This Juneteenth will be observed by a nation currently in a fight for democracy, says Catherine Coleman Flowers, environmental health researcher and author of Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope.
Through her organization, the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Catherine works specifically on water, sanitation, and wastewater failures nationwide, bringing together infectious disease experts to expose and address infrastructure issues. “What we’re seeing in our rural communities is the lack of investment in all kinds of infrastructure to support a healthy community,” she says. Working infrastructure is an environmental issue, but it’s also a key tenet of democracy.
Infrastructure, resources, and democracy
Catherine was born and raised in Lowndes County, Alabama, a rural county near Selma and Montgomery. She says that when rural communities lack resources, there’s often also a lack of investment in infrastructure. “I remember when I was growing up, the U.S. Public Health Service paid for doctors and people to be trained in the medical profession, and then as part of paying that money back, they would go and serve in underprivileged communities. And now we’re seeing an attack on all those kinds of programs that provided services to communities that didn’t have access to them otherwise,” she says.
The recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down a challenged Louisiana congressional map as racial gerrymandering, for example, was, Catherine says, essentially a strike against democracy itself. In a 6-3 decision on April 29, the High Court struck down a congressional map drawn in 2024, with the majority declaring it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The ruling stopped short of overturning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act outright, but it represents another blow to the 1965 law that emerged from the civil rights movement to defend the voting rights of racial minorities—a statute that a string of recent court decisions has quietly hollowed out. The ruling weighs heavily on Catherine, especially leading up to observing Juneteenth.
“When you put this in place, and you start drawing lines based on political affiliation, we’re ending democracy for all of us. I think that it’s wider than Jim Crow. I think it’s wider than the Civil War. I think that the purpose of the Civil War was very different; this seems more like tyranny. This seems different,” says Catherine, a retired teacher and one of Time’s Most Influential People of 2023.
“I strongly feel that anybody who believes in democracy and supports the Constitution can’t support this, because if they can draw lines and eliminate people who have the right to vote based on their goals to maintain power, then that means that anybody who disagrees with the position that they are taking will be subject to the same thing.”
Fighting for rural communities
Catherine’s environmental work is essentially to extend democracy to all. She chronicles her fight for those in rural communities—like where she grew up, a region historically nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent past against Black Americans during the civil rights era—in her first book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret.
As a climate researcher and a 2020 MacArthur fellow, Catherine says the fight includes global warming. “We’re having droughts more frequently, more widespread. In some places, stronger storms. There are island nations that are disappearing. The glaciers are melting. Nothing has changed. And water scarcity is still a problem because in a lot of places, water is drying up, or it has become so contaminated that it can’t sustain life,” she says.
Finding hope this Juneteenth
Catherine’s hope is that this Juneteenth will be a national moment to focus on the Constitution and its promises for all Americans.
“It’s a chance for all of us to rededicate ourselves and use Juneteenth as an opportunity to save democracy for everybody. For those looking for inspiration, they can look to Juneteenth and the role that African Americans have played in this country in expanding access to democracy for hope and as a strategy for how we move forward,” she says.
Catherine, the former vice chair of the Biden administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, also finds hope in young people, religion, and even the communities that have recently come together to fight back against the health and environmental impacts of data centers. “These data center fights are bringing together people who would not have worked together otherwise, across racial lines, political lines. They all realize the importance of fighting to maintain the integrity of their communities and the environment for generations to come. So, all that makes me very hopeful.”
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution