By Lee Rowland, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

February 9, 2017 | 11:45 AM

Esther Calhoun, Ben Eaton, Mary Schaeffer, and Ellis Long helped create Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice,
a community organization dedicated to battling pervasive racial and
environmental injustice in Uniontown, where more than 90 percent of
residents are Black and the median per capita income is around $8,000.

As
part of their advocacy against a host of problems in Uniontown, these
four activists decried the presence of coal ash in a landfill located in
their residential neighborhood. And they were right to be concerned—the
Uniontown landfill accepted the very same coal ash that had
leaked out of a Tennessee facility, causing an environmental disaster.
In return, the two corporations that own the landfill sued them for $30
million in federal court, claiming defamation and slander over Facebook
posts that said things like “we should all have the right to clean air
and clean water.”

…

As my colleague Dennis Parker and I wrote when we took on this case, Uniontown has an unfortunately large and varied collection of injustices that need to be called out:

In
Uniontown, seeking health and justice means highlighting a municipal
sewage “system” that sprays fecal water onto a field while emaciated
cattle graze nearby. It means fighting the suffocating smell of aerated
whey that is shot into the sky, making the town reek like putrid
processed cheese — on a good day. It means following the trail of a $4.8
million Department of Agriculture grant that residents feel just
evaporated without any benefit to the citizens it was intended to help.

Fighting
for justice in Uniontown means opposing the trains that roll into town
carrying hazardous coal ash from 33 states to deposit it at the
Arrowhead landfill — a dump bewilderingly located in a residential
neighborhood, near wetlands, within this spacious county full of rolling
fields and open space. It means worrying about the safety of that coal
ash — the very same coal ash that catastrophically leaked out of a
Tennessee facility in 2008 and destroyed the surrounding environment
before it was hurriedly redirected to Uniontown.

Small-Town Activists Stand Up to a Coal Ash Landfill and Win a Major Victory for Free Speech