“David Baker (of Anniston, Alabama) drove us around the community. And he explained that this person, this resident, passed away such and such year and this is one of the...our relatives passed away, passed away he passed away. So, it was so heartbreaking. Very, very sad experience,” said Professor Ryoichi Terada, of Tokyo’s Meiji University.
It’s been two decades since the chemical company Monsanto settled a lawsuit with Anniston residents. People there said Monsanto exposed them to chemicals called PCBs which caused birth defects and cancer. Anniston still bears those scars, and the town's plight is attracting international attention. The Alabama Public Radio news team spent ten months, with no budget, investigating this subject.
This is just the latest major effort by Alabama Public Radio to address issues impacting underserved and impoverished communities in our State. Previous projects include a fourteen-month investigation of human trafficking in Alabama, a yearlong probe into rural health deficiencies in the State, and a ten-month long report looking into the preservation of slave cemeteries in Alabama. This content prompted invitations from the U.S. State Department for APR to address international delegations on our work and its international implications.
"Monsanto, Anniston, and Taylor"
Aired
8/22/2023
My name is Taylor Phillips. I’m twenty four years old, and this year, I’ll start medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. I grew up on the west side of Anniston, Alabama. That’s where the heaviest contamination of PCBs from Monsanto was supposed to be. When I was young, my mother would joke about it. She used to say we were all radioactive and we’d glow green at night. But, the impact of one Monsanto product was more serious than that. It was a group of chemicals called Polychlorinated Biphenyls, or PCBs for short.
To get a complete picture of Monsanto, Anniston, and PCBs, you have to go back to the early 1930’s and the story of Rayfield Horton. He was my great grandfather…
The nation was still reeling from the Great Depression when Rayfield got a job as a janitor at the Swann Chemical Company in Anniston. Monsanto later bought the plant where my great-grandfather worked. That was 1935…
This is one of the fireside chats by President Franklin Roosevelt. His radio address took place the same year Monsanto bought Swann Chemical. FDR’s plan to save the nation’s economy was called the New Deal. One idea was to bring electricity to rural parts of the country. PCBs were used in electrical insulation, so that was good news for Monsanto.
My great-grandfather was just one of the African Americans living in Anniston. They were mainly descended from slaves and sharecroppers. Most of them got jobs making the town’s big exports. The list included iron, steel, and chemical products. This was also the Jim Crow South. That meant Anniston was segregated. Blacks lived on the rural west side.
The PCBs made by Monsanto were used in things like flameproofing materials, paint, varnish, and even chewing gum. The problem was that two years after Monsanto bought Swann, PCBs were being linked to medical problems. The Harvard School of Public Health held a conference on sicknesses like liver damage, skin irritation, and infections caused by chemicals similar to PCBs.
In 1944, the D-Day invasion took place during World War two. That same year PCBs were officially declared toxic. But nobody told my great grandfather. Monsanto salesmen were warned to stay clear of the chemicals. That information didn’t filter down to any of the black men working maintenance jobs at the plant. The company didn’t even provide protective gear. All of those details would be in the lawsuit against Monsanto that was coming.
That would go on until my great grandfather retired in 1969. That’s the year Astronauts landed on the Moon. It’s also when my family started getting sick. By the mid-nineteen seventies, all three of my surviving great grandparents had suffered strokes. They were only in their late forties and early fifties.
In 1977, Monsanto was pressured to quit making PCBs. Two years later, the EPA ordered a nation-wide ban.
During the 1990s, my mother’s generation began to experience severe health problems. Women went into preterm labor or suffered preeclampsia. Their newborn children had congenital defects. My own brother was born at only twenty-five weeks. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was a year old.
Around this time, my family started investigating the impact of PCBs. They all had blood tests taken. Both of my parents, my aunt, and my older brother had higher levels of PCBs than the federal government considered safe.
As the world looks back on twenty years since the Monsanto settlement, it’s what money doesn’t buy that hurts.
Two years after the settlement, my extended family gathered together for we knew was my grandmother’s last birthday. We all called her Nanny. Her cancer had metastasized to her brain. I was too young to know what that meant. But, I remember Nanny growing more frail every time I saw her.
On the weekends, she used to sit me in her lap with a copy of the book Pippi Longstocking. Nanny used to read to me and challenge me to spell and pronounce the big words. Her illness worsened to the point that you could barely understand what she was saying. We never finished that book and no settlement will change that.
"Monsanto, twenty years later..."
Aired
8/29/2023
“Oh man, the smell you could not stand, though. Oh man, it was something…if you ever smelled a rotten egg, like 20- day old collard greens mixed together...That smell would come up. It was bad. It was a bad smell,” he says.
David Baker grew up on the west side of Anniston. That is where most of the town’s black residents lived. It was also where the PCB contamination was said to be at its worst. And there were more than just bad smells, there was a mysterious yellow substance.
He says, “My mother used to had to wipe the tables there, before she could cook in the morning because back then you didn’t have air conditions as they have now so your widows was up in the summertime so the contamination would land in on the table” Baker is the founder and director of the Anniston organization Community Against Pollution. Over twenty years ago, he led an effort to get Monsanto to compensate residents for illnesses blamed on PCB contamination.
The story is ongoing and often begins by getting in his truck...
“We had everything over here, everything. This was the projects, houses was there” he says, “...This was a meat market, right there in front of us. No longer is it a meat market. It’s just a dilapidated building now.”
...and APR isn’t the only ones to take that drive and to hear those stories...
“My name is Ryoichi Terada. I'm a professor of Meiji University, Tokyo.”
Terada visited Anniston in March. He is a professor of environmental sociology and has spent his career focused on issues relating to environmental justice.
“He drove us around the community and he explained this is one of our relatives passed away, passed away, passed away…was so heartbreaking.”
Professor Terada made the trip with a small group of researchers including a dean who also teaches with Ibaraki University.
“My name is Yayoi Haraguchi. I am the Dean of College of Humanities and in Social Sciences of Ibaraki University.”
Once Professor Terada’s group wrapped up its visit to Alabama, we caught up with Dean Haraguchi in her office on campus northeast of Tokyo. She was surprised by the differences she found in Anniston between parts of town.
“Yes, I saw some two different communities, a very active and vital side of Anniston and then the other side, quiet and some vacant spaces,” Dean Haraguchi remembers.
In fact, the Japanese are no strangers to PCB contamination. In 1968, they had an issue of their own with what has become known as the Yusho incident. This occurrence helped to alert the international community on the danger of PCBs.
The final destination in APR’s truck tour with David Baker is the old Monsanto plant. Across Highway 202 is what looks like a small mountain. It’s surrounded by a chain link fence and has warning signs.
“You see how high that mountain is right there. It used to be down this low, but they've been burying... they buried PCBs in that, in that mountain in that, well now it’s a mountain but its PCBs,” Baker says, “They try to they try to cap it and surround it to keep it in but the PCBs still leaks. It just goes all the way through here. You see that road right there. You see that mountain over there? That’s full of PCBs.”
It has been twenty years since Monsanto and its subsidiary Solutia agreed to pay a settlement of close to 700 million dollars to more than 20,000 residents of Anniston. The jury is out whether the lawsuit did enough to help with the ongoing effects of the pollution to the small community in northeast Alabama. Baker continues to be involved in the struggle
Baker says, “People love making money, but you got to understand whatever you make, you got to make sure that you’re not hurting somebody in the meanwhile while you’re making it.”