[00:00:18] Speaker A: Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host, Jaron, and I'm.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Your other co host, Lonnie.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: And today we're celebrating Cecil Corbin Mark, who was fundamental in making weak what it is today.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: That's right. We'll hear from our executive director, Peggy shepherd, about the early days of we act, just after the groundbreaking lawsuit against the North river sewage treatment plant, when Cecil was hired as the first full time employee of WEAC. Kind of picking up where we left off in December.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: But before we get to that, Lonnie, can you read we act's mission statement?
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Absolutely. WEAC's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and or low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection practices and policies.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Thank you. So why are we honoring Cecil in this episode? Lonnie, besides the fact that he's one of the reasons that we have our jobs?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Well, there are a couple reasons. First, like you said, Cecil was Weak's deputy director and well known and highly respected leader in the environmental justice movement. Cecil was a lifelong resident of Hamilton Heights in Harlem, New York, where his family has lived for six decades. Cecil began his environmental justice career at WEAC for environmental justice at the age.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Of 25, which is mind blowing to me. That's so young.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: I know. I was trying to think about what I was doing in 25, and I don't think I can tell people what I was doing in 25 on this podcast. He was the first paid staff person hired by the Harlem based volunteer group when it became a formal nonprofit organization. Over the next 26 years, Cecil grew to be one of the leading figures in the movement, both in the New York state and across the nation.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: At the time of his passing in October 2020, Cecil was WEAC's deputy director and director of policy initiatives. In this capacity, Cecil helped develop and pass numerous environmental health related bills in New York City and New York state, provided overall policy guidance to WEAC's New York program staff, managed WEAC's Washington, DC federal office, and served as an informal mentor to aspiring environmental justice advocates across the country. So basically, he created the department that I work in, in the group that we have now in the policy team.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: He did a lot. In honor of Cecil's legacy, Weak actually started the Cecil Corbin Mark Fellowship for environmental justice leadership. The fellowship is now in its third year, and ReAct's hosting two new fellows starting in June, and that fellowship lasts for one year, and we've had a couple of those fellows on the show, including Caleb and Liz.
And for anyone who's interested in applying, application as of the time of this episode is still open, and I'll include a link in the show notes that you can go to. Lastly, and really, the main reason that we're here releasing this episode this month is that we act is hosting a special event on April 20 where city council member Shana Breyu, who you heard on the show before earlier this year, will be joining us for Cecil's street naming ceremony. Like we mentioned before, Cecil was a lifelong resident of Hamilton Heights, and council member Abreu was instrumental in making this street naming ceremony happen and getting Cecil recognized and having a street naming. So it's really special that we get to have this event.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great that we get to say it's a lot to celebrate. And, I mean, having a street named after you, I think, is such an honor. And I think it's. It's just a great way to kind of solidify his legacy and who he was as a person. So, without further ado, let's hear from Peggy about the early days of weak and what it was like to hire and work with Cecil.
[00:04:14] Speaker C: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Peggy. We're so excited to have you on the show. It's been a long time coming.
[00:04:20] Speaker D: Wow. Yeah.
So I imagine Bernice told you how I met Cecil, that I was walking down convent Avenue one Saturday afternoon, and they were having their sort of annual, you know, summer street festival. And I heard this young man on the microphone talking about quality of life and our block, sustainability, cleanliness, clean air. And I stopped and said, who in the world is talking about these issues? And I went and introduced myself and, you know, interacted with him a couple of times afterwards. You know, I had a. I was the democratic district leader, so I had a democratic club, the West Harlem independent Democrats. It was on 145th street between Broadway and Amsterdam. I think there's a hardware store there now. And, you know, that's where we had not monthly, but weekly meetings to talk about political issues in the community, if it was near election time, to get people on the ballot to talk about voter turnout. And so Cecil, you know, came every now and then, but it was really after we got the settlement of our lawsuit that I'm sure Eric Goldstein at the Natural Resources Defense Council talked to you about. Once we got that lawsuit settlement and a $1.1 million environmental benefits fund for West Harlem, we were able to secure $200,000 from that fundamental to hire our first staff at we act. And Cecil was the first staff. And I remembered him and really didn't know him that well but reached out to him. He was working at the Bronx DA's office doing a special project on child abuse and child trafficking. And so I told him. I said, you know we have this money. We're gonna start. We act. Yeah. We act. Had been a volunteer group for about six years. But now we could really, really focus on the issues of the community. And so he said he consider it. And I think a number of his colleagues tried to talk him out of it. I mean my God. You're going to leave a city job and go to some startup for something called what, environmental justice? What the hell is that?
And so I'm sure he got a lot of flack. But he called me back and said he wanted to do it. And so our first job was to find a space, which we did. We had a space at 125th and 8th Avenue, the Bishop Madison building. We had the second floor and we had this one big room and had a conference table in the middle of it and we had office space around it. The first major thing we had to do was, guess what? Find a telephone system.
Because what you have to remember is even informally, you're starting a business.
Whenever you've got an employee. That means you've got a whole system of things to do. Right? You know, withholding from paychecks and you know, signing paychecks and paying rent and getting the lights on and all of those things. Yet you've never. You don't have credit as a business.
And so we made the rounds and finally found a company that was nonprofit and contract it with nonprofits around telephone systems. And so we got that insert and we were kind of rocking and rolling.
The next two people we hired was a communications director and an office manager. And I think the next person was a community organizer.
So there were four or five of us for a long time. Cecil and I did all of the grant writing.
We would start that at 05:00 in the evening after we'd done the community organizing and the meetings and all of that. During the day I would do the narrative and the proposals and he would do the budget and the evaluation. That's the way we always had it. Had it divided up. And we even had one of our board members who was chair of our board, Dennis Derrick, Doctor Dennis Derek come over and help us write some of these federal grants. And we were very. We were very lucky. And we were. I guess very effective at being able to get large federal grants, you know, for a pretty small organization.
You know, we took on a lot of campaigns, several key campaigns. One was dump dirty diesel, a campaign against the MTA that eventually took 18 years. But now, guess what? When you look outside, you see buses saying clean fuel bus. And, you know, every time I see that, I know that that's we act. So every time you see a bus in New York City that says clean fuel bus, we act. Has been the only key player around the buses for decades here in New York. And why? Because we house over one third of the bus fleet in uptown neighborhoods. And so once we realized that crucial fact and realized the horrendous environmental exposures that our kids were being exposed to, you know, think about the high asthma rate, then you realize how important that campaign was. And then we've done other fun things like created the West Harlem Piers Waterfront park, organized the community board and community residents to come out in planning charrettes to determine what should be over at the waterfront because the city wanted to privatize it. They wanted to put a hotel up there. And, yeah, once you put a hotel on the waterfront, guess what? Most of us won't be walking back and forth along there.
And so once we heard that, we really organized, and we organized quickly, within a year, and we got a number of scenarios for what the waterfront and the whole manufacturing zone could look like. And we developed drawings with the urban planner and then began to work with our city elected officials to demand that they develop a master plan to build it. And ten years later, it was open. And it's this missing link in the uptown and downtown esplanades, because you would have to get off your bike at 123rd street and walk along the street and then pick it up in the 140s above the sewage treatment plant in terms of Riverside park. And so it really created the missing chain. So it really shows you.
I think those two campaigns I've just mentioned really demonstrate how what you would think is a local issue benefits the entire city. I mean, that esplanade benefits everyone in New York City and is well used, and the bus system and cleaner air obviously benefits everyone. So even though it seemed like, well, this, you know, we're the only neighborhood who's hosting, yeah, six depots. Seven were in Manhattan, six. All but one were uptown, even though those buses go throughout Manhattan and some go into the Bronx. But we were bearing the brunt of it. So it seemed like a local issue nobody else cared about. Nobody else was concerned about but the resolution of that created a benefit for the entire city. So when people say, you know, what makes you, even though there's a lot of ways that we haven't been effective or we haven't been able to move ahead and get the sustainability and the investments we want, even so, what makes you want to get out of bed every day and feel good? And it's some of those things walking by the park, looking up, and seeing a bus that we made cleaner. All of those things make life a lot better.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: You know, one of the things I. Because as you were laying everything out, did you always envision we act transitioning from, like a volunteer kind of organization of people to that, that day? One, we have money now to be more formalized. We've got a phone line, you know, and in that, if you one, did you envision that be kind of where we act was going to go? And then, second, did anything change when it came to how you did the work that you did in the organizing, when you had to kind of make that jump where you are now, I guess you could quote unquote, official, even though you'd already been official in lots of ways.
[00:13:57] Speaker D: So I think, you know, just understanding history and how communities operate, so often you see groups that spring up to address a particular problem. They address the problem, and then they go back to what they were doing until something else pops up, and then another group begins to organize. And we realized that environmental exposures and environmental justice concerns were not only significant to the health and sustainability of communities, but that there were so many other issues that were in this community that we were just becoming aware of.
We also realized that the MTA wanted to build another depot across from 3333 Broadway and across from that junior high school there.
And it was interesting because we worked with the community board, nine on it, and the kids at this junior high school wrote over 100 letters to the MTA talking about how the demolition was rocking their classrooms and how they were scared and anxious and how they did not want that to continue. And so we realized that they were going to build another depot. They wanted to put seniors that are citizen housing on top of the depot.
And we realized this was a strong environmental justice issue because there was no environmental review. So we decided with a legal group, a Harlem legal services, that was on Broadway at that time. We went to them, and even though they usually really took housing tenant cases, they took this case on, and they helped us sue the MTA. And we were suing the MTA to demand an environmental impact statement known as an EIS.
And what we found was that transportation facilities in New York City are exempt from environmental review.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that seems a little fishy.
[00:16:19] Speaker D: Transportation facilities and their land is exempt from environmental review. However, if that land or any part of that land is to be used for something other than a transit use, then there would have to be environmental review. And so them wanting to put senior housing on top meant that they would have to do an environmental review. They didn't want to do that. So the senior housing was stopped. And I mean, you would say, oh, you stopped housing, affordable housing. But what good is it to have affordable housing if it's making you sick? And in some cases, children die? Because back in the eighties and nineties, we were seeing children in this community still dying of asthma. Not that that doesn't happen occasionally, but it was significant at that point. And so I think continuing to see these issues around environment, deciding to sue the MTA, well, basically, you've got to have an organization to do that.
So we're like, okay, West Harlem environmental action, and we incorporate it. And we did that as in direct response to being able to sue the MTA.
And so we realized that this was just, wasn't an ad hoc issue here or there, that there was a sustained advocacy that needed to happen in this community. And the funny thing, and I don't know if Eric or Venice mentioned it, but when we got the settlement, we were talking about, oh, my God, what are we going to do? And our good friend and attorney and board member, Eric Goldstein said, well, I guess, you know, we can give some of the money to the Sierra Club and they can come uptown and do some environmental projects. And I looked at Bernice and I said, no, we're going to create our own little NRDC uptown.
And I think he was stunned. Maybe we stunned ourselves, but that's what we set out to do.
We're going to create an advocacy organization that is sustained and really serves this community and is a monitor and watchdog for this community. Now, we never perhaps anticipated at that time to answer your second question, that we would be working statewide, nationally, and to some degree interacting on international environmental policy as well.
[00:19:11] Speaker C: That's super. I feel like it's helpful to have some of those kind of specific details. And it's great because vernice, I think, mentioned that exact conversation of, we want to have our own mini NRDC uptown. And I wouldn't really say mini anymore. It's now we're growing. I'm curious for you. And in those early days, you were going from like you said, kind of more volunteer oriented way of going about the work. And I remember Vernice mentioning that, you know, y'all were doing your full time jobs, and then on top of that, trying to do all the work that went into, you know, creating we act. What was it like for you in those days of transitioning from trying to do all of that and then to being kind of a full time react employee? And what were the things that you were really envisioning as? Like, these are the components that we want to embody as an organization. These are the things that we see as components of NRDC that we want to try to create, and maybe some things that we don't want to recreate, maybe things that we want to differentiate ourselves from an NRDC.
[00:20:20] Speaker D: Yeah, I would say I'm not sure that those were issues we thought so intentionally about. I think it was almost understood for us that we were about the racial disinvestment in our communities, that we were social justice organizations, that we were community based. All of those things are different from an NRDC or any other mainstream environmental group. That organizing was the foundation of our work, that community residents needed to understand these issues and be able to speak on them and tell their own story. So we were very clear what the value of an organization like ours would be versus mainstream organizations. And I would say it was sort of an evolution, even though we had the money and the lawsuit settlement. It all happened at a funny period of time in which, you know, I had been working for the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal as the director of public information.
And so, you know, I was able to use up to save up all my vacation time and then take time off and go to a community board meeting.
It was funny. We had a meeting with the state Department of Parks because, you know, we were very engaged in the Denny Farrell State Park, Riverbank State park, that's on top of the sewage treatment plant between 138th and 145th streets in the Hudson. And so I was meeting with him, and somehow it came out that we did not have that I had another job, and he was done because he thought I was running react every day. And so that was kind of funny. But what happened is I ended up leaving DHCR division of housing, and I went to work as the women's outreach coordinator for Liz Holtzman, who was the city controller. And at the time, she was about to run for reelection. And so I'd gotten there, and about seven months later, she lost the primary to Alan Hevesy. And so about the same time the lawsuit settlement happened. And the idea was, well, Peggy, you should run it. And I hadn't really, really thought about it, so I was having a natural transition at the same, that all of these things kind of came to a.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: Head at the same time that's so serendipitous.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: I feel like a lot of things, you know, they happen for a reason. The timing works out in a way that really sets us up for great opportunities like this, to be the leader of what is now a fantastic and globally recognized organization.
[00:23:33] Speaker B: What was the reaction to react, like at the community level? But then also, what did these mainstream organizations think when we act came on the scene?
[00:23:46] Speaker D: Well, I remember when David Dinkins was running for mayor, I don't know if that one year, it might been like 1989 or something, and a group of progressive democrats got together and they called it environment 89. And there were these big meetings at St. John Cathedral, the divine.
And vernice and I went to one of them, and during the open mic, we got up and said, what was he going to do about environmental racism and environmental justice? And nobody had ever heard of it. And so we were then asked, well, what is that? And so that was the first time that vernice and I understand that those words were ever uttered to a group of people trying to take action around politics in New York City. And I think people were just learning. And then, of course, we were very strong. We got a lot of media publicity on the buses.
Daily News covered it a lot. Daily News back then had an uptown guy who covered uptown.
So we got a lot of media around the bus stuff and the MTA stuff. We did press conferences with. We joined forces. We've always had strong partnerships and understood that we can't do this work alone. So we partnered with the TWU. So obviously, all of these depots are in our community. So all these TWU workers are right here. Many of them live in this community, but they're all working here. And so what we realized was, it's not just the impact of diesel exhaust on people in this community, but what about the people inside the darn depot with the doors closed, where all this exhaust is? What about the fact that, I think it's been reported again in the Daily News and other papers that when a bus driver retires, many of them are dying within five years.
So again, we understood that these drivers and maintenance people inside the depots were very impacted. So we were able to reach out. We have one of our older photographs, and we're standing outside of the 127th and Amsterdam street depot, with Father Castle from St. Mary's Catholic Church, and with TWU members with their hats and signs on. And we're all talking about diesel fumes can kill. And so again, we were also able to really talk to the union about these issues as well.
[00:26:40] Speaker C: I find it very interesting that, and maybe not super surprising that the initial reaction from more mainstream environmental groups was like, wait, what is environmental racism? Can you tell us? I feel like to some extent, so much of that is still going on today. We spend so much of our time continuing to educate folks on what is environmental justice. We do our educational workshops here at weact, and that's where we always start. The workshop is, what is environmental justice? And the conversation normally starts with, well, it's the trees, it's the animals. Okay, let's move past that. Let's also talk about the impact of the environment on us as humans in our environment and environmental racism. What is that? And how does that fit into the work that we're doing? So I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to see everyone's face. What are you talking about? But I'm so glad that you brought up the dirty diesel campaign again, because it seems like that was the first real, like you mentioned campaign that you all started as a newly formed organization. And I would love to hear more about some of the conversations that you and Cecil and the conference director and your off office manager we're having in those kind of early days where you're deciding, is this it? Is this our first real campaign? Did it kind of happen organically to where it wasn't like an active decision? Or did you all kind of feel the momentum building? And you're like, yes, this is going to be something that we prioritize as our first real campaign.
[00:28:13] Speaker D: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the North river campaign was the first, but that's an air quality campaign. It was the fact that emissions from the plant were making people sick, especially those who lived along Riverside Drive. But also the smells from the plant could be smelled all the way over here. We're here on Amsterdam, so we understood also that we had an asthma epidemic. So we reached out to Harlem Hospital in Columbia to find out whether they saw more hospitalizations coming from our zip codes. And so we talked to a man named Doctor John Ford, who was the director of pulmonology at Harlem Hospital. And he called us about two years later to say that he was just about to publish a paper that showed that the prevalence of asthma in Harlem was three times that of other neighborhoods. And, you know, again, that was data we pushed for and requested. So that when we understood the issue about the buses and we decided to file the lawsuit against the MTA, well, that's the campaign, because we were already addressing the issues of North river. So the second campaign became the MTA. And when I say campaign, you know, all those tactics. For instance, with the North river plant, we held up traffic on Martin Luther King Day on the west side highway. We got arrested. We were called the sewage seven. David Patterson, who was our state senator and became lieutenant governor and then governor, was with us again. Strong campaign. Get in the New York Times. Get on tv. And then we had all the senior citizens holding up traffic on Riverside Drive. So when people were diverted from the west side highway to Riverside Drive, there we were holding them up again. And so direct action, those kinds of tactics were important. So when we rolled into the MTA, the campaign against the MTA, we knew that there were going to have to be hearings in the state legislature around this. And so every week, we would hold some sort of press conference. And then they decided they were going to close the only depot downtown and open a new one in East Harlem. And so every week for about three months, we held a press conference with state elected officials, hammering the fact that that depot should not be opened and organized, a lot of the people who live across from it. So another part of our strategy was organizing people who live near every depot.
[00:31:27] Speaker C: Thank you, Peggy. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us. I feel like it was such a joy. You gave us even more information than I expected. So this is beautiful. We're really filling out this narrative of we act and the impact that it's had.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: So the impact with just. With just four people. I don't know if Taryn's feeling this, too, but I'm thinking maybe we need to be working a little different.
[00:31:50] Speaker D: I know.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:31:52] Speaker C: Well, thank you so much again, Peggy. We can't wait till the next chance that we get to have you on the podcast.
[00:31:57] Speaker D: Okay, thank you.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Thank you for listening. If you liked the episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts about the show, we encourage you to reach out to us with your thoughts and
[email protected].
[00:32:12] Speaker A: Dot check out weact on Facebook, that's weactforej. And on Instagram X and YouTube. React four, EJ. That's w e a c t, number four, EJ. And check out our website, weact.org, for more information about environmental justice. Well, that's it.
[00:32:33] Speaker C: All we have to say is, thank you, Cecil.
