Troubling heroes: Reframing the environmental justice contributions of the Flint water crisis

Abstract

While the story of the Flint water crisis has been shared widely, the popular narrative—described in multiple documentaries and as evidenced by accolades heaped upon a limited few number of actors involved with Flint—largely leaves out the broad experiences and actions of Flint residents in responding to the crisis, raising awareness, and advocating for change. Academic literature has contributed to reinforcing an abbreviated and disempowered version of the narrative where Flint residents needed rescue. In this article, we present an extended description of the Flint water crisis leading up to the water switch in April 2014, including descriptions of community mobilization efforts to call government actions into account and produce investigations that validated the concerns of the residents. We offer a review of prominent academic literature demonstrating patterns of erasure that suggest Flint residents were disempowered. In response, we offer three examples which demonstrate how Flint resident mobilizations have broad historical context, national reach, and individual actions that contradict the narrative that Flint residents lack agency and power. In our analysis, rather than viewing Flint residents as in need of rescue by science, we argue that the community mobilization in Flint is indicative of a highly successful implementation of popular epidemiology with profound effects on national conversations about lead in water, drinking water infrastructure management, and environmental justice.

1 |. INTRODUCTION

Once the Flint water crisis (FWC) became national news, Flint was a magnet for academics and journalists eager to have their voices heard on the crisis. In this scramble, narratives inclusive of and highlighting the experiences and actions of Flint residents were obscured. Multiple documentaries have been produced that use charismatic characters to carry the story of the FWC within the film medium. In an analysis of national media depictions of the FWC, Carey and Lichtenwalter (2020) observed a lack of agency assigned to Flint residents, where residents were characterized as “angry but powerless” (p. 27). In this article, we turn our attention to the ways in which the academic literature rein-forces this “angry but powerless” narrative of Flint residents in response to the FWC.

The academic community has celebrated the actions of the same few charismatic characters uplifted by the media, through awards and speaking engagements, with little effort to also celebrate the tireless actions of numerous community members. As well, many researchers who published on the FWC did not conduct local research and repeated summaries provided by other sources, leading to distortions in the historical timeline such as those that happen in a long game of telephone. As a result, many published pieces on the FWC have inaccuracies. The framing of these articles tends to further minimize the involvement of Flint residents. Flint residents are cast as shadows in the background of their own stories while a few prominent figures are labeled heroes and outside organizations are credited with “saving” Flint.

The debacle in Flint launched lead in water as a national concern, raised awareness about decaying infrastructure, made visible issues around water access and water quality in the United States, and brought the issue of environmental racism to living rooms everywhere (Baum, Bartram, & Hrudey, 2016; Mohai, 2018). Flint’s salience continues such that politicians in the 2016 and 2020 elections strategically organized in and upon Flint. The FWC also squelched a rising narrative pushed by former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, initially considered a contender in the 2016 presidential election, about the national generalizability of Michigan’s model of emergency management. We assert that credit for these impacts should go largely to Flint residents for their actions throughout the FWC.

Our analysis highlights the actions of Flint residents mobilizing in refusal to accept the tacit abandonment and harm by government in its failure to protect the health and welfare of the Flint community. Racial capitalism operates through a process that renders populations as racialized, thus creating a system to value the certain groups of people less than others. In this system, environmental racism occurs in events like the FWC when the desire to maximize profits for more valued groups of people is put before the basic needs and wellbeing of less valued groups of people. While this system operates at a structural level, an additional violence is perpetrated upon communities when residents are characterized as passive and merely victims as such. Although we would prefer to take less space in repeating the timeline which has been described in so many publications, this is part of the problem in the extant literature. The sequence of events and their influence on outcomes is important in understanding how residents affected and were affected by those events.

In this article, we draw from Flint’s rich involvement in community based participatory research methods (CBPR) to show a sustained process of resident participation in critical inquiry and a sensitization to research methods, which are not highlighted in other retellings of the FWC. CBPR is the current gold standard for engaged research methods within the field of public health, where the goal of CBPR is to promote equity between academics and community members through shared control and leadership in all aspects of research. We argue that this longstanding engagement in CBPR lays the foundation for understanding the actions of Flint residents during the FWC as a successful implementation of popular epidemiology, and in doing so we rebut characterizations of Flint residents as background characters in the story of the FWC. Popular epidemiology is a lay investigative research process characterized by resident observations of potential associations between environmental hazards and health outcomes, resident recruitment of scientific experts to participate in an investigative process, and a political mobilization strategy for organizing to protect public health (Brown, 1987). Framed as a popular epidemiological intervention, Flint residents are not secondary to academic experts, but the revelations by those experts were grounded in community mobilization strategies that organized to invite collaboration with experts, engage in inquiry about community member concerns, and collect data to answer those community generated questions.

As the authors of this article have intimate experience with the Flint community, having worked in partnership with Flint community members since early 2015 (first author) or decades before (second author), and given the second author’s experience as a Flint resident, researcher, and community organizer, we first present our understanding of the FWC timeline. Next, after a review of a representative selection of prominent literature on Flint, which demonstrates how academia has contributed to a passive, victim narrative, we turn to a presentation of contexts in Flint that highlight the agency of Flint residents in organizing and resisting for community wellbeing. These contexts include the organizing history of Flint including the relevance of labor organizing, efforts to mobilize ethical scientific practices around a CBPR model, and community collection of embodied data for representation in political organizing. In the discussion, we review the examples provided in the timeline and the three contexts to show the ways in which resident actions align with a popular epidemiological frame. We conclude that the profound effect that the FWC has had on the national conversation around lead, infrastructure, and environmental justice should be largely credited to Flint residents for making this possible. It is our hope that future scholars will be more careful in challenging power dynamics through their writing rather than reinforcing the victim/savior trope that tends to be imposed.

2 |. THE FLINT WATER CRISIS

The unfolding of the FWC can be loosely characterized by the organizing frames of the residents during each period. Before the change in water sources, the focus of residents was principally on the high cost of water in Flint, with Flint water rates among the highest in the nation. Residents protested and spoke out demanding water affordability even leading into the days after the water switch in April 2014. After the water switch, residents’ protests shifted to focusing on the observed changes in the water (taste, color, and odor) and readily measurable health effects (rashes and hair loss). Up until the letter released to residents that the city was in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act for disinfection byproducts, residents had little official corroboration that something specific was in the water with the potential to cause harm. When the letter was distributed, residents were immediately concerned with the impacts of total trihalomethanes (TTHMs) but with the involvement of outside experts this shifted swiftly to a focus on elevated lead levels. The explosion in media attention around the water crisis and a measure of validation of Flint residents’ concerns began to break with MSNBC coverage and widely with the city, state, and federal declarations of emergency. These phases mark significant shifts in the way that residents framed the FWC and approached organizing for community redress.

2.1 |. Water affordability

Prior to the water switch in 2014, residents were already mobilizing against emergency management and exorbitant water rates. A study by Food and Water Watch (2016) found that Flint residents paid the most of any US municipality for their water. American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates show that the 2014 median household income in Flint was $24,679 and 41.6% of all people (73.7% with children under 5 years old) lived in poverty. In 2013, Flint Finance Director Jerry Ambrose estimated that the average Flint household paid $1,800 annually for water and sewer (Adams, 2013). The median household paid 7.3% of their annual income for water and sewer—1.6 times the EPA’s recommendation of 4.5% for water and sewer affordability and nearly three times the 2.5% goal of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO) (Colton, 2005; Mack & Wrase, 2017). High water rates were used as a political rationale for why the change in water source was necessary and emergency management was the means through which that change was made possible.

For a deep analysis of the historical conditions that led to the economic crisis in Flint see Hammer (2019) and Sadler and Highsmith (2016). Emergency financial management was imposed upon Flint between 2002–2004 and 2011–2015 in order to resolve debts but in the process stripped residents and officials of the ability to prioritize resident needs (Doidge et al., 2015). Critics have argued that the implementation of emergency management in Flint was a terrible instance of the violence of racialized capitalism in its devaluation of the wellbeing of communities of color in favor of profit accumulation for predominantly white beneficiaries (Pulido, 2016).

The decision to form the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) was announced in April 2010 as a partnership between Flint, Genesee County, the city of Lapeer, and Lapeer County in an effort to develop an alternative water source for the region (O’Brien, 2010). Flint’s Emergency Financial Manager Ed Kurtz gave authorization to join the KWA in 2013 and in 2014 then Emergency Manager Darnell Earley authorized using the Flint River for 2 years while the KWA pipeline was being constructed (Gooden-Smith, 2018). Discussions about using the Flint River as the city’s primary water source took place at least several years earlier (Longley, 2011).

Over the years, Flint residents faced multiple rate increases including a 25% water and 22% sewer increase in January 2011 and another 35% water and sewer increase only 9 months later in September (AlHajal, 2010; The Flint Journal, 2011). High water rates were presented as the rationale for why an alternative to Detroit’s water system was needed. In 2011, the public was told that “water customers in Flint and Genesee County could save $400 million in water rates over 30 years” (The Flint Journal, 2011). Not only should residents expect lower water rates but the KWA was pitched as an economic stimulus for the region because Flint would be able to offer affordable water to entice new businesses to the area (Gleason & Walker, 2011). When April 2014 arrived, Earley said that rates would not be going down because of the need to invest in the system (Adams, 2014c). Rather, a new rate increase of over $50 per month was recommended (Fonger, 2014c).

2.2 |. Taste, color, odor, rashes, and hair loss

Prior to the switch, residents had concerns about potential health consequences of using the Flint River for drinking water. Historically, the river was heavily contaminated from automobile manufacturing and there were anecdotal reports of it catching fire in the 1930s (Carmody, 2016). Overuse of fertilizers and sewage contamination in the 1970s led to widespread fish kills and algal blooms. In 1999, 22 million gallons of sewage poured into the river over 2 days when a pipe ruptured. For 14 months, direct contact with the river was prohibited. Another 18 million gallons of sewage spilled into the river in 2008. This legacy left the Flint River high in organic and inorganic matter.

Water operators expected that with the switch the only change would be water hardness, which residents would likely not notice (Adams, 2014a). In retrospect, residents have stated that they noticed changes in the taste, color, and odor of the water immediately. Local media at the time reported few complaints about quality but continued frustrations over water rates (Adams, 2014b). Internal documents showed that Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) officials were informed about the water potentially causing rashes in children as early as May (Masten, Davies, & McElmurry, 2016). By 1 month after the change, engineers were struggling to reduce the hardness of the water and MDEQ publicly stated that few complaints had been made about the water since the switch (Fonger, 2014h). By June, complaints had started to “pour in” (Fonger, 2014a). To address these complaints, the city added lime to soften the water but residents continued to state that the water “stinks” and tasted “nasty” (Fonger, 2014a). Into the summer of 2014, residents reported that water had declined in quality since the switch and they were frustrated that their high rates did not decrease with a reduction in quality (Fonger, 2014a). Residents continued holding protests against high water rates throughout the summer (Adams, 2014c; Ridley, 2014).

On August 14, 2014, routine testing found coliform bacteria in a sample. Two days later an additional test indicated the presence of total coliform bacteria, triggering the first boil order (Fonger, 2014g). Two additional boil orders were issued on September 5 and 6, also prompted by tests showing total coliform bacteria in the water (Associated Press, 2014; Fonger, 2014b, 2014d). Outside experts attributed the bacteria to leaks in the system typical of aging infrastructure and not a general indication of an impending crisis (Fonger, 2014b). For residents, the boil orders validated their rising concerns about the changes in appearance of the treated water and further damaged their confidence in the ability of the city to provide safe drinking water.

These concerns shifted to fear and indignation when General Motors (GM) was allowed to stop taking water from Flint because it was causing corrosion in their machinery (Fonger, 2014e). Still, the city continued to dismiss resident concerns, stating that the company needed water with “excellent” chloride levels for their production processes while “acceptable” levels of chlorides were sufficient to meet “safe” drinking water standards for general household use (Fonger, 2014f). The high corrosivity of the water in the distribution system was due to high preexisting levels of chlorides from road salts; high levels of organic matter that reacts with alloy surfaces, increasing metal oxidation and the leaching of lead (Korshin, Ferguson, & Lancaster, 2000); and the addition of ferric chloride by the city as a coagulant/flocculant to remove precipitate, which increased the chloride concentration in the water (Fonger, 2014e).

Where government, media, and academia refused to validate the concerns of residents, the faith community and local community-based organizations responded immediately to the needs of community. Bishop Bernadel Jefferson approached the Flint faith community about residents’ water concerns in 2014. As a result, collective efforts to advocate for filters, clean water, and residents’ concerns became priority for local churches. The Concerned Pastors for Social Action (Concerned Pastors hereafter) organized to bring attention to the water problem and address health concerns of congregants. Religious groups offered space for meetings to support protest efforts.

2.3 |. From TTHMs to lead

In late 2014, the city received notice from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that it had violated the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) by exceeding allowable levels of TTHMs, disinfection byproducts that are formed when chlorine reacts with organic matter (Prysby & Rosenthal, 2014). To reduce TTHMs the city added more ferric chloride, further increasing the corrosivity of the water. In January 2015, the city issued public notice of the SDWA permit violation.

In January and February 2015, Flint residents reached out to universities and outside organizations for help. Largely, academics who were approached were unable/unwilling to offer assistance without accessible dedicated funds to readily switch over to investigating residents’ concerns and with no official datasets to draw upon for analysis. Internationally known environmental activists Erin Brockovich and Lois Gibbs were responsive. Brockovich connected residents with Robert Bowcock, an environmental advocate and former water utilities manager based in California. Bowcock visited Flint, toured the treatment plant, reviewed treatment processes, provided a set of recommendations for addressing the problems with the treatment system, met with residents, and recommended residents advocate on multiple fronts (political, legal, scientific, etc.) to demand accountability from government. Gibbs shared community mobilizing strategies with Flint resident, Melissa Mays. Mays teamed up with Flint resident LeeAnne Walters to form Water You Fighting For? (WYFF). While Bowcock’s presentation focused on TTHMs, he also worried about how the treatment processes were contributing to corrosion in the distribution system and household plumbing (Mays, 2015).

Throughout the spring, residents organized marches, protests, townhall meetings, spoke out at public meetings and events, and engaged in social media to elevate their voice about the negative impacts of the water. Flint Councilman Eric Mays (no relation to Melissa) stated “we’ve had people come in where one mother testified that she would fill her bathtub up halfway and sit her twin babies in there and from halfway down, they broke out in rashes…She’s concerned about what we’re going to do to help. We’ve had elderly break out in rashes. I’m hearing all of these, what I’m calling, valid concerns” (Stafford, 2015). Others complained of vomiting and diarrhea (Gottesdiener, 2015). Local media was contacted by residents on numerous occasions, yet without validation from the government, editors did not consider the concerns of residents to be newsworthy (University of Michigan—Flint, 2016).

After receiving the SDWA violation notice from the city, Flint resident LeeAnne Walters requested that the city test her water. There is no safe level of lead exposure, but EPA regulatory requirements trigger when water tests exceed 15 parts per billion (PPB). A test collected on February 18, 2015 showed that the water in the Walters’ home contained 104 PPB of lead (Del Toral, 2015). A second test from March 3, 2015 revealed 397 PPB of lead. The method of testing used by the city of Flint involved a pre-flush, which has been criticized by Marc Edwards, an environmental engineer and lead expert with Virginia Tech (VT), as artificially suppressing the lead measurements below what residents would routinely be exposed to (Del Toral, 2015; R. Williams, 2015b). Based on elevated levels of lead in the family’s water, in April the Walters’ children were tested for lead (Guyette, 2015). Tests showed that the Walters’ 4-year-old son had a BLL above the action level of 5.0 μg/dL at 6.5 μg/dL, which can have irreversible long-term neurological effects (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017; Hulett, 2015). Walters got in touch with Miguel Del Toral, the regulations manager for the Ground Water and Drinking Water Branch of the EPA’s Region 5. Del Toral was alarmed by the Walters’ lead levels and put the family in touch with Edwards (McCartney, 2010). The VT team tested the water in Walters’ home and found lead levels as high as 13,200 PPB, which they described as hazardous waste (Roy, 2015c).

In March 2015 Flint Democracy Defense League (FDDL), Concerned Pastors (including Bishop Jefferson), WYFF, Councilman Eric Mays, Mt. Zion Church, and Woodside Church came together to form the Coalition for Clean Water (“Coalition” hereafter). The group prepared flyers to distribute throughout the community to raise awareness about the water problems. They went house-to-house with door hangers that encouraged residents to get their water tested, talk to their doctors if they were experiencing any symptoms, and contact their elected officials with provided numbers. They also collected sample bottles from the water plant that they distributed to and collected from residents so that residents could get their water tested by the city for free. Curt Guyette, investigative journalist for the ACLU of Michigan, along with filmmaker Kate Levy contacted the FDDL and met with the Coalition in April for the 1-year anniversary of the switch while they were working on a larger story about emergency management. They went on to produce the first documentary film about the water crisis, Here’s to Flint, and Guyette became an integral partner in investigating the crisis (Guyette & Levy, 2016).

In May, Coalition members participated in the International Social Movements Gathering on Water and Affordable Housing (Gathering hereafter) in Detroit, putting the issues in Flint in front of a larger audience of water activists fighting water shutoffs and for affordability. Coalition members also retained attorney Trachelle Young and prepared an intent to file an injunction to move back to the Detroit water system. The intent was filed in June 2015 but was quickly thrown out by a judge. This action coincided with Flint Attorney Val Washington’s lawsuit contending that Flint illegally raised water rates in 2011. Buoyed by the Gathering in May, from July 3–10 Detroit and Flint water activists mobilized a 70-mile march from Detroit to Flint in solidarity between the two cities’ water struggles. After arriving in Flint, marchers were bussed to the state capitol in Lansing for a protest. Dozens joined at different locations along the way and the march garnered significant media attention. WYFF helped to gather over 26,000 signatures that they gave to the Mayor of Flint in early August 2015, demanding a switch back to the Detroit system.

In the latter half of August 2015, Coalition members worked with the Edwards’ VT research team to collect water samples from Flint homes. Edwards sent 300 kits hoping that they would get 100 returned. Over 2 weeks, Coalition members were able to get 277 kits sent back. This tremendous response rate was possible because local churches donated spaces for around a dozen meetings. The Coalition put out advertisements through radio, Facebook, and print ads. Coalition members met with Guyette to plan where to distribute kits across the city and to ensure that the returned kits, as they came back in, were adequately representative of the distribution system. Guyette and Melissa Mays walked door-to-door to recruit so that sufficient responses were gathered. Participants were excluded if they did not live in a house with an independent water meter or lived in Flint township. Those residents that did not have transportation were picked up and driven by Coalition members to meetings. Nayyirah Shariff welcomed residents and showed them a video instructing them about how to collect the samples. Coalition members helped to organize filled sample bottles for overnight shipment back to VT. VT’s analysis showed that 20 % of the first 120 samples exceeded 15 PPB (Roy, 2015a). The Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) requires remediation if the city’s LCR compliance testing finds an excess of 10% of samples over the regulatory limit (Environmental Protection Agency, 2017). Despite the findings of the VT analysis, officials with Flint, MDEQ, and the state continued to deny that there was a problem with the water system and insisted that Flint would not switch back to Detroit (Fonger, 2015a). Official responses asserted that the water was of appropriate quality at the water treatment plant.

While city officials discounted the VT analysis, others in the community were more responsive. Encouraged by Elin Botanzo (formerly with the EPA) and others, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, Director of the Pediatric Residency Program at the Hurley Medical Center, worked with Rick Sadler, a medical geographer with Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine, to analyze Hurley’s historic data on lead testing of children in Flint before and after the change to the Flint River. On September 24, 2015, Hanna-Attisha publicized that an analysis of 1,746 children showed an increase in BLL since the switch (Hanna-Attisha, 2015). They found an increase from 2.1% to 4% of children with BLL over 5 μg/dL for all children tested in Flint and an increase from 2.5% to 6.3% for children living in the neighborhoods analyzed by VT (Hanna-Attisha, LaChance, Sadler, & Schnepp, 2016). City, MDEQ, and EPA officials all stated that the results of official routine monitoring of the water indicated no potential for health impacts. Brad Wurfel stated that, “anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax” and that any children with elevated BLL were outliers (Smith, 2015).

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) ran their own analysis which showed no change in BLL (Fonger, 2015b). Wurfel called Hanna-Attisha’s announcement “unfortunate” in a time of “near-hysteria” in the community (Associated Press, 2015). Soon, however, it was discovered that the state’s analysis included children outside of Flint who were not on the Flint water system (Sadler, 2016). When those children were excluded, the state’s results using a much larger dataset mirrored those from the Hurley data.

After confirmation that the water from the Flint River led to elevated water lead levels (WLL) in homes and elevated BLL in children, Genesee County declared a public health emergency and instructed residents not to drink the water (C. Williams, 2015a). Subsequently, the faith community organized water distribution efforts from local churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues. For months, national religious organizations sent trucks of water into Flint to their local affiliates to disseminate to Flint residents. Community Based Organization Partners (CBOP) members Janice Muhammad and Katherine Blake organized water delivery operations to deliver bottled water and water-related information to residents who could not leave their homes (Johnson & Key, 2018).

It was ultimately revealed that the city’s failure to add corrosion control to the water system allowed for the breakdown of protective layers of scale and biofilm and the release of lead into the water (Masten et al., 2016; Olson et al., 2017). On October 16, 2015, Flint switched back to the Detroit water system and began flushing the pipes of the Flint River water. By November 2015, the first class action lawsuit related to the FWC was filed in US District Court, (case No. 15–14,002), arguing that due process had been violated as a result of emergency management of the city and held the Governor and state and Flint officials as defendants in the case. At least a dozen lawsuits were filed in county, state, and federal courts, many focusing on constitutional violations related to due process and equal protection, as well as violations of the SDWA (The Network for Public Health Law, 2016). Throughout 2015, officials refuted residents’ claims of rashes as rashes and hair loss as they are not known symptoms of lead exposure. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) conducted an investigation into the source of the rashes and concluded that they were likely caused not by lead but by wide swings in chlorine and water hardness levels (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, 2016).

2.4 |. (Inter-)National awareness

In December 2015, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC began coverage of the water situation and centered a prominent national media spotlight on the city. Within the next month, the Mayor, Governor, and President all declared a state of emergency in Flint. Initial government communications about the water in Flint were distributed only in English and over English media stations. Hispanic residents reported they did not find out about the FWC until 2016 when their relatives from their other countries called them and told them not to drink the water. When water points of distribution (PODs) were set up, they were staffed by national guardsmen in full uniform and PODs required identification to receive water. Undocumented residents were fearful about trying to get water from PODs and when guardsmen went door-to-door to distribute water residents were afraid that they would be detained and deported if they opened the door. Local groups and Hispanic organizations in Detroit mobilized and translated pertinent communications concerning the water in Flint and distributed water and information to Flint’s Spanish-speaking community.

With the declarations of emergency came official investigations into the cause of the failures in infrastructure. The Flint Water Advisory Task Force (FWATF), commissioned by Governor Snyder, concluded in their March 2016 report that a major factor in the crisis was environmental injustice as a result of insufficient democratic representation introduced by the emergency management structure (Davis, Kolb, Reynolds, Rothstein, & Sikkema, 2016). Over 2016, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission (MCRC) held hearings to determine if any civil rights violations had occurred. The commission concluded that environmental racism played a significant role in the course of events (Demashkieh et al., 2017).

While the state of emergency was lifted in the summer of 2016, for residents the water crisis continued. Flint Rising was formed in January 2016 as a fiduciary so that the Coalition groups and outside allies could fundraise, as previously members had been using personal money to support purchasing and delivering water to community members. This allowed the group to collect donations to pay for buses for travel and for direct actions. Flint residents have never stopped fighting for their community. The WYFF website keeps a counter of the number of days since the start of the crisis, at the time of writing now approaching its seventh year. As a community, Flint remains ever vigilant fighting for change in governance, health, and humanity for the city and beyond.

3 |. INFLUENTIAL ACADEMIC LITERATURE ON THE FWC

At the time of writing, a search of Google Scholar for the words “Flint” and “water” between 2014–2020 produced roughly 30,000 results. Our review focused on articles with “Flint” and “water in the title” and more than eight citations or referred to ‘justice’ in the title, abstract, or journal name (n = 54). From these articles four prominent themes emerged, each of which contributes to an erasure of the importance of Flint residents’ organizing efforts. These themes include (1) articles that use the FWC as a case study to analyze a topic of relevance to the author, (2) basic sciences articles that attempt to analyze a narrow aspect of the FWC, (3) critical race articles that focus on structural analyses of harm but in doing so limit the discussion of agency of the residents, and (4) articles that focus on a limited number of actors and in doing so suggest decontextualized influence of individuals over the labor of the community.

The first theme includes a subset of articles that does not contribute to new knowledge about Flint but instead focuses on topics of interest to the authors. These may include articles that use the FWC as an educational case study (Aguirre, Anhalt, Cortez, Turner, & Simic-Muller, 2019; Buckley & Fahrenkrug, 2020; Davis & Schaeffer, 2019) or use the FWC from which to position a deeper analysis of a theoretical concept (Wilson & Stanley, 2020). Articles that use the FWC as an illustrative case tend to present a summary of the FWC based on general literature reviews rather than direct research and run the risk of authoritatively presenting information that is distorted through reinterpretation and summarization. These oversimplified timelines default to a heroic narrative without adequately conveying the impact and agency of Flint residents.

We found that most articles treat Flint residents as background characters in the development of the water crisis. This second group includes scientific articles that attempt to focus on chemistry, health, legal, or policy analyses. In these articles, residents may not be mentioned at all but when they are their actions are limited to observing aesthetic (taste, color, odor) changes in the water and health effects (rashes or hair falling out) (Goovaerts, 2017; Heard-Garris et al., 2017; Logan, 2018; Lytle et al., 2019; Masten et al., 2016; Mayfield, Carolan, Weatherspoon, Chung, & Hoerr, 2017; Olson et al., 2017; Ruckart et al., 2019; Schwake, Garner, Strom, Pruden, & Edwards, 2016). Some articles suggest that local government intervened before residents realized there was a problem (Wang, Kim, & Whelton, 2019) or they might downplay community mobilization by suggesting it was mutual and cooperative, such as “initial government and community efforts focused on providing water filters and bottled water to Flint residents” (Healy & Bernstein, 2016, p. 170).

In this second theme, if agency of residents is suggested it is typically limited to a brief mention in the article about how residents observed aesthetic changes in the water, perhaps mentioning that they associated those changes with health outcomes, or participated in protests (Congdon Jr, Ngo, & Young, 2020; Lubrano, 2017; Mix & Gill, 2020). Some, while acknowledging mobilization efforts, may still present resident action in such a limited way that suggests their role was modest. These statements might be limited to a sentence or two that says “residents fought to have [the water contamination] mitigated” (Butler, Scammell, & Benson, 2016, p. 94) or “in an effort to resist emergency management, and, later, to bring attention to the water quality issues in Flint, residents organised at the grassroots level, protesting and demonstrating against local and state governmental actions, and, in some cases, inactions” (Doyon-Martin, 2020, p. 320). While these statements are important, positioned in a larger article that may give paragraphs describing individual experts and their involvement in the FWC it is easy to take away that resident involvement was modestly influential.

A third framing observed in the literature comes from critically engaged scholars that attempt to highlight the role of power imbalances and the violence of the current racial capitalist system for communities of color. Critical race framing articles, while important for understanding the mechanisms of oppression that led to the crisis, typically downplay agency of Flint residents if focusing directly on residents as individuals at all (Ranganathan, 2016). While this literature is essential in understanding how events like the FWC unfold, we have to wonder at times if each of these authors would be comfortable reading their articles aloud in the Flint community. Through concentrating on the perpetrated violence this literature characterizes Flint residents as passive victims, often using quite provocative language. One article described Flint as having “infected flesh from lead poisoning” and residents as “infected bodies” (Grimmer, 2017, p. 20, 27). Articles focusing on the mental, physical, and developmental harm to Flint children suggest that they are irreparably damaged and less capable of advocating for themselves (Healy & Bernstein, 2016; Washington & Pellow, 2016). These articles make statements such as “devalued and disposable Flint residents” (Pulido, 2016, p. 4) and that Flint residents are expendable, surplus people who are viewed as “ungovernable, as a social contaminant, a cultural pollutant” (Washington & Pellow, 2016, p. 55). This leads to statements that because Flint is a poor, Black community it “is not surprising” that the FWC happened (Greenberg, 2016, p. 1359). A counter to these frames comes from articles developed with Flint residents as co-authors where, while also discussing the violence perpetrated upon the Flint community and using language such as “genocide” to describe what happened to the community, they point to the potential of Flint residents, particularly youth, to organize in resistance to such injustices (Muhammad et al., 2018).

The fourth pattern in the literature that we encountered was that of the heroic savior. Journalists frequently used the language of hero to describe various actors involved in the unfolding of the FWC. In some ways this is understandable as media is reporting an event moment-by-moment and storytelling is more relatable with main characters that an audience can connect with. Although there has been the use of explicit language describing a handful of actors as heroes of Flint (Pulido, 2016), heroic narratives may reinforce this trope simply by focusing on individuals’ actions without positioning those actions within the context of the broader actions of the community. While different heroes or focal points were identified depending on the source and the authors’ priorities (one article suggested a public relations manager for the Governor as an “almost” savior [Logan, 2018]), these articles tend to give focus to a relatable character while leaving out the history and context through which that character’s contributions emerged (Craft-Blacksheare, 2017; DeWitt, 2017; Edwards & Pruden, 2016; Hanna-Attisha et al., 2016; Pieper et al., 2018; Pieper, Tang, & Edwards, 2017).

Throughout the literature we found a general absence of language that suggested the importance of Flint residents in responding to the water crisis. The notable exception to this frame is Flint resident Ben Pauli’s (2019) book, “Flint Fights Back.” While some authors pointed to additional community actions such as lawsuits (Gostin, 2016; Hodgson, 2019), community mobilization was largely not emphasized. In the next section, we present three contexts that illustrate the efforts of Flint residents to mobilize to protect public health and advocate for the community. These contexts are not exhaustive of all residents’ efforts by any means, but we hope that they help to shift the lens toward more attention on the contributions of the Flint community.

4 |. FLINT CONTEXTS

In this section, we present three contexts that illustrate the importance of community organizing for Flint residents in relation to the emergence of resident mobilization around the FWC. We present these as contexts as opposed to cases because they each present a pattern of action as opposed to a discrete mobilization event. The contexts that are key for understanding the development of resident actions in relation to the FWC include the cultural importance of Flint’s history of organizing in resistance to unfair treatment, the community’s leadership in CBPR and ethical research methodology, and the contemporary efforts of residents to collect data that highlight the residents’ experiences with and perspectives on the water system.

4.1 |. Organizing history

Residents in Flint have a long history of resisting unfair, inhumane, and unethical treatment. On December 30, 1936, United Auto Workers (UAW) members employed by GM in Flint went on strike against low wages and poor working conditions. Strikers occupied two plants to avoid cold weather and police violence against picket lines (West, 1986). The sit-down strike lasted 44 days and was met by police aggression with clubs, tear-gas bombs, riot guns, and pistols while strikers resisted with fire hoses, hinges, bottles, stones, and other projectiles thrown at policemen (Fine, 2020). When it was over GM agreed to recognize the UAW as the negotiating body for workers and the UAW obtained legitimacy as a powerful group able to challenge industry. UAW membership grew rapidly and organizers took their efforts to organizing labor in the factories in Detroit (Smith, 2001). Flint residents hold deep pride for the city’s role in launching the successes of labor unions. This history remains part of the cultural context of the community where protest, organization, and resistance are valued parts of family histories.

In response to Flint being put under emergency management, Flint residents organized to form the FDDL. Two of its founding members included Nayyirah Shariff and Claire McClinton. McClinton herself is a retired UAW member and comes from a family of autoworkers. McClinton has a long connection to water organizing in Detroit, helmed by the MWRO, which itself was closely tied to the history of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Dating back to 2005 MWRO has led the fight against water shutoffs in Detroit (Carrera, 2014). Water shutoffs present the risk of child removal by MDHHS Child Protective Services and potential loss of property due to unpaid water bills being transferred to tax liens on housing.

In resistance to emergency management in Michigan, a statewide coalition of groups formed, including FDDL members and other Flint residents, mobilizing to collect more than 200,000 signatures to put repealing the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act of 2011, Public Act 4 of 2011 (emergency manager law) on the ballot in the November 2012 election. The law was overturned by voters. However, within a few months, Michigan legislators passed the Local Financial Stability and Choice Act of 2012, or Public Act 436, a very similar law with most powers of the emergency manager intact. The new law also contained an appropriation that prevented it from coming up for referendum again (Michigan Radio Newsroom, 2013).

The history of labor organizing in Flint primed residents to organize against unfair governance practices including emergency management and high water rates. In 2013 faith leaders and local organizations, such CBOP, delivered water to Flint homes affected by shutoffs. That same year, the Mission of Hope (MOH) shelter, led by Pastor Bobby Johnson, allowed community members to shower at the Mission and take water home to drink. After MOH’s water was shut off as they too could not afford the high water rates, CBOP coordinated volunteer efforts to bring MOH water so that their water mission could continue (Johnson & Key, 2018). Between 2011 and 2014, groups like Concerned Pastors spoke out against high water rates, rate increases, and new millages that would pose additional burdens on already struggling Flint residents.

4.2 |. Ethical science

In addition to labor organizing, Flint has played a prominent role in the development of ethical research methods for scientific engagement, leading to active resident involvement in the oversight of research projects developed around the FWC. The Flint community’s response to the water crisis was aided by preexisting leadership in collaborative research addressing health disparities along the lines of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. In the 1990’s, leaders in Flint participated in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Based Public Health Initiative (CBPHI). This initiative premised that to improve the health of communities, collaborative efforts should involve academics, practitioners, government, and community. The goal was to strengthen the practice and teaching of public health through partnerships (W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 1995). From these collaborations the groundwork for the CBPR model was laid. In 1994 Flint-based CBOP was formed, which is an umbrella organization of community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, neighborhood associations and other Flint and Genesee County residents. CBOP helped to form the Community Based Public Health Caucus of the American Public Health Association (CBPHC, 2011) and was a core organizer of the National Community Based Organization Partners. These organizations have played national roles in championing community based public health, equitable community-academic partnerships, and CBPR.

Communities of color have a long history of distrust of government and research, with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study still having salience in community discussions (Brandon, Isaac, & LaVeist, 2005). While Institutional Review Boards (IRB) are established at medical centers and universities to ensure the protection of research participants, their governance is not controlled by affected communities (del Campo, Casado, Spencer, & Strelnick, 2013). A review panel for a municipality led and controlled by residents without institutional interference is exceptionally rare. In 2009, Key (second author) founded CBOP’s Community Ethics Review Board (CERB) (Key, 2017). The CERB is comprised of community members who provide ethical reviews of proposed research, identify community advisory board members for researchers (if needed), and work with researchers to ensure community-level protections and mutual benefit. The CERB serves the interests of both the Flint community (protecting them from unethical research conduct) and researchers interested in Flint (facilitating access to the community).

With an influx of researchers, community groups, churches, neighborhood associations, and schools were approached to recruit participants for numerous studies. Community leaders wanted to ensure mutual benefit and that the research being conducted in Flint was informed and endorsed by the community. The CERB became a vehicle through which hundreds of research studies presented to various Flint groups were vetted, critiqued, and discussed by local community members trained in research ethics (Key, 2017). After initially failing to give credence to residents’ concerns, once the FWC made national news Michigan State University and the University of Michigan stepped in to form the Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center (HFRCC) in collaboration with and led by CBOP-CERB and the Flint-based National Center for African American Health Consciousness (NCAAHC). The HFRCC works to centralize the coordination of the studies of Flint, ensure that they are reviewed by the community, and that the products of the research are available to and benefit the community.

4.3 |. Community data

Lastly, when residents were initially dismissed by academics who were solicited for assistance, residents were undeterred in their effort to collect community level data. When WYFF formed in early 2015, they began collecting resident experiences with the water. Melissa and Adam Mays developed a website to provide a clearinghouse for information on the water situation in Flint. The site gathered personal information, house location, number in household, “What does your water look/feel/smell like? Explain:”, “Having any recent health issues? Explain:”, whether the respondent had consulted a doctor, average monthly water bill, whether the information submitted can be shared with government officials, and any “Additional Questions, Concerns, Complaints:”.

Testimonies were visually displayed onto a city map as a way of constructing a community-level spatial narrative about the water crisis across the city, emphasizing the broad impact of problems for Flint residents and binding them together through observed health conditions and contaminated water. (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, & Harris, 2015). The map included pictures of discolored water in tubs, resident descriptions of rashes, hair loss, autoimmune disorders, infections, broken fire hydrants, flushing fire hydrants, and high water bills.

WYFF used this map (Figure 1) to convey the experiences of Flint residents to those who would listen and those they considered accountable for the problems in the city. Melissa Mays printed the map and affixed it to a large sheet of cardboard so that it could be brought out at meetings. In July 2015 Coalition members brought the cardboard map to the Michigan Governor’s office. At a second meeting in early August, in addition to bringing the cardboard map, the up-to-date map was printed on handouts and distributed to state officials including the Governor’s Chief of Staff and Director of Urban Initiatives. In response to these meetings, 1,500 tap filters were donated to area churches for distribution. The map has also been included in lawsuits related to the water crisis.

FIGURE 1.

Resident experiences with water mapped onto the city of Flint by WYFF (http://wateryoufightingfor.com/downloads/mapofflintwaternewestoneWEB.png)

At Coalition rallies residents held up clear plastic bottles with water they collected from their taps showing dirty, brown, discolored water and demanding local leaders address whether they would drink the water from the bottles. Residents collected hair from their drains and brought it as evidence of hair loss from bathing in polluted water. Resident testimonials included embodied data in the form of clumps of hair and bottles of brown water to visually tell the story of their experiences on the water system.

While popular and academic narratives emerged that minimized the importance of Flint residents in response to the FWC, community members took to conducting their own analyses of resident concerns and priorities. As the FWC unfolded hundreds of meetings were held. Key (second author) attended many dozens of these meetings to listen, observe, and discover the main concerns of residents. In 2016, Key organized a community voice project with two dozen Flint residents and academic partners to transcribe 17 public meetings that had been recorded, review the transcripts for community perspectives, assess connections between community representation and trust, and conduct nine focus groups with roughly 140 residents across racial and age groups to develop a coherent version of the community’s perspective on the water crisis (Carrera et al., 2019). A subset participated in the coding and analysis of the focus group data. The significant takeaway from this research was the desire for true community control over the FWC narrative, where community member data is recognized as valid data and that the desires, goals, and benefits for community members are the forefront of investigations into environmental justice struggles.

5 |. DISCUSSION

While scholars assert that Flint residents could not succeed without expert scientists and therefore failed to independently bring about change (Krings, Kornberg, & Lane, 2019), for our analysis we present a discussion of Flint as a highly successful case of popular epidemiology. Brown’s (1993) popular epidemiology model suggests that community recruitment of independent scientists is a form of organizing not a weakness in the power of resident mobilizations. Brown conceived of popular epidemiology in his analysis of community efforts during the early 1980’s in Woburn, Massachusetts where a childhood leukemia cluster was discovered to be associated with low-lying contaminated wells (Brown, 1987). Brown describes popular epidemiology to be a lay investigative process to uncover associations between environmental contaminants and health experiences. Popular epidemiology is both a scientific as well as a social organizing process where communities work to answer questions that are important to residents and fight against the minimization and dismissal of residents’ concerns.

According to Brown (1993, 1997), popular epidemiology can be characterized in 10 stages that may not necessarily follow in sequential order. Flint residents began with Lay Observations of Health Effects and Pollutants in the weeks after the water switch when they observed discolored, fowl smelling and tasting water coming from their faucets along with a co-incidence of rashes and hair loss. They proceeded in Hypothesizing Connections between the change in the water quality and those health outcomes. Over time, residents hypothesized about health connections to bacteria, chlorine, disinfection byproducts, lead, and copper all found in the water. By beginning very early on in organizing meetings and showing up to speak out about the problems with the water system, the community moved swiftly into Creating a Common Perspective. Residents have also continued to work toward creating a common perspective through leading efforts in ethics in research in the community and driving research studies to answer resident questions about the FWC.

All throughout 2014 and early 2015 residents went through official channels in reaching out to the city and state as they were Looking for Answers from Government and Science. When academia failed to take interest and government refused to acknowledge the seriousness of the problems in Flint, residents continued by Organizing a Community Group. Individual groups such as WYFF were formed by residents and these efforts were brought into larger partnerships such as the Coalition for Clean Water and later Flint Rising, linking WYFF, FDDL, Concerned Pastors, and other supporters. Official Studies Conducted by Experts only came in response to investigations spearheaded by residents wherein those official analyses, such as the MDDHS analysis refuting the Hurley data, disputed that there were any significant problems with the water system.

Through reaching out to Brockovich, Bowcock, and Gibbs, Flint residents brought in expert environmental activists to guide them in their efforts. They also invited Edwards and his VT team to the community to analyze water samples across the city, providing the first scientific confirmation of water contamination. While Hanna-Attisha was independent of the activist groups, her analysis came about because of the efforts of the Coalition and the WLLs revealed by VT. These all speak to how Flint Activists Brought in their Own Experts. Litigation and Confrontation have been powerful tools used by Flint residents including the intent to file for an injunction against the use of the Flint River, Washington’s lawsuit against water rate raises, and the class action and individual lawsuits filed against the city and state. Protests have been a consistent part of the process for Flint dating long before the water switch and continuing long after. Notable examples include the delivery of WYFF’s map to the Governor, delivery of more than 26,000 signatures to the Mayor demanding a return to Detroit, as well as the Detroit to Flint march. Pressing for Official Corroboration paid off with the CDC’s investigation of rashes in Flint which pointed to variable chlorine levels, the conclusion of the FWATF and the MCRC that environmental injustice and environmental racism had taken place in Flint, and criminal charges being filed against at least 15 people from the city to the state level for their involvement in Flint (Egan, 2017).

Finally, through ongoing pursuit of legal interventions; the fight against emergency management and water shutoffs; advancing leadership in scientific investigations and formalizing structures for ethical oversight of scientific research in the community; persistent activism about water quality through social media, speaking engagements, and collaborations with environmental justice activists around the world; and deep distrust of government to protect the wellbeing of the public, Flint residents demonstrate the highest level of Continued Vigilance. As Flint residents continue to fight for infrastructural improvements for the community, accountability, and compensation from government, and to share their experiences with other communities coming to terms with their own environmental justice struggles, the residents of Flint have demonstrated themselves as leaders in confronting a public health crisis and have presented a strong contemporary example of resistance to environmental injustice.

6 |. CONCLUSION

The academic literature has largely supported the conclusion that awareness of the FWC can be attributed to the actions of a few individuals while the efforts of residents offer only modest context. Understanding the impact of the FWC crisis, however, cannot genuinely be disentangled from the efforts of the community as a whole. After the declarations of states of emergency in 2016, the events of the FWC became widely known throughout households in America. While these events were shocking, widespread knowledge about Flint would not be because of the severity of lead exposures. Many have argued that Flint is not even one of the most severely affected communities with respect to lead exposure (Wines & Schwartz, 2016). The Washington DC case 10 years earlier included 4,109 homes that were tested in excess of 15 PPB (Cohen, 2004). Decaying infrastructure is such a widespread problem across the United States that drinking water infrastructure gets a grade of “D” by the American Society of Civil Engineers (2017). We do not specifically know about Flint because of it being kept under emergency management as eight other cities and three school districts in Michigan have come under emergency management with the most dramatic case leading to the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history in Detroit in 2013. While the egregiousness of environmental racism that took place in Flint is remarkable, it is not unique and events like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 share strong parallels. We also do not believe that widespread awareness about the FWC can be credited merely to the heroism of a handful of individuals. Instead, awareness about Flint emerged because of Flint residents’ tireless actions to make their experiences and voices be known. These efforts were not suddenly emergent as a consequence of the switch in the water system, and residents merely overreacting to aesthetic changes in the water as many experts and officials initially suggested, but from a vigilant and organized community familiar with the importance of community mobilization to bring about change in confronting power.

We argue that we know about Flint because of the residents’ persistent, consistent, tireless action to resist, organize, and hold accountable. Flint residents are leaders in responding to a public health crisis, organizing against environmental injustices, and leading new directions of scientific inquiry. The impacts of the resistance efforts in Flint are not limited to the city’s borders. Remarkably, under a Trump presidency which saw continued efforts to reduce funding for and even eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt aimed to launch a “war on lead” as a direct result of the events that occurred during the FWC (Roy & Edwards, 2019; Siegel, 2018). The water industry had long resisted addressing lead in water because of high costs of pipe replacement but because of the publicity of events in Flint it has changed course and moved forward with programs to reduce lead in plumbing (Rothstein, 2016). The FWC crisis has been infused into the larger Black Lives Matter movement where the denial of breath and water create a fundamental intersection between racial and environmental justice (Sands, 2016). As scholars continue to unpack and leverage the events surrounding the FWC in understanding contemporary struggles for health and democracy, we must begin from a place that recognizes the humanity of and indebtedness we have to thousands of Flint residents who persisted and demanded better.

“People have said many times that if this had happened in a rich white community the FWC would not have happened. I think that’s true because they wouldn’t have any idea how to organize like Flint did.”

Melissa Mays

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.