A relentless campaign of public advocacy, legal challenges, and community mobilisation involving the People’s Advocacy Institute, the Poor People’s Campaign, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Forward Justice, and ACLU of Mississippi, recently won a victory in the courts for clean, safe and public drinking water in Jackson, Mississippi. A Federal court granted Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and the People’s Advocacy Institute intervention in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) lawsuit that resulted in the de facto takeover of Jackson’s water system. Being granted intervention means they are now an official party to the lawsuit and have a voice in the proceedings. The lawsuit, brought against the City of Jackson by the EPA for violations of the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act, dramatically shifted residents’ access to information and say about the direction of their water system. The groups believe that this victory marks a crucial step toward the transparent, equitable, and community-centred management of Jackson’s water system.

Z staffer Bridget Meehan interviews Rukia Lumumba of the People’s Advocacy Institute about the history of the public water system in Jackson, her work in the campaign, and the indomitable spirit of the people of Jackson.

Bridget: To start with, could you give me some background about the People’s Advocacy Institute and the kind of work you do.

Rukia: Thank you for your interest in talking about Jackson and the work we’re doing. We’re one of many community groups that are trying to create a water system and infrastructure, and just better conditions for our communities in Jackson and Mississippi overall. But, I am the founder of the People’s Advocacy Institute [PAI] which is a not-for-profit, non-governmental entity that serves as what we consider an incubator for transformative justice in the US South. And so we work in three main areas to see community-led and community-driven solutions to common problems.

One, we create a space for co-governance so we engage in community-led policy, design, development and implementation. We do that through several tools including People’s Assemblies.

We also have a body of work that we call Ending Mass Incarceration and Criminalisation that focuses primarily on development of coalitions and policies that decrease reliance on the carceral system and increase reliance on community members as problem solvers and people with the right and the responsibility over the resources that help to create safer communities.

And then our last body of work is what we call Investing In Communities. That’s where we help to seed different initiatives and programs that are initiated by community members directly impacted by the harm that they’re hoping to solve, for example, we operate the only bail fund in the State. We incubate those new projects with the hope that they’ll eventually stand on their own and be an example for other projects to come to fruition as a result.

Bridget: That focus on community, having communities lead rather than having things done to them, is really the way decisions impacting communities should be made. Regarding the lawsuit, could you give some background on the public water project, why it needed to happen, who was involved, how long it’s been going on?

Rukia: In the lawsuit, the People’s Advocacy Institute (PAI) served as plaintiffs; specifically our team member Brooke Floyd was a named plaintiff. Brooke is the Director of our community co-governance initiatives in her role she oversees our community-led governance initiatives like people’s assemblies. Brooke is also a lifelong resident of Jackson, and is a mother who happened to be directly impacted and continues to be directly impacted from unsafe drinking water in Jackson and the lack of water at times. We decided as an organisation made up of residents who live and work in Jackson and surrounding areas, that it was important we not only engage in the rapid response efforts to provide people with clean drinkable water, and to provide people with filters, but also to ensure that we had a voice and created a space where community members could be engaged in that policy development broadly, for our city, for the policies that impact our lives. We felt it was critical that community members have a right to be at the table to ensure that our considerations as community members in general, not just the People’s Advocacy Institute, had an opportunity to engage fully in the negotiations and the design and development of the rebuild of our water system.

Historically, as residents we’ve never had a seat at the table and so ensuring that we have the opportunity to intervene, to sit at the table, felt like a necessary step for community voices to be heard, incorporated and valued and have weight in the decision-making process around this water rebuild.

We worked with an amazing team of legal advocacy firms as well being co-plaintiffs with the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign which PAI is a member of. Danyelle Holmes served as the named plaintiff on behalf of the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign. Our legal team is made up of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Forward Justice, and the ACLU of Mississippi. We received research support from the National Resource Development Center (NRCD). Using local and national advocacy legal firms that have a social justice mission was really critical to our work as well, because we knew that they understood what we were fighting against and that they had a commitment to fully engage in this fight even though there were no financial benefits to them or us. It was really about having a seat at the table and understanding how critical it is, and how it begins to set the tone for future engagement not only in Jackson, but in Mississippi overall where water systems are failing across the board. And it sets the tone as well for communities at the table nationwide. What we’re experiencing in Jackson has happened in so many other cities and is happening currently in neighbouring states like Alabama. We hope we’ve set precedent through this to see other communities be included in the development process as interveneers.

Bridget: Can you tell me about the water system in Jackson, its history and why it’s fallen into such disrepair?

Rukia: The water system has historically been a public entity and I’ll try to give some highlighted bullet points. About 108 years ago – that’s a long time – the Fewell Plant was built. It was our initial water system and is still in operation today. In 1962, the Governor of Mississippi Ross Barnett, who was also opposing integration, constructed the Ross Barnett Reservoir, which is the largest source of drinking water for the city of Jackson. When the reservoir gets too high, water is discharged into the Pearl River, which flows through Jackson. Integration began in ‘62. Ross Barnett said we ain’t having integration in Mississippi. The Federal Government had to force Mississippi to integrate, from 1968, 1969, and then real push in the 1970s. White flight began to happen after integration, and after that enforced integration, white flight really picked up with more than 11,000 white families fleeing Jackson to avoid school integration. In 1972, there was the passage of the Water Pollution Control Act which ushered in the infusion of EPA grants to fund municipal water projects across the country. This is important because you began to see right from 1972, as the city gets Blacker and then later the administration gets Blacker, the number of funds that make it through the State to Jackson for water infrastructure increases.

In the 1980s, specifically 1981, Jackson was ordered to build a metro wastewater treatment plant because we didn’t have one. It included some neighbouring towns like Pearl, Flowood, Brandon, Pearl River Valley water supply district, the Jackson Municipal Airport, the State mental health facility, and a number of other places. Before that system was even complete, some of the municipalities surrounding Jackson (Pearl, Flowood, Brandon) were fighting to contribute as little financial resource as possible, including Rankin County which is the home of the current Governor Tate Reeves and is literally not even ten minutes outside of Jackson.

Many of these areas for the most part were receiving free sewer treatment off the backs of Jackson residents’ tax dollars. Then in 1987, with the passage of the 1987 Water Quality Act, the funding of municipal water systems began to end and there was no more water investment money coming through most of the municipalities. At that time, Dale Danks Jr. was the Mayor of Jackson. Federal funding began to disappear from places like Jackson, but specifically and including Jackson. There’s a quote where Danks says the Feds [Federal government] lowered the financial assistance to deal with the metropolitan area as it relates to water and sewage; we have to find some source to fill the gap of reduction and participation by the Feds, he explains. And then Danks goes on to raise the water rates in the late 1980s precisely as the Federal Government expected municipalities like Jackson to do. Now, you have a combination of lack of funding for infrastructure where because there’s no longer Federal investment and you have a smaller and growing lower income local tax base. A recipe for disaster, right, because white flight is taking off and the city population is decreasing, but the city’s responsibility to fund the entire water infrastructure, for not only the city but many of the suburban developing areas, remains.

In 1993, what we know now as the OB Curtis Plant was developed and became the city’s primary water plant, constructed near the Ross Barnett Reservoir. We have the Fewell Plant and the OB Curtis Plant, and both still exist today.

In 1997, the first Black Mayor, Harvey Johnson, was elected. Mayor Harvey Johnson began the trajectory to try to fix the water. Recognizing that the Fewell Plant is 100 and something years old, recognizing that OB Curtis Plant can’t do all of it, he decides to increase investments into the Fewell plant in response to the EPA implementing the Consent Decree. 1997 saw Harvey Johnson’s administration create a master plan for the water and sewer system. This was the first master plan of a water and sewer system in Jackson that anybody has actually seen or been able to produce. So, the first Black Mayor produced the first water and sewer system plan. In 2010, a major ice storm hit Jackson which for, I guess, the first time in more recent history highlighted the system’s vulnerability to widespread service disruptions. In that 2010 storm, hundreds of water mains burst; all those service interruptions didn’t last for a full month but they lasted for weeks. That was the first time.. In 2012, the city constructed an 8.6 million water main connecting OB Curtis and Fewel Plants to help keep water pressure up.

I’m sharing all of this because I want you to understand that under Black leadership there was an active effort to maintain a water system. It wasn’t until Mayor Harvey Johnson came into office that you began to see actual attempts to correct a water system that was over a 100 years old.

Bridget: So after years of neglect, here was the first time where anybody was trying to do anything to rectify this.

Rukia: Right, and so then you just keep seeing that happen. You get to year after year after year from 2012 to 2019, where not only is the city government consistently trying to one, put a Band-Aid on the cracks with very little funding; but then, second, you see that they’re also trying to give residents the ability to contribute towards the water costs by ensuring we have working water meters. The City contracted with Siemens, which ended up being the worst thing you could possibly do. We all know now how many cities and states Siemens has unfortunately ripped off providing faulty equipment to. Jackson was one of them, where they installed water meters – never worked; some were charging people higher rates; and some they never even placed in people’s homes. There were thousands of homes that Siemens never even placed a water meter in, and most of those homes were in predominantly White communities. So, for years some White residents were never paying for water.

Bridget: It’s adding insult to injury, and with all the different elements there, it’s far more complex than just the system being run down.

Rukia: Right, and it resulted in a failed billing system where residents had the burden of trying to correct their bills. But even before that, residents took up the decision to contribute even more to our infrastructure issues. In 2013, under the Mayoral leadership of the late Chokwe Lumumba, residents decided to tax themselves an additional 1% to help with our infrastructure issues; they decided by over 90% through a referendum that they wanted to contribute additional tax towards fixing our roads. Our roads were consistently in disrepair because pipes were constantly bursting due to weather and old pipes. All this is to say that it’s been the residents of Jackson who have had the largest burden both financially, as well as healthwise, as a result of these water system failures.

2021 was the next time that we saw a major water break that further exacerbated the understanding and the reality of our vulnerable water system. The system had gotten to a place of complete dysfunction. In 2021, we had a winter storm where for six weeks many residents across the city were without any water, period. The Governor did not call for a state of emergency in the city of Jackson until three weeks after we had already been without water.

Bridget: How do you even cope with water, it’s so fundamental?

Rukia: Between Covid and that 2021 situation, you understand the strength of our communities and the love of our neighbours. One of our biggest efforts was the establishment of the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition where we were able to galvanise resources from across the nation to get people drinkable water. We mobilised, we were distributing water, hot meals, kerosene for heat, two days after the storm and before any government entity was able to respond. That’s the power and beauty of community-led change. We served over 55,000 people during that time. So, I’m just really proud of the residents of Jackson. I really, really want to highlight that because they have really been at the forefront.

During the 2021 winter storm, we also had over 221 days of Boil-Water Notices. So in addition to six weeks of not being able to drink water we also were, for the majority of the year, unable to drink the water coming out of our faucets, we were encouraged not to brush our teeth, and those kinds of things.

In 2022, as soon as the weather began to get cold, we were faced with another severe water situation where we had a water crisis come to national attention as the result of our water system just completely breaking, failing. And that’s what led us to the current point. It’s currently in a place of repair but it’s not out of crisis mode, and it is definitely not in a place where residents are able to safely drink their water, utilise their water, and/or have confidence that the problem will be fixed within a reasonable time, in our opinion. And that’s why it’s important that we’re engaged in intervention.

This current city administration, as well as most city administrations post-Harvey Johnson, have worked to fix the water. It has not been something that people have just neglected, it has not been something that residents have just neglected. I think that’s an important thing to understand because people will try to paint the narrative that we’re just Black, uninformed, unequipped, and need a saviour to come and save us. What we have seen is that not only have we been the most equipped to maintain water flowing through our pipes at least to any extent, but that the same problems we told you we were experiencing because we did not have the finances to fix them, are the same exact problems that now this interim administrator that has been appointed by the EPA is having to this day. The difference is, he has the money to fix them, and he needs to listen now to the residents and the city administration that have been working on it so that he does what is necessary.

Bridget: Could you talk a bit about the model that you want to see in place, now that there’s an interim administrator and resources to do something? And do you think the administrator is going to listen to the community and actually do what needs to be done?

Rukia: I think that all we can do is encourage them to listen, really pressure them to listen. But because the court supported our intervention, I am hopeful that they will actually follow the court’s orders and actually allow residents – not ‘allow’ because it’s a right – so I’m gonna stop saying ‘allow’. So, it’s about them following through on the recommendations that we make as community members. The process is engaging community members in a number of ways. One: through surveying about what their water experiences are. The second part, because we need to fully understand what people’s experiences have been both historically and currently, we’re asking where they’ve seen some change. We also need to identify what residents feel is the immediate need. Some residents might say their immediate need is to repair the pipes leading to their home. Some residents might say their immediate need is a water filter. Some residents might say their immediate need is actually water coming through their pipes, not even clean water, just water. So, we have to assess residents’ needs and in assessing them, we assess where across the city the issues are similar and different because it is a variety.

Adding to that list, we have to assess who is receiving accurate bills, who’s receiving a bill and not receiving a bill, and how are residents being charged. We want affordable water and we want that water to stay public. That is critical because under a third-party administrator, the water is actually no longer in the city’s control and is not really in the EPA’s control. It’s actually in its own little separate entity that has the authority to determine what Jackson’s water system looks like without any requirement that they take the advice of the city or of the EPA. But as an intervener, according to the ruling of the court, the community at the very least should be involved in the judge’s review of the third-party administrator’s efforts.

Bridget: So, how much contact do you have with this administrator and how much influence do you have in making sure the community, who have done so much to get it to this point, are not ignored? As you said, they have the solutions themselves, they don’t need a saviour, but is there a chance they could end up getting ignored?

Rukia: There’s always a chance that we can be ignored and I think that’s the responsibility of groups like the People’s Advocacy Institute, the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign, and all of us collectively that engage in this work on a day-to-day basis. We cannot allow the voices of the people to be ignored. We have to be the pushers, the agitators, to ensure that community is having that voice. That’s really the role we serve.

But you asked the question, can we be ignored? I mean we’ve seen throughout history, community voices being ignored regardless of court cases. We had back in the ‘60s and ‘70s law that required integration of our schools, and Mississippi ignored that. It took the Federal government to step in. You look at what’s happening, Mississippi ignored Jackson’s water needs and it took the Federal government to come in and say, well we’re no longer sending money directly to the State to support the water infrastructure of places like Jackson, because we’re seeing that you’re not sending that money to Jackson. We’re gonna bypass you and we’re sending this money directly to Jackson.

Unfortunately, the money went to the third-party administrator and not to the city. But we’ve already seen the Federal government have to step in – that’s one instance of them stepping in. We’ve seen the Federal government having to step in around our prisons in the State of Mississippi, the Federal government having to step in because of the inhumane conditions inside the prisons of Mississippi; after years of community groups and legal groups fighting with the State to close down these prisons, we’ve seen the Federal government having to step in and demand humane treatment and conditions inside of prisons. Mississippi has had a history where the Federal government has had to step in.

Bridget: It doesn’t say much for the State, as the Federal government isn’t exactly the greatest champion; it only shows how bad it is when the government is better than what’s going on in the State itself – the discrimination, the levels of outright racism. You mentioned that the water system is public. Would your ideal situation be that it stays public but with the resources being put into it and with the community having a say in how it’s managed?

Rukia: Absolutely, and ideally what we would all like to see is something similar to cooperatives. In Mississippi, you have farming cooperatives, you also have the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives, which has been around for a hundred years, is Black-led, and has over 400 cooperatives. Mississippi has always been home to cooperatives. Fannie Lou Hamer in the Delta created some of the first cooperatives to just support and ensure that Black people were fed – farming cooperatives and pig banks – all of these to ensure that community could share resources. Really what we now call the Solidarity Economy is what our ancestral mentors like Fannie Lou Hamer were doing. We get the examples from the blueprints they provided us back in the day. We have electrical cooperatives in the state of Mississippi; many are in rural communities where organisations like One Voice, MS are fighting for Black community members to be part of those cooperative boards. They’re not perfect entities but they’re entities in which we’re organising to ensure there are more black voices and more voices of poor working families on those boards, and to ensure that they are truly cooperative and representative.

When we think about our water system, it’s not unimaginable that we have some form of participatory process by which residents of Jackson have a say in the decisions in the management and the oversight of our water and sewer treatment centres.

Bridget: So that is a possibility as well, being able to take it to that cooperative point. I suppose you want to get it out of crisis first and then look at how the management structure could be changed to make it more participatory. I can see you’re going in that direction and that you have the strength and the ability to make that happen. When I think about some of the European models, a lot of the water systems here are publicly owned as well, like in Jackson. But again, a lot of them suffer from that neglect; not for the same reasons as yourselves in Jackson but more because of decades of wealth extraction where public services have been squeezed. The systems here have slowly degraded because they haven’t had the necessary investment, because the money is going elsewhere.

And in the part of Ireland where I live, we have a public water system that needs huge investment to be brought up to standard. The local administration tried to impose water charges, but that didn’t happen because there was uproar and people said they just wouldn’t pay. In the south of Ireland, the other jurisdiction in Ireland, they brought in water charges and there was absolute mayhem; many people simply refused to pay.

In England, they probably have the worst of all worlds because their system has been completely privatised; and although they pay water charges, the private water companies have just asset-stripped the infrastructure for decades. Their systems are in serious decay. There’s actually a massive campaign going on about pollution in the rivers and sea because the private water companies have been pumping raw sewage into the rivers and sea. People are experiencing some of the things you’re experiencing in Jackson where they might be without water, say if there’s been a weather event like a flood or extreme cold. And there’s only going to be more of that because of climate change anyway.

I think we could learn some lessons from the campaign that you’ve been involved in, in Jackson, looking to see how the public could take a bit more control and have more say in how the systems are run. It could start the process of bringing these systems back into public ownership.

It’s such an inspiring example, what you’ve done. One of the things that really stood for me when you were talking was how determined people in Jackson were. They were saying,we just can’t take any more of this, and they were determined to make that change happen and knew what they had to do. That level of community cohesiveness and solidarity makes a huge difference to campaigning. They were even willing to impose more taxes on themselves, that’s unheard of.

Rukia: Trust me, that was a big one. I will say that even the Mayor at the time wasn’t trying to tax people more but the people were saying it was necessary. But, I appreciate you sharing what your communities have been experiencing, as it sounds so similar. We know for a fact that what we’re experiencing in Jackson is happening in so many, many more rural communities throughout Mississippi where dollars for infrastructure have not been provided because the State doesn’t value that particular area; or doesn’t appreciate the significance of maintaining water infrastructure that allows for us to have access to clean water – just doesn’t appreciate it, meaning just doesn’t understand the importance of it. So, some of it is just ignorance.

Bridget: And disregard as well. Everybody would grasp the impact of having no water or having water that’s unsafe to drink. They could empathise but they’re choosing not to. They’ve chosen to say I don’t care.

Rukia: You’re right. And I do want to say that in Jackson, community came together and has always come together in times of crises. When we come together, our community is no more special than any community across the world. I think that what we’ve experienced in these times of crises, we have what we consider, and what one of our movement elders Mr Frank Figgers says, is a “fragile unity”. It’s unity that’s only held together by a single little thread, that thread that is a common pain that we’re struggling through and are willing to get to the other side of to get a little relief from.

I definitely think that the ways in which we engaged, the tools and techniques, the strategies that we have used, really can be used anywhere and we can probably see more people use them; and others will use additional ones that we will learn from.

Bridget: And I suppose your next step is to see what happens after this court ruling and to continue with the campaign to make sure that what the court said actually happens. The real issue is to get something done with the system so that the water is safe and fit-for-purpose.

Rukia: Yes, thank you. One last thing to mention is PFAS [per-and poly fluoroalkyl substances] chemicals and the presence of permanent chemicals in the water. One of our colleagues, Brooke Floyd, has written an article that discusses this in some detail. These chemicals have been found in the water systems all over the State of Mississippi. So, the issues people in Jackson have experienced are not just narrative, although if they were narrative they would still be valid. But the water has been tested and the tests show that there are health risks and the drinking water is currently not safe. There’s a lot of double-speak and refusal to actually engage on the question of whether the water is safe to drink or not. The main focus is around the financial arrangement of the water system which is essentially about how to get the indebted public utility into a place where it can be privatised. That’s what the authorities are focused on but residents are focused on the fact that the water is not safe and they can’t get straight answers about that.

Bridget: After listening to you talk, and how passionate you are, as well as everybody involved in the campaign, I have no doubt that you’ll succeed and that it will happen. Thank you for talking to ZNetwork.org and I wish you ever more success with your campaign.

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