Troubling the waters: Race, the environment and activism in the United States South

This dissertation investigates how the recent convergence of two important social movements—environmentalism and civil rights—has enabled African-American activists in the South to articulate, challenge and reconfigure structural inequalities in new ways. Emerging approximately ten years ago, the minority-led and grassroots-driven environmental justice movement opposes the disproportionate siting of toxic waste producing facilities in minority neighborhoods. Environmental justice activists have expanded the meaning of the environment to include social and ecological issues. In so doing, the environmental justice movement appropriates and applies discourses of national and global environmental movements to local issues of racial justice. Using environmental justice as a case example, I analyze how the legacy of slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws and the civil rights era continues to influence race-based activism in the post-civil rights South. Arguing for the primacy of race and class experiences in shaping definitions and understandings of political issues such as social justice and environmentalism, I show that such experiences are integral to the ways in which people collectively seek to improve their lives through political action.; Research for this study is grounded in fourteen months of fieldwork in Augusta, Georgia with an African-American neighborhood association. Through this data, I demonstrate how social memory, as well as race and class identities, framed activists' discourses about land, the environment and activism; how changing economic and political contexts influenced their commitments to, and understandings of, social action and the environment; and how, through networks with both professional environmentalists and grassroots African-American organizations, activists negotiated and articulated race and class dynamics and identities.; Finally, two distinct theories concerning social movements emerge from this dissertation's main findings. First, during periods marked by an absence of public protests or campaigns, social memory continued to nurture an activist consciousness and infrastructure, enabling the mobilization of collective action as necessary. To account for this, I develop a theory of social movement quiescent politics that addresses seemingly dormant periods in the long-term life of a social movement. Second, I develop a processual model of contemporary social movements that provides for the multiple and interlocking levels of their networks, influences, goals and strategies across both time and space.