Compair Lapin vs. Christopher James in Cancer Alley
In this Dispatch from the Frontlines, Joy Banner describes the way her rural Black community is using the power of law and rights to their ancestral land to fight an industrial scheme that threatens to tear it apart.
Joy Banner in her hometown of Wallace, Louisiana near the proposed site of a grain elevator. © Tailyr Irvine
Update: On August 4, 2023, The Descendants Project won their lawsuit to protect their historic Black community and ancestral gravesites in Louisiana from a massive industrial scheme. The ruling effectively stops construction of a dangerous grain elevator, and represents a major legal victory that can help other communities in Louisiana's Cancer Alley protect their lands from dangerous industry and fossil fuel projects.
Growing up in my small town along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, the moments I treasured most were evenings spent beneath a huge old tree listening to my grandma’s stories, often told in creole French. My favorite stories were about Compair Lapin or a “Wise Rabbit, '' who was the trickster predecessor of Br’er Rabbit and Bugs Bunny. Compair Lapin used his wisdom and ingenuity to outsmart those in power, mainly a farmer or a bear. The story of Compair Lapin was brought to Louisiana by our enslaved African ancestors, and though comical in nature, the tales about him were not simply entertainment. They were examples of resistance and agency. They show us today, as they showed our enslaved forebears, how to use strategic and calculated wisdom when facing the oppressive structures of power.
Compair Lapin reveled in his ability to outsmart his opponent, and I think he would be mighty impressed by how we, the community of Wallace, Louisiana, have successfully fought off a powerful Californian investor named Christopher James and his company, Greenfield Louisiana. Mr. James has been celebrated nationally for the way he used shareholder activism to force Exxon Mobil to “go green.” But here on the Mississippi River, Mr. James is funding an industrial facility, a massive grain terminal, that will shatter my rural Black Louisiana community. It also makes a mockery of his high-minded progressive ideals.
If the mammoth Greenfield grain storage complex is built on the old plantation lands alongside our homes, it will force my extended family off the land we love. This is land we have owned and tended, land we have raised families and grown sugar on since our ancestors bought it following their emancipation from the nearby plantations. Our community is determined to fight Greenfield. We are confident we will win, for we have two aces up our sleeve: our land and our heritage. It’s not just that we love our land and take immense pride in our heritage: it’s that we are coming to understand the legal power of both.
With 56 silos and a tower the height of the Statue of Liberty, the Greenfield complex will loom monstrously over our homes. Our stretch of the Mississippi is already so contaminated by heavy industry that it is known as Cancer Alley. In Wallace, our risks of contracting cancer are already verifiably higher than 95% of the rest of the country. Now, if Greenfield comes to pass, our historic community will be destroyed by 100 tons of additional air pollution a year, almost 30,000 more trucks a year along Route 18, 50,000 barges on our river banks, and huge SupraMax ships that are too big to fit in the Panama Canal. You might think a threat this ominous would scare off even Compair Lapin. Instead we are rising to the challenge as he would, as we always have.
Refineries border Norco, Louisiana on May 15, 2023. © Tailyr Irvine
The fact that we still have our family land and community intact in the first place is a testament to my ancestors’ ingenuity. Wallace was founded by Black Union soldiers who emancipated themselves, fought in the Civil War, and then returned to Louisiana. Hundreds of descendant communities like mine sprung up around former plantations, as formerly enslaved people settled where there was land, work, and most important, networks. But while the owners of the plantation Big Houses have used “heritage status” to protect their land and property, the historical value of my ancestors (who made those Big Houses possible in the first place), and of our own worth as a Black descendants community, has been ignored.
Until now. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has mandated an investigation, under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, into whether the site is a historic or cultural resource. Our non-profit organization, The Descendants Project, has been admitted as a consultant, and we are making the strong case that our very presence here is living history that needs to be protected and defended. This has been a transformative learning experience, and a powerful potential precedent for others: by asserting our heritage, we can conserve our history and defend our communities from dangerous industrial development.
We have always believed we have ancestors buried on the Greenfield site. Now, a whistleblower has revealed that Greenfield suppressed the recommendation, made by its own consultants, that there should be more investigation into whether there are unmarked graves on the site. Both legally and ethically, the project should not proceed until the graves have been identified and conserved.
We, the living descendants of the enslaved people buried on the Greenfield site, are claiming our value too. This value has been recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which this year designated the eleven-mile West Bank of St. John the Baptist Parish (that includes Wallace, and the nearby Whitney and Evergreen plantation museums) as one of the most-endangered historic sites in the country. The National Parks Service is looking into declaring the whole stretch a National Historic Landmark. If either of the above initiatives are successful, as we believe they will be, historic sites will need to be properly documented and accounted for during federally-funded and permitted projects to mitigate harm.
Photographs of Joy Banner’s ancestors decorate the walls of her coffee shop in Wallace, Louisiana. © Tailyr Irvine
That is if the law doesn’t get there first. Whether or not our stretch of river obtains the protection of heritage status, there is a fundamental legal problem that precedes this. In the 1990's, the Greenfield site was initially allocated for heavy industrial use through an illegal scheme that involved extortion, money-laundering, and threats of legal action against neighboring residents to force them to sell their property. This has been proven in court: the parish president was sentenced to nearly five years imprisonment.
That was thirty years ago. But since Greenfield bought the site, Compair Lapin has been hard at work. Last year, The Descendants Project presented a petition to the Louisiana District Court arguing that, given the above history, the Greenfield site is not currently zoned for industrial use. The industrial zoning permit granted by the parish and needed by Greenfield is therefore illegal. Judgment is imminent.
I was ten-years-old, in 1990, when this all began. A Taiwanese company called Formosa Plastics bought the land with the intention of building one of the world’s largest petrochemical plants. Formosa decided it needed to buy up much of Wallace too. Our family was in the line of fire; we were told we would have to move. It was only last year that I realized how traumatic it was for my parents when I took an affidavit from them to include in our petition. I wept as I heard my mom and dad recount their loss of any agency, any voice, in the matter.
They had been threatened with “eminent domain.” If they didn’t sell low, our land would be expropriated and they would be forced to accept even less. Although there were some fierce resisters, most folk were resigned to what they thought was fate. But something scared Formosa off and we were able to stay in our homes. We’re not exactly sure what it was; perhaps the intervention of the FBI, which investigated the case that led to Millet’s conviction, or the EPA, which commissioned an Environmental Impact Statement.
We thought Formosa was gone for good, until the company returned thirty years later to another site, upriver, right on top of another Black community. But times changed in the interim. Sharon Lavigne, Rise St. James, and other community activists have heroically kept Formosa at bay by mobilizing against the proposed petrochemicals development.
Back in 1990, when Formosa first threatened our homes, our community was saved by the actions of federal agencies, working alongside the community’s own resistance. Today, the same partnership is necessary. The state government has declared Louisiana to be open for business. This means even further entrenching Cancer Alley as a fully-industrialized corridor, never mind the health and rights of its residents, or the fact that such “development” only deepens the climate crisis that threatens all our lives and futures. Given this hostile local environment, we really need the Biden administration to walk the talk of its commitment to fight environmental racism.
Refineries border Norco, Louisiana on May 15, 2023. © Tailyr Irvine
In this context, it feels like betrayal that the EPA recently decided to withdraw a Title VI (of the Civil Rights Act) investigation into the Louisiana departments of environmental quality and health. If the EPA had continued with this investigation, it would have found what we know to be true: that there is systemic racism in the way the state promotes and permits harmful industrial development in Black communities.
When the EPA first announced its Title VI investigation, it seemed to me that we were finally entering an era of Environmental Reconstruction – so necessary if we on the frontlines are going to do our bit fighting for our homes and the planet we love. Now I ask myself: is it over already? Have we been abandoned, as our forebears were in 1877 at the end of the Reconstruction? Are we on our own yet again?
For reasons that are not clear, the EPA has decided that it will not use Title VI to look at systemic racism in environmental policy in Louisiana, despite the evidence that Black communities such as my own have provided. At the very least, though, we expect the agency to do its primary job, which is to protect the environment. In this case, it means ordering an Environmental Impact Statement on the Greenfield plans as soon as possible. If the government were able to stop environmental racism effectively at the site in the first place, there would be no need to invoke the Civil Rights Act at all.
Greenfield counters any racism charge by stating that it is acting for the good of the community, by providing jobs. But the evidence is clear: the Black residents who are being asked to sacrifice the most – their health, land, and even lives – are least likely to get the jobs. A recent study has found that only two out of ten industrial jobs in Louisiana are held by Black people. Despite the presence of fourteen industrial sites in our parish, 18% of our children and 12% of our senior citizens live in poverty. Greenfield has been given a $209 million tax break that will take millions of dollars out of the Parish budget, funds that could be far better used in providing education and social services.
Joy Banner in Wallace, Louisiana near the proposed site of a grain elevator. © Tailyr Irvine
In fact, Christopher James and Greenfield are not interested in the agency of the Black people whose lives it will disrupt, our right to make decisions for ourselves. Rather, they seem to care only about our ability to provide labor, and what they think should be our gratitude at being granted this opportunity.
In this way, like so much of the industrial development around here, Greenfield echoes the plantation economy it seeks to replace. It is an exploitative and extractive model rather than the reparative and regenerative one we at The Descendants Project are committed to. We want to grow and root our community through initiatives we own, building heritage tourism and associated services that the neighboring plantation sites, sites our ancestors built, are already benefiting from.
Christopher James has a favorable reputation in the impact and ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment arenas, but if players in these spaces are serious about fighting for our planet, they need to realize that they cannot just do so from the boardroom. They need to fight for its survival on the frontlines too, supporting those of us who are standing between harmful heavy industry and the lands we love, the lives we cherish, and the heritage that is the birthright of us all.
Similarly, if the Biden administration and its EPA leadership are serious about fighting environmental racism, they need to stop injustice at its source. The administration has the power to do so, in partnership with us, here on the frontlines.
As I think about all that I could possibly lose because of Christopher James and Greenfield, I remember Compair Lapin. What I liked most about that silly rabbit is that he never gave up hope. When one of his plans failed, he tried another, and another, until he won – often using the tools of the powerful as his own weapons.
We will do the same, until our inevitable victory. And like Compair Lapin, we might even have a little fun while doing so.
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