After struggling with cancer for two years, Damu Smith -- one of the greatest activists of his generation -- passed away late last night.
In March 2004, doctors told him he had three months to live. He vowed to beat it, not just to continue the struggle for peace and justice, but more importantly to be around for his "pride and joy" -- his daughter Asha -- who is 13. He died surrounded by many loving friends and family members.
When we worked together at Greenpeace back in the 90s, I remember how boundless his energy and spirit were. He was a true warrior for peace and justice, an organizer whose style of campaigning was both an art and a science (even if it did mean lugging around those bags and bags of fact sheets and contact books).
He led one of the toughest organizing projects the Greenpeace US Toxics Campaign ever undertook -- stopping the construction of Shintech, Inc., a giant vinyl chloride (VCM) chemical plant, which was targeted at Convent, a small African-American community already overburdened with pollution from Louisiana's "cancer alley" -- the area south of Baton Rouge where dozens of giant petrochemical facilities operate along the Mississippi River.
Working with local community activists and Greenpeace's toxics team, which with all its talent was already the equivalent of the Chicago Bulls of toxics campaigners, year after year, Damu brought a new game to the team using his years of leadership and extensive network in the environmental justice movement to leverage national and even global pressure against Shintech.
He not only did his share of the day to day tasks, scheduling meetings, photocopying flyers at 2 a.m., helping to plan the agenda of community meetings in Convent and across the state in Lake Charles, but he also organized a variety of other ancillary strategies that took the Louisiana Chemical Association -- which was not used to losing these kind of battles -- by surprise.
Damu led a feisty delegation of local community leaders in a delegation to Japan, where they decided to confront the company's top executives with a clear message: the PVC plant was not wanted. (I bet that was a little out of the execs' cultural experience!) Meanwhile, working with brilliant lawyers like Monique Harden and the at the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic (whose involvement prompted the Governor to threaten to yank the university's funding, one of many intense subplots), they managed to create some significant speed bumps in the permitting process, while Damu and others built the opposition ever outward, applying more and more pressure, setting up toxic tours and bringing Alice Walker and John Conyers and Danny Glover and Michelle Shocked and other celebrities and national civil rights leaders to see the situation for themselves, as well as the entire Greenpeace global toxics campaign, which joined him in a protest against the vinyl industry in Louisiana.
Eventually, the company blinked, and withdrew the Convent proposal, announcing it would build a smaller plant upstream next to Dow. That's about as clean a victory as you get in these kind of struggles.
No one believed it could be done. But everyday and everyway, Damu was always there to say "We are Winning."
In no small way was this one reason why today, architects and builders, and companies like Walmart and Nike are eliminating PVC from their buildings and products, and why the medical industry is gradually working to eliminate its own use of PVC and other toxic chemicals, with the help of a powerful alliance of nurses, doctors and environment groups called Health Care Without Harm . All of these efforts were either inspired by or drew strength from the fact that organizers like Damu Smith put a face on the effects of toxic pollution from PVC plants.
In many respects the Shintech battle was the Waterloo of the chlorine industry in the U.S. Greenpeace began to focus on chlorine-based chemicals as a priority class for phase-out years before, in its Great Lakes campaign. (To learn why, be sure to check out ex-Greenpeace scientist Joe Thornton's book, Pandora's Poison)
But without organizers like Damu Smith, Greenpeace would never have been able to effectively shift its focus and stop the expansion of the chlorine industry down in the Gulf of Mexico, a politically difficult region to work in, to say the least. (If you haven't seen the movie, "Blue Vinyl" do -- it gives you a sense of what it's like.)
Nor was Shintech Damu's last battle in Louisiana. He continued to help grassroots activists and community resident confront Shell for the cancer-causing contamination caused by its refinery in Norco, Louisiana.
Damu grew up in St. Louis. But he gravitated towards struggles for justice (when he first found out he was sick he was traveling in Palestine). He was already an activist by the time he was out of high school, and a leader in the solidarity fight against the South African apartheid government both in college and after, before turning his attention to environmental issues.
He helped Greenpeace play an important role in supporting the movement for environmental justice, helping to organize first People of Color Environmental Justice Summit in 1991. The summit resulted in a key statement of principles that forced the environmental movement to confront its own internal makeup, and begin to recognize how important it is to confront environmental racism in order to win the battle against pollution and undesirable technologies that are typically dumped on poorer communities, especially communties of color.
Damu helped Greenpeace understand the strategic importance of the issue (along with other campaigners like Jackie Warledo, Bradley Angel, Nilak Butler, Kishi Animashaun, and Angela Brown). Needless to say, for the organization, this was not always an easy thing to do. There were some frustrating moments when he stepped up to facilitate the organization's internal engagement with these questions. There were times when he also helped the organization use its experience in the U.S. to understand relationships between the global North and the global South.
After Greenpeace, Damu continued to play a key role in the environmental justice movement, helping form the National Black Environmental Justice Network, and establishing Black Voices for Peace, a leading voice in United for Peace and Justice and the broader peace movement. While I was working for Citizen Works in Washington DC, BVP sublet an office in our office. I could tell that the pace of his organizing had not slowed down any since he left Greenpeace. When he wasn't out on the road or organizing meetings and rallies, he was working all hours. He also had his own local radio program.
To the end, he was a tireless organizer, traveler and student of movements and history. He will be sorely missed.
(To learn more go here.)
We love you Damu, and will try to remember to buck up and say "We Are Winning" even when things look tough.