Near a looping bend carved out by the Alabama River at Montgomery, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has erected the new National Monument to Freedom. The human rights organization seeks to lay bare the history of slavery and struggle in and beyond the American South. Powerful forces in the United States are trying to rewrite this history and block its teaching in classrooms today.
Though the recent radical shift in the American political landscape may have hit with shocking speed and intensity, the Freedom Monument reminds us that competing forces of oligarchy and democracy have long coexisted. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted this central paradox in U.S. history: that those who founded a nation upon human equality “also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior.”Footnote 1 Through unrelenting struggle over more than two and a half centuries, marginalized and oppressed constituencies have countered oligarchic currents, expanding democratic rights in the United States. American rivers, as ever-changing markers of empire, expose a contested history of environmental injustice.
Political scientist James C. Scott wrote in his final book, In Praise of Floods, about river history, that we are living in a geopolitical moment of “hyper-radical uncertainty.”Footnote 2 Water, perhaps above all things, is the physical embodiment of that uncertainty, of radical impermanence. Through flooding, seasonal change, and course alteration, rivers shape and reshape the landscape, modifying the context for human activity.
Shifting an interpretive lens to consider riverine pathways reinvigorates questions of culture, power, and scale. Considering alterations in the flows of rivers—both natural and human-engineered—over long timeframes, using firsthand accounts and technical data sets reveals that rivers can be routes of exploitation and injustice and also key sites of restorative efforts. On the one hand, rivers map the historical record of extreme extraction of both human labor and environmental wealth, from Indigenous dispossession and slavery forward. At the same time, standing on the shoulders of the Black freedom struggle, multi-site, multi-constituency environmental justice groups have taken action to protect human health and fragile ecosystems, achieving some success in restoring watersheds, even in conservative locales. Current shifts in federal environmental policies severely threaten those advances.
Bubbling up out of the southern Appalachian mountains, the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river system, known as the A-C-T, waters the land-based empire of the Alabama Black Belt before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile.Footnote 3 The Mobile River Basin is the sixth largest in the United States and the fourth largest in stream flow.Footnote 4 The A-C-T is one of the most obstructed industrial rivers in the U.S. South. Seven major Alabama Power dams produce hydroelectric power along the Coosa; three more dams lie south of Montgomery. The Alabama River is a meandering old river, called “the heart river of the state,”Footnote 5 and features great aquatic biodiversity, yet is becoming an “extinction graveyard.”Footnote 6 In 2022 this waterway earned two slots among the top five Most Endangered Rivers in the United States, due to coal ash dumping and agricultural pollution.Footnote 7
Likewise emerging from the Appalachian foothills in the eastern United States, the Rappahannock is now one of the longest free-flowing rivers east of the Mississippi. Coursing through Virginia, this waterway feeds into the largest U.S. estuary, the Chesapeake Bay. The Rappahannock made the American Rivers endangered list, too, twice: in 2017, due to fracking impact; and, in 2025, for unchecked development—mainly from data centers—that depletes the underlying Potomac Aquifer.Footnote 8
Geographically distinct, these river systems nevertheless trace a shared history to Native dispossession and slavery. Both rivers were central to the lives of Indigenous populations. Rivers, as Scott noted, form both “a corridor and a habitat,” defining places and creating an integrative community. Prior to the 1820s, the Indigenous Creeks concentrated what historian Steven Peach has called their “riverine power” in this Alabama bioregion. The Creeks’ integrative community, which also encompassed the Chattahoochee River, was nutritional, cultural, and spiritual—including the more than human and the river itself—as well as linguistic and military.Footnote 9
Both rivers, the A-C-T and the Rappahannock, became deeply embedded in the expansion of racial capitalism in the United States as highways for trade. After Congress foreclosed most U.S. participation in the international slave trade in 1808, Southern oligarchs created a massive internal market in human beings to expand their position in the lucrative global commerce in cotton and other agricultural exports. Fredericksburg, the largest city along the Rappahannock, housed notorious slave traders, some of whom shipped their human cargo south by steamboat and schooner along coastwise routes. Following the expulsion of Indigenous Muscogee Creeks from their homeland in Alabama during the 1820s and 1830s, slave-holding whites brought 96,000 enslaved persons into the state, most by land, many by sea to Gulf Coast ports.Footnote 10
From Mobile, AL, the river bore steamers along the short route upriver to Montgomery, aiding the enslavers in penetrating the interior South. Montgomery became the state capital in 1846 in part because year-round navigability on the Alabama River enhanced the city’s market in enslaved persons, solidifying the anti-democratic hold of enslavers’ power on the state. “During the last twenty years of American slavery, no slave market was more central or conspicuous than the one in Montgomery, Alabama,” notes the EJI.Footnote 11 “By 1860, nearly 400,000 Black people were enslaved on or near the Alabama River.”Footnote 12
After the Civil War, through Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, the oligarchs—former insurrectionists and their entrepreneurial allies—reasserted white supremacy, disfranchised Black voters, and tightened their hold on southern land, agriculture, mineral resources, and the region’s rivers. Industrialists re-engineered and exploited the river system, further setting the conditions for environmental injustice today. The commodified river became ingredient, cooling agent, and sewer, as well as transport route, for the new industries. Runoff from iron and coal mining and the production of steel constrained and contaminated natural flows. Successive major deadly floods inundated Montgomery, Prattville, and Selma in 1886, 1939, and 1961. Beginning in the 1910s, the Alabama Power Company built dams for industry that facilitated electrification of southern businesses and homes, but restricted the quantity and diversity of aquatic species and locked in pollution from industrial wastes.
Today, the Alabama River has attracted vigorous defenders along its route: activists, fishers, farmers, and recreation seekers, as well as racial justice and public health advocates. Scaling down to a few local sites along the river between Rome, GA, and Mobile shows the geography of pollution and of restorative action.
Nearly a century ago, the A-C-T became repository for the wastes of the transnational chemical industry, in the form of the Monsanto Chemical Company in Anniston, Alabama. Toxic doses of dumped polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which accumulated in fish and sediment in creeks that fed the Coosa River, contaminated more than forty miles south, backing up behind the dams that created reservoirs at Lake Logan Martin and Lay Lake. Beginning in the 1990s, the appearance of deformed aquatic species alerted environmental justice organizations to the poison. In a series of successful lawsuits, these groups pressured Monsanto and its corporate partners to clean up the pollution. Upstream, the Coosa River Basin Initiative also challenged PCBs that had been dumped beginning in 1953 by a Rome, Georgia, General Electric plant.Footnote 13 River sediment imparted PCB pollution or mercury contamination to fish. Today, the Coosa Riverkeeper monitors the river; their 2021 study showed that nearly one-third of consumption fishers were unaware of the toxic chemicals in their catch.Footnote 14
Following the waterway south reveals other cases of environmental injustice deeply tied to Alabama’s past. North of Mobile, the river carries a noxious chemical load from an industrial corridor that has multiplied the toxic impact on Mobile Bay.Footnote 15 Downstream from the chemical plants is the community of Africatown, where some residents trace their past to enslaved persons brought to American shores in 1860 on the last known slave ship from West Africa, the Clotilda. Along with other local groups, the Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJAC), formed in 2013 in Africatown, fights pollution in the river and the bay.
Scaling down leads to one locale where the river winds through the Black Belt. That expanse of rich dark soil stimulated the cotton economy, but left descendants impoverished, making Lowndes County among the region’s targets for industrial waste. Here, where the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and Black Panther activism began in the 1960s, environmental justice activists are building on a legacy of resistance, pressuring both state and federal governments to fulfill their rightful role as guarantors of democratic rights.Footnote 16 The river benefited in 1981 when the interracial Lowndes Citizens to Fight Deadly Dumping in Alabama successfully blocked a proposed landfill.Footnote 17 Again in 2006, Lowndes County activists kept the ironically named Alabama River Partners from siting “[a] sand [and] gravel mine, an inland port, and a landfill” that would have accepted waste from half a dozen southern states, including debris from Hurricane Katrina cleanup in Mississippi and Louisiana.Footnote 18
Still, the permeable, shifting boundaries between water and land along this stretch accept pollutants—e coli, siltation, mercury, dieldrin, and more—from multiple sources.Footnote 19 Frequent flooding exacerbates potential exposures. In recent years, the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, now the Center for Rural Enterprise and Economic Development (CREEJ), led by women, including Catherine Coleman Flowers, has been fighting to remedy nineteenth-century conditions in Lowndes County. Raw sewage surrounds people’s homes and “spew[s] into trenches and pits” because the county does not provide modern sanitation services for residents in a physical terrain inhospitable to standard septic systems.Footnote 20 In 2023, the group won a settlement to install functional septic systems, which could also have improved water quality in the Alabama River. The agreement, in red state Alabama, was the first effective use by the U.S. Department of Justice of Title VI of the sixty-year-old Civil Rights Act to remedy environmental discrimination.Footnote 21
Under the agreement, the population and the river would benefit from significant attention to environmental justice at the federal level that had been a long time coming. Environmental justice activists had fought their way onto the national agenda in the early 1990s, winning a tiny Office of Environmental Justice inside the George H.W. Bush administration Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and then recognition in a 1994 Clinton executive order. Congress has never acted on multiple proposed environmental justice bills. Only in the Biden administration did the EJI movement really begin to see more robust measures, including the Justice 40 initiative, which promised to invest 40 percent of certain federal climate, energy, and housing programs in disadvantaged communities.Footnote 22 Through the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, both Anniston and Lowndes County received major environmental justice grants.
Early in Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, federal support came crashing down, unconstitutionally, many claim, since the funding was provided by Congress. In April 2025, grant recipients learned that the EPA planned to claw back more than $2.4 billion in contracts—including any grant with “environmental justice” in the name—slashing $14.4 million in support for sanitation relief to Lowndes County and $2.6 million to Anniston.Footnote 23 Environmental groups working with the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have challenged the cuts with initial success, but government appeals have kept the dispute in court, denying communities vital funds.Footnote 24
Environmental justice had become a prime target of Make America Great Again (MAGA) ire because it embodied two targets of white grievance: government programs that aid the disadvantaged and remedies for racial injustice. Just before Earth Day 2025, almost the entire staff of the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, two hundred people, were notified of their dismissal, effectively closing the office.Footnote 25
Climate mitigation is likewise excised from the federal agenda, leaving little attention to flooding, which has plagued the river. The climate crisis will worsen in what an SELC attorney called the “gas-fired fever dream gripping the South,” as oil and gas pipeline expansion projects continue to carve up the larger region. Now, the Transcontinental Gas Pipeline Company has proposed the largest new pipeline project in a decade, an artificial river of oil and natural gas, linking Alabama to Virginia.Footnote 26 The Alabama Rivers Alliance, a broad coalition of more than thirty-nine organizations, is working to block another pipeline expansion that would cut across the Coosa-Alabama just north of Montgomery, where construction and leaks could pollute the waterway.Footnote 27
Under federal assault, environmental strategists have turned not only to the courts but also to the states to protect rivers; that’s where blue states have a decided edge. The Virginia House of Delegates passed “Water is a Human Right” legislation in 2021.Footnote 28 A successful Indigenous land return campaign, part of the “land back movement,” led to the historic re-acquisition by the Rappahannock tribe of Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge spanning 465 acres of “stunningly beautiful” land along the river in Virginia.Footnote 29
Intense exploitation of rivers persists. As we move from micro-sites like septic tanks to the larger political economy, we see the fragility—the potential impermanence—not only of land and riverscapes but also of democratic rights. And yet, despite multiple anthropogenic assaults, rivers are restorative, constantly replenishing their waters and the terrain around them as sources of renewal and sites of activism. The present crisis is opening up new alliances among justice-seeking people and organizations renewing the fight for the rivers—and for democracy—every day.
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