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2 “Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities” St. Louis and the Fight against Lead Poisoning C harles Liebert did not come into his office on August 11, 1970. He did not want to face one of his tenants, Carrie McCain. With her daughter and a small group of activists, McCain was staging a sit-in at Liebert Realty to protest the continued lead poisoning of her granddaughter. Dorothy Nason had been treated twice for lead poisoning over the past six months, and now McCain refused to pay rent to Liebert until he fixed the problem. She was there on August 11 to remind him of this. The McCains were one of many families in St. Louis touched by lead poisoning during the 1970s, but she was one of the first to protest that harm. The activists joining her were members of the People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning, one of a number of groups that fought against lead poisoning in St. Louis during this period. In the early 1970s, activists tested thousands of children, pushed the city to enact and enforce effective lead paint laws, and tried to secure safe and healthy housing for the city’s poor. Despite these efforts, at the end of the decade lead poisoning was still a major problem in St. Louis, which suggests a failure of both the public health bureaucracy and lead paint activism.1 A closer examination, however, reveals some real achievements. Activists and city residents were behind every major victory in the fight against lead paint, including the initial lead poisoning ordinance and its subsequent revisions , and raising awareness across the community. They shaped public health policy, taking the focus off doctors and government officials and putting it on those who actually experienced lead paint poisoning. Finally, lead paint was the entry point through which residents constructed a critique of the decline of the urban environment. They felt its impact every day in the garbage-strewn streets, gray smoggy skies, and creaky, dilapidated apartment buildings. However, it “Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities” 39 was not until their children, grandchildren, and neighbors got sick that they were able to argue that the discrimination and segregation that created slum conditions did not just sully the landscape but brought actual, physical harm. The story of St. Louis’s lead poisoning crisis also highlights the importance of technical and expert knowledge to urban environmentalism. Most of the city’s lead activists were experienced organizers who had been involved with the local civil rights movement, Great Society agencies, or both. They were excellent at putting together petitions, writing newsletters, and staging protests. They also experienced the city’s decrepit housing conditions and the sick children it produced firsthand. But it took assistance from one of the country’s most prominent environmental scientists to give them the expertise to show how the city’s buildings were not just ugly but dangerous. On one level this highlights the challenges that urban residents faced, because they could not make successful environmental claims without expertise. But on another it shows the possibilities for grassroots urban environmentalism. If people could get access to that knowledge—whether through community health programs, local universities, or simply informal information exchange—then they were able to mount effective campaigns to try and address local hazards. In addition to expertise, another important part of this story is the shifting epidemiology of lead poisoning. Lead is a heavy metal that, when inhaled or ingested, can damage joints, major organs, and the central nervous system. In the early twentieth century, it was primarily considered an industrial toxin that caused acute poisoning among those who worked in or around lead smelters and other manufacturing operations. But the massive use of lead-based interior paint in American homes during the middle of the twentieth century changed the epidemiological landscape. Lead-based paint became popular during the 1920s, when paint companies began marketing it as an inexpensive way to create clean, bright home interiors. Combined with the introduction of lead in gasoline, many Americans were now being exposed to high concentrations of lead every day. By the late 1930s, public health researchers began to realize that this massive increase in environmental lead was especially harmful to children, whose poisoning tolerances were much lower than for adults. Whereas an adult usually showed signs of poisoning with a blood lead level of around 70 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, for a child the threshold was about 40 micrograms. This was...

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