Living here is tossed body overboard,
Sacrificing,
It is being Jonah and knowing the whale’s belly,
Flourishing in the dark.
We’ve trained our eyes to still embrace light.
Remember light.
We are that light.
—Raise It Up! Youth Poets, “Flint” (2016)
I.
In the spring of 2018, Joy Tabernacle was still at home in the blond-brick church at the corner of Chevrolet Avenue and Dayton Street in Civic Park. A historic plaque honored the Presbyterian congregation that first filled its pews, and the words “God is Love” were etched above the entryway. Though it was still a neighborhood anchor, Joy Tabernacle was not only a community church but more of a campus. Once-vacant homes nearby had been transformed into sacred spaces of a different kind. One had become the Civic Park Health and Wellness House, serving people’s medical, dental, and vision needs. That was done with the help of the University of Michigan-Flint, which now held four classes a week at the church’s social ministry, the Urban Renaissance Center, in subjects like social work and English linguistics. The makeshift college classroom had seats reserved for neighborhood residents. Another house was slated to become an agriculture center, where people could learn to garden and farm on vacant land, and then preserve food through canning. Renovations were carried out through an apprenticeship program led by one of Joy Tabernacle’s ministers, which trained five young men in construction work. Pastor Sherman McCathern and his collaborators called this widening community Ubuntu Village, using a Southern African term for “I am, because you are.”1
In the same segregated neighborhood that General Motors had built for white workers and their families, people were constructing a new inclusive model for urban life, where residents weren’t just workers in a factory or problems to be solved: they were part of a community that had need for their whole selves. “When you look around,” McCathern said, “people can’t see it like you can, but there’s a lot of improvements.” There were the refurbished houses, and the partnership with the university; there was grant support from both the C. S. Mott Foundation and the Ruth Mott Foundation (Ruth was Charles Stewart’s wife); there were the plans for Civic Park’s centennial and for the forty recent graduates of the church’s work readiness program. (Congressman Dan Kildee had been the ceremony’s keynote speaker.) There was also the rehab work on Joy Tabernacle’s sanctuary.2 For years, the congregation had been meeting in the fellowship hall because of serious repairs needed in the sanctuary, where part of the ceiling had collapsed. Essential work had been postponed as an insurance dispute dragged on, and then, with Flint’s water crisis, the church became a leading emergency resource, which caused further delays.3 But, McCathern thought, it was finally time to turn back to the renovations. On a cool evening in March, just days after returning from a service trip in Uganda, he was hard at work, drafting a campaign to raise $150,000 “to get back upstairs.”
It had been four years since the significance of the dark water spraying from a hydrant had dawned on him. But it felt like a never-ending revelation. McCathern had begun to struggle with short-term memory loss. He’d pat around for his car keys, look up, look down, and finally arrange for someone to pick him up before going outside and seeing that his car was already running, the keys in the ignition where he’d left them. His greatest sadness was that he’d forget if he prayed or not. He’d be getting up off his knees in the morning and it would strike him like a cold shock: did he actually pray just then, or no? He wasn’t sure. He worried that he was cheating God. And so he’d bend down again, his knees creaking, and he’d pray once more.
McCathern attributed the memory loss to aging. But speaking at a large meeting one day, he asked if others in the room had similar problems; he was surprised when about 250 or 300 people raised their hands. So could memory loss be related to the water in Flint, along with everything else? What about the people he knew who had amputations because of some kind of bacteria-related illness—was that the water, too? And how about the young men in his church who he’d rushed to the hospital with an accelerated heart rate? Was that the water’s fault? Who knew? Anything seemed possible.
“It takes so long for an American citizen to realize this, but we’ve been poisoned for real,” McCathern said. “I watched it among my own congregation, Sunday after Sunday. I began to realize this is real. It was not play, it was not in your mind, you’re not making something up.”
The national attention did lead to some positive changes in Flint. New infrastructure was being laid throughout the city. People had better access to health care, thanks to expanded Medicaid and other services. These were longtime needs in the community, and they could help heal wounds that went far beyond even lead and Legionella. Also, in the years following the peak of the crisis, there was a cascade of ambitious investment in Flint. An auto supply manufacturer broke ground on the first such facility to come to the city in about thirty years: the colossal Buick City complex was being converted into a factory for Lear Corp., which was set to make car seats for General Motors. It would create up to six hundred new jobs. Downtown, the historic Capitol Theatre, vacant for two decades, reopened after a $37 million renovation brought its glittering marquee back to life. The Flint Institute of Arts went through an enormous expansion, adding a wing for contemporary crafts and creating a multipurpose maker space where visitors could watch glass and ceramic artists at work.
There were other encouraging developments, quieter but no less welcome. Two online news sites launched, Flintside and Flint Beat, providing broader coverage of the city’s rich stories. A state grant that was part of the water recovery response brought a youth basketball league back to the city after a fifteen-year absence. The first Flint Literary Festival debuted with the theme of ‘Flight,’ featuring Christopher Paul Curtis, a city native and a Newbery Medal–winning author who often wrote about his hometown. And a children’s education center opened on Gladwin Street, in a brand-new facility built on the site of a former elementary school. With space for more than two hundred Flint children, it was designed to work with those who had been most exposed to lead-laced water.4
Above all, McCathern was awed by his neighbors, not only in Civic Park but throughout the city. “Most people in poverty are very resilient and adaptable,” he said. “They know how to adapt to situations. They know how to go without this and without that.” That spirit was a powerful resource for survival.5 It gave him hope, even as he worried that this much-tested resilience could slip into a kind of fatalism, where people would settle for less than they deserved as human beings of worth and dignity. He feared that a quick, anxious wash with bottled water might start to seem normal, or that people would ignore health warnings, or just drink water straight from the faucet with an attitude of “I’m going to die some kind of way anyway.”
The extraordinary pain of the water crisis: it seemed incalculable. And it had happened in a city already traumatized by poverty and the exit of Flint’s life-sustaining companies. The compounding harm would affect this generation, and the next, and the one after that, and its roots stretched back over decades, too, when black Americans from the South were exploited in the city where they came for a better life. “Flint was a social experiment from Day One,” McCathern said.
“In all honesty, I don’t know how you can righten that,” he added. “I’m a preacher and, you see, I’m at a loss for words.”
II.
This isn’t just Flint’s fight. We built all our cities out of lead. We were sure we could make this metal work for us. History revealed a pattern of poisoning, but we were certain that we could contain it, control it. Progress came when we acknowledged how terribly harmful lead is and instituted anti-lead laws that reduced our exposure to one of the world’s best-known neurotoxins. But the next great challenge—a tremendously difficult one—is reckoning with the lead that is still in our environment. Individual solutions, from purchasing bottled water and investing in private purification devices, isn’t enough. As the nineteenth-century water wars revealed, a community is not safe and certainly will not thrive if only some have access to clean water and others do not. Infrastructure, the ties that literally bind us, one to another, requires our consistent care and attention.6 At a certain point, “doing more with less” no longer functions as a mandate. Sometimes less is just less. Public health historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner put it this way: “If the history of lead poisoning has taught us anything, it is that the worlds we as a society construct, or at least allow to be built in our name, to a large extent determine how we live and how we die.”7
Lead is one toxic legacy in America’s cities. Another is segregation, secession, redlining, and rebranding: this is the art and craft of exclusion. We built it into the bones of our cities as surely as we laid lead pipes. The cure is inclusion. Flint’s story is a clear call for committing anew to our democratic faith in the common wealth. As the water crisis demonstrates, it is simply not good enough for government officials to say, “Trust us.”8 For all the inefficiencies and messiness that comes with democracy, the benefits—transparency, accountability, checks and balances, and the equitable participation of all people—are worth it.
Accordingly, federal and state authorities need to recalibrate their responsibility to local governments, casting a close eye on everything from revenue sharing to environmental regulation. At every level, there should be strong open records laws, so that citizens can plainly see the cause and effect of their leaders’ decision making and its impact on their neighborhoods. New transparency models are necessary for communities in which private foundations and public-private partnerships are increasingly taking responsibility for public services, as is the case in Flint and other shrinking cities. The wisdom of lived experience must be a valued and necessary part of policy making.
While positive action is imperative, it needs to come with great intention and care, mindful of the boundless mistakes of the past. Pain cannot be papered over with public-relations spin or erased by shiny new programs or buildings, any more than our lead problems were solved when we stopped laying lead pipes but did nothing to extract the ones that were already in the ground.9 Just and sustainable change requires reckoning with the past even while cultivating a transformational future.
Agencies charged with protecting public health and natural resources deserve to be well-funded, pro-active, and oriented solely toward serving the public interest.10 And environmental law is due for a shake-up. Depending on how they play out, the Flint criminal and civil cases could help provoke one. So could the pending class action lawsuits, which contend that the mismanagement of the water violated the civil rights and constitutional rights of residents. Not only might the legal battles achieve a measure of accountability for what happened in Flint, but they also might inspire new policy that better accounts for contamination and how it works—even when it is invisible and unintentional.
In the meantime, Flint’s story isn’t over. And it has no single narrator. From the vantage point of Civic Park, where the city’s youngest church is upending the old rules, all are welcome.