The American Dream Denied

Lydwina Hurst

We are enslaved in our community. …I cannot do what I would like to do to my home. If I wanted to add on to my home - I’m not gonna do that. If I wanted to do anything in my yard to enhance where I live, - and I cannot do that. I cannot allow my grandchildren to come play in my yard. And I have a very large yard … if we had been up in any other community with white folks in it, this would have been over with. Right now, it has been three decades that we have been fighting this, and it’s not fair. No, it’s environmental racism at its highest.
…We’ve been fighting this for over two decades, through six different mayors. In that first lawsuit, the attorneys paid the nine families and nobody else got paid. The attorneys walked away with one point something million dollars.

… We want to be a part of the resolution that they make. We don’t want anybody else to make resolutions for us, telling us where we need to go, how much we need, or what we need to do. We’ve had enough of that. We have been abused long enough, too many times, and it’s time for that to stop. So therefore, we want to be involved in whatever plans they have for us. We don’t want just somebody else making plans, the Mayor or nobody else, making plans for us to tell us where to go.

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