October 7, 1997
VIA FACSIMILE
Dear Mr. Utley,
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me on the telephone yesterday. I am sorry for your troubles in Augusta, and I hope you and your neighbors will get some kind of relief in the near future. I also hope that I can be of some help to you. I became interested in environmental justice as an activist, and I now want to combine that activism with my academic work. My research will focus on one grassroots environmental justice group whose ranks I hope to join. From what you explained to me yesterday, I think that your group would be an excellent place for me to learn about environmental justice organizing. I intend to participate in your group’s activities as a volunteer, lending whatever assistance I can.… I am committed to the cause of environmental justice and want to emphasize my intention to participate as an activist as well as to conduct research as an anthropologist.…
In the fall of 1997, I sent Charles Utley the preceding letter to follow up a telephone conversation. Although our call was rushed because Utley had to run off to coach his school’s football team, that talk marked the last in a series of phone calls I had made that autumn in my search for a field site.
In 1994, I had conducted research with a multiethnic group of minority activists in Brooklyn, New York, who were opposing the installation of an incinerator in their already polluted neighborhood. This time, I decided to move southward and explore environmental justice activism in the region where it began in the late 1980s. However, I had no contacts with southern environmental justice activists. I received the names of potential groups with which I could work through various sources, but unsurprisingly, until the day I phoned Utley, no one had even let me present my spiel.
With characteristic patience, Utley listened long enough to hear and digest my offer: I would come to and live in Augusta for a year and act as a nonpaid staff member of his organization. My job description would be created by HAPIC’s activists, and I would agree to perform whatever duties they required. In exchange, activists would allow me to sit in on meetings and events and have access to their files. HAPIC had no staff, relying entirely on the volunteered time of its membership. Even so, HAPIC had received several operating grants and become well known among environmental justice activists across the nation, even traveling to Washington, D.C., to testify before members of Congress and other environmentally related subcommittees. Wishing to continue and enhance his organizations’ successes, Utley recognized in my offer a potentially beneficial situation. After consulting with HAPIC’s board members, he agreed to have me come to Hyde Park.
When I arrived in the fall of 1998, I had lunch at a popular southern-style cafeteria with Utley and Melvin Stewart, HAPIC’s treasurer. The two men—longtime friends and colleagues—suggested that I set up base at the Mary Utley Community Center, a neighborhood center from which HAPIC operated. The Utley Center also housed offices of the Economic Opportunity Authority (EOA), a local nonprofit that assisted low-income Augustans with electric, gas, and rent bills. The combination of the EOA and HAPIC drew many residents to the Utley Center on a daily basis, making it a superb place from which to observe and participate in neighborhood goings-on.
Utley and Stewart also requested that I start an after-school tutoring program for Hyde Park children in grades k–12 that would have some kind of environmental education component, and that I help HAPIC get 501(c)3 status, making it an “official” nonprofit. I hesitantly suggested that I might also build it a Web site. “A Web site!” Utley exclaimed and looked to Stewart.1 Both grinned with the wide, easy smiles I would soon come to know well. Thus began my fourteen months of participant observation with the Hyde and Aragon Park Improvement Committee—with an extra emphasis on “participation.”
While reciprocity (as well as activism) has always been a tradition in anthropological fieldwork, it has remained a largely undiscussed topic for fear that the subjectivity it implies will compromise anthropology’s legitimacy as a serious social science.2 In the past twenty or so years, many anthropologists have recognized the limitations of trying to achieve “objectivity,” acknowledging that subjectivity enters into and complicates any research project. Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo argues that rather than seeing these subjective positions as compromising, we might recognize that objective stances themselves are “neither more nor less valid than those of more engaged, yet equally perceptive, knowledgeable social actors.”3 Taking Rosaldo’s argument one step further, I suggest that we view the ethnographer’s project on a continuum of engagement. The ethnographer then situates herself on that continuum and analyzes her research from that place. For example, my commitments to environmental justice activism position me on a somewhat far end of the engaged spectrum.
But that position has only partly to do with my own personal commitments to environmental justice activism. To a large degree, it also stems from strong feelings about finding a clear-cut way to “repay” the residents of Hyde Park and the activists of HAPIC for allowing me to do research with them. Volunteering full-time for HAPIC not only enabled this “repayment” but also benefited my fieldwork method in myriad ways. First, I was an “outsider” on many levels. During my first two weeks at the Utley Center, I was known mainly as “the white lady.”4 While Hyde Park residents had seen other white activists come into their neighborhood, the daily presence of a white person, and a northeasterner, definitely sparked questions, curiosity, and skepticism.5 Despite my repeated explanations, no one was quite sure why I was there, what I planned to do, or how long I planned to stay. Yet, while they did not necessarily believe that their neighborhood needed an anthropologist, nearly all Hyde Park residents agreed that it needed a tutoring program.
As soon as I began the after-school tutoring program, parents would stop in at the Utley Center when they picked up their children to meet and greet me. I held several meetings with parents to discuss their children’s progress, and in those meetings I had the chance to ask neighborhood adults about local contamination and other conditions. I also observed parent-child and neighbor-child interactions, giving me insights into the close-knit flavor of Hyde Park and the degree to which “mainstream” ideas about child rearing and education are very much a part of their lives.
As the months of fieldwork wore on, I became more engrossed in the daily business of HAPIC, and activists began to trust me with increased responsibilities and access to the organization’s files and financial records. About three-fourths of the way into the fieldwork, my typical day at the Utley Center might include working on a grant proposal for the organization, working on a flyer for an upcoming community meeting, driving someone to do an errand,6 answering requests from funders for reports and other information, sorting through files, conducting an interview with an HAPIC member, chatting with residents as they dropped into the center, and preparing for evening programs. By the end of my fieldwork, I had written four grant proposals for HAPIC (three were successful), created a Web site, organized after-school and summer programs for youth (including environmental education, tutoring, field trips, and outdoor sports), helped plan to plan numerous community meetings and two community cleanup days, and organized adult computer training courses.
I eventually found that participating in HAPIC aided my research, and sometimes my research aided my participation in HAPIC. In organizing a community cleanup or meeting, for example, I called upon certain HAPIC members to help me pass out flyers. In some cases, contacting people for this purpose led to an interview. In other cases, this process worked in reverse—I met people at community meetings, asked them for an interview, and during it managed to corral them into helping pass out flyers in the future. Writing grants necessitated developing a written history of HAPIC, which I later used in chapters 4 and 5 of this book. Perhaps most important, my responsibilities to HAPIC kept me at the Utley Center on a daily basis. I thus got to know residents who came in and out of the center and participated in countless informal conversations and discussions about their lives, the lives of their neighbors, and local and national politics.7 Some of these encounters led to invitations into people’s homes for cookouts and birthday parties, or to a Sunday service at their church, all of which enriched my knowledge of social life in Hyde Park.
Another example of symbiosis between my duties as an HAPIC activist and as a fieldworker was my regular presence at a number of local meetings, including Augusta Clean and Beautiful (a group of neighborhood activist organizations by the Augusta–Richmond County government to work on cleaning up Augusta’s low-income neighborhoods); the Transportation Leadership Development Initiative (a group organizing to improve public transportation in the county); the Augusta Neighborhood Associations Alliance (an alliance of neighborhood association presidents); and the Jenkins Elementary School PTA. My participation at meetings helped out when HAPIC activists had prior engagements or work commitments. In addition, I gained valuable insights into how local politics worked in Augusta, and the ways in which people understood, discussed, and tried to change it. In the case of the Jenkins PTA meetings, I developed a clear idea of what issues concerned Hyde Park parents and what inspired them to come out and attend community meetings.
Defining my commitments to reciprocity was not always a clear-cut process. On a few occasions, for example, Charles Utley asked me to go in his stead to fairly critical meetings such as the Committee for African American Environmental Justice’s Leadership Training Meeting in Washington, D.C., or a meeting with Mayor Young to discuss HAPIC’s writing a federal grant proposal on behalf of Augusta–Richmond County. One day, Utley also asked me to compose a mission statement for HAPIC. These kinds of requests caused me some consternation. On the one hand, I had promised to do whatever was asked of me. On the other, involving myself in HAPIC’s affairs to the extent that I represented it to the mayor or wrote its mission statement, seemed to over-step even my heavily activist-oriented bounds as a researcher. In the end, I negotiated such situations by (as much as possible) trying to recapture activists’ own words and deferring to longer-term members of the group. Finally, my extensive involvement in HAPIC led to some mixed personal emotions. By becoming an integral part of the organization, I went through many of the same ups and downs as its members, as together we encountered both the successes and the failures that come with the daily practice of community organizing.
Whether passing out flyers, distributing bags of food at a community cleanup, delivering kids to parents after a program, or hanging out at the local bar, I met at least three-fourths of the 250 adults living in Hyde Park. By attending numerous meetings and events, I also met most of the people who regularly worked with HAPIC, even if they did not live in Hyde Park. Eventually, I established a group of approximately twenty-five people who were key providers of information and with whom I conducted formal interviews. Of those, I got to know about seventeen or eighteen fairly well, and I have interviewed most of them two or three times over the past five years. Some of their stories make up my chapter prologues.
I chose interviewees based on how long they had lived in Hyde Park and/or been part of HAPIC and the degree to which they represented some aspect of organizing that I wanted to understand. Approximately half of the people I interviewed were currently active participants or leaders in HAPIC. (I define “active” participants as those who attended almost every meeting and who helped plan certain events and/or pass out flyers.) Another thirteen had been active in HAPIC in the past but no longer attended meetings on a regular basis or assisted in planning or executing organizational activities. These people also included professionals who had volunteered to help HAPIC in some way—for example, its lawyers, a local professor, and several other activists who were allied with outside organizations. Almost all those I interviewed were African American and had spent most of their lives in Hyde Park. Thanks to my research assistant, Michelle (who grew up in Hyde Park), I was able to meet and interview a number of “old-timers,” people in their late sixties, seventies, or eighties who provided detailed oral accounts of neighborhood history.
My interview style was “semidirected.” That is, I asked specific questions on such topics as changes in Hyde Park and HAPIC over the past thirty years; the meaning of the environment; attitudes toward neighborhood activism and activists; and the meaning of racism. These queries included “small” questions (e.g., “In what specific organizational activities have you engaged?”) as well as “big” questions (e.g., “What does environmental justice mean to you?”). In addition, I took cues from my interviewees, following up on their comments with questions inspired by the course of conversation. Interviewees chose the locations for their interviews, with most preferring to have them in their homes but some at the Utley Center. With activists who did not live in Augusta, I generally conducted interviews over the phone.
With permission, I tape-recorded all in-person interviews and took notes on them. To analyze these interviews, I first transcribed and then coded and examined them for recurring themes. For instance, I looked at the words people used to describe the environment, how they explained the reasons for the contamination of their neighborhood, what memories were most prominent when they discussed the “old days,” what they thought were HAPIC’s most and least successful events, and other narrative patterns that deepened my insights into how people formulate understandings of political action, racial identity, and the environment.
Most of the people I interviewed are activists and have been for much of their adult lives. They are proud of their accomplishments. When I asked whether they wanted anonymity, most requested that I use their real names. As Arthur Smith said, “If you can’t stand behind what you’ve said, you lose credibility as an activist.” Consequently, as much as possible, I have used people’s real names when they have requested it. For those who did not want to be identified, I have used pseudonyms and changed some of their biographical data. Nearly everyone interviewed has reviewed the material in which they are mentioned and given me final, written permission to publish it.8
Upon arriving in Augusta, I was fortunate to become acquainted with faculty members of the Augusta State University (ASU) Department of Sociology. In conjunction with ASU’s student sociology club and a class in survey methods, the sociology department had decided to conduct a Hyde Park neighborhood survey in the fall of 1998. I, too, had planned a survey, and to spare Hyde Park residents the annoyance of answering two surveys within several months, I worked cooperatively with the ASU researchers on theirs. The survey consisted of forty-one questions designed to measure residents’ attitudes and opinions about neighborhood concerns and behaviors, as well as environmental issues and involvement in HAPIC. In addition, it tested theoretical models for explaining participation in grassroots community organizations.9 ASU faculty members allowed me to preview and have some input into survey questions, a good number of which matched my own research questions. They then organized groups of students to go door-to-door in the neighborhood to distribute initial questionnaires and obtain results in person. Later on, students completed follow-up interviews as needed. The survey (conducted over four consecutive weekends) resulted in completed questionnaires from 176 individuals, or approximately two-thirds of Hyde Park’s adult population. In its testing of sociological models, the survey diverged from my more ethnographic approach to social movement study. I have relied on it primarily to supply demographic information on Hyde Park (since the area does not constitute its own census tract, reliable demographics are otherwise hard to come by). In a few cases, I have also used it to record residents’ attitudes toward HAPIC and neighborhood problems.
Finally, I supplemented my work with individuals and groups by paying close attention to representations of relevant issues in the local media. For example, I clipped newspaper articles from Augusta’s four newspapers—the Augusta Chronicle, the Metropolitan Spirit, the Metro Courier, and the Augusta Focus (the latter two are owned and operated by African Americans)—that addressed issues pertaining to race and environment. To gather historical material and statistical data, I used materials on file at the ASU library and census data. I also spent one long, fruitful afternoon in the archives of the Richmond County Historical Museum and several slightly more frustrating afternoons at Augusta–Richmond County’s records department.
Conducting fieldwork in your own country has both advantages and disadvantages. One of the major advantages is that the people with whom you develop the close ties that fieldwork fosters are never far away. Since leaving Augusta in October 1999, I have returned to Hyde Park on eight separate occasions. During these visits, I divide my time between follow-up interviews, attending any HAPIC events that happen while I am there (this frequently and deliberately occurs), and visiting people just to catch up. Twice, I also conducted community seminars as part of the Brownfield grant program. In the months between visits, I speak regularly on the telephone with several people. That allows me to stay in touch with individuals and neighborhood goings-on, and continue some of my participation in HAPIC business, especially grant writing and maintaining the Web site. Continuing my relationships with the people of Hyde Park has enabled me to resolve research questions as they arise, to fill in gaps as they appear, to stay somewhat active in HAPIC, and, most important, to maintain valuable friendships.