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From The New Press: "Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur 'genius,' grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called 'Bloody Lowndes' because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s ground zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation.
Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this 'powerful and moving book' (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West.
In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.
This was a must-read on our Waste No Water Library Tour book list!
Listen to our interview with Sherry Bradley, former Director of the Bureau of Environmental Services with the Alabama Department of Public Health who now runs The Blackbelt Unincorporated Wastewater Program (BBUWP).
Watch a video interview with Flowers on the Free Library of Philadelphia here.
Listen to Flowers on Kirkus Reviews here.
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