs into a nearby creek and local landfill.

In 1995 Monsanto tried to buy out contaminated sites, an action intended to limit corporate liability and forestall protest. But the relocation of hundreds [End Page 219] of residents spurred civic mobilization led by veterans of the civil rights movement. The dramatic highpoint of Baptized in PCBs is a 2003 settlement that obligated Monsanto and Solutia to pay about $600 million to Anniston’s more than 21,000 residents, to build a health clinic, and to sponsor an educational foundation for area youth. However, payment of the settlement money was delayed and, once distributed, amounted to very little per resident.

Spears’s book is rich in detail, but at times its density threatens to overwhelm the narration. I wanted to read more about Anniston’s weapons stockpile, which was so crucial to the region’s military-led development and to its legacy as “Toxic Town, U.S.A.” (p. xiv). But these are small quibbles for such an important book—one that belongs on graduate reading lists for a variety of subfields. As the hidden costs of industrialization, convenience, and modernity reveal themselves on our bodies and in our landscapes, scholars will be metabolizing Spears’s observations for years to come.

Sarah Milov
University of Virginia
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