Before Vernice Miller-Travis became the environmental justice legend she’s considered to be today, her early work was doing traditional civil rights and racial justice advocacy. She still thinks about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—and other leaders—every day. “It’s the reason that I wanted to be involved in civil rights work. It’s because I saw what they were doing. I saw the change that they were making,” she says.
Childhood immersed in civil rights
Vernice was drawn to this work from the time she was in middle school. “I set my course to be a civil rights lawyer. That’s what I wanted to do with my life.” It helped that growing up, she was surrounded by icons of the movement. Within a five-block radius of her childhood home in Harlem, New York, was the mosque where Malcolm X was mobilizing and the church where civil rights leader Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was preaching. Also nearby were the offices of the Urban League, the NAACP, and the Nation of Islam.
Vernice’s father, Harold Miller, an immigrant from the Bahamas, worked alongside Powell, the first Black American elected to Congress from New York, as well as the first from any state in the Northeast.
“All of us were in this effort to see more equitable outcomes, more equitable opportunities, and certainly a lessening of directly racially patterned racism and acts of violence,” Vernice says. “Sometimes those acts of violence were things we would see on television, on the nightly news, but other times there were things that were happening right in our own community or in our own metropolitan area.”
Earth Day 1970: A turning point
Vernice’s entrance into the world of environmental harm in Black communities dates back to 1970, the year she graduated from elementary school. That’s when the first Earth Day celebration was held at the northern edge of Central Park, touching Harlem. Despite the proximity, the community was not included in the event. “It was interesting that no one thought to ask any of those people in Northern Manhattan and in Harlem to be a part of that celebration. It was as if, and I would say that this is probably true, they had no idea we were even there—350,000 people overburdened by air pollution issues,” she says.
Despite not being included, Vernice’s community was experiencing most of the environmental threats at the time in Manhattan: “We had the highest rate of asthma and premature death from asthma of any community in the United States. That would be revealed through some research that I and others were involved in some years later,” she says.
Photo courtesy of We ACT.
Toxic Wastes and Race
Vernice is perhaps best known for a groundbreaking report, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which she worked on as a research assistant with the United Church of Christ Commission for Race and Justice. Released in 1987, the report broke open the national conversation about environmental racism and injustice in America.
It came about because member churches in Warren County, North Carolina, were engaged in a traditional civil rights battle with their state, which was looking to build a hazardous waste landfill in the middle of this rural, predominantly Black county.
A year later, in 1988, Vernice deepened her toxics and waste work by co-founding West Harlem Environmental Action (We ACT), a nonprofit organization launched to mobilize community opposition to New York City’s operation of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant.
The plant was designed to treat all the raw sewage and wastewater produced on the west side of Manhattan, 180 million gallons per day, but somehow was built with no odor control devices. “It was literally across the street from where several thousand people lived,” she says.
Siting a sewage treatment plant there was particularly offensive. “And to build it with big stacks at the same level as people’s apartments on Riverside Drive so the odors were just going directly into homes, flooding the community. It made the air unbreathable, and it made our community turn into a giant toilet bowl,” she recalls.
We ACT succeeded, through a winning mix of community organizing and legal action. New York City was required to address the issues with the North River Sewage Treatment Plant with a settlement—over $55 million—to cover upgrades to the plant and create a community environmental fund.
Today, We ACT is going strong, delivering on its mission to include, inform, and enable communities of color about the policies and health impacts where they live. Sharing her full expertise from civil rights advocate to environmental justice leader, Vernice serves on the boards of various other organizations, including Clean Water Action/Clean Water Fund, Land Loss Prevention Project, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund, and she is an appointee of Maryland Governor Wes Moore to the Chesapeake Bay Trust.
But We ACT remains her focus—she’s a member of the Board of Directors as well as Chair of the Board of Directors for the organization’s political arm. Like Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights inspirations before her, she is working to make real change. “I will be a part of We ACT until I take my last breath.”
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