Angela
Brown
A leading student/youth organizer dedicated to fighting for environmental
justice, Angela Elizabeth Brown has been called a "drum major for justice
in the rural South." Her efforts have served as a wake-up call to young people,
urging them to acknowledge their own power to shape their surroundings, and
ultimately, change their future.
Ms. Brown's ability to successfully mobilize youth was evident at the age
ot- fourteen, wE she first organized her peers around such pressing issues
as education, voter registration drives and women's support groups. Throughout
college and graduate school, Angela concentrated her energies on educational
justice. She helped bring together youth for the 1990 national March for
Justice in Education, which took place in Selma, Alabama, and founded the
Leadership Initiative Project (LIP) to promote youth leadership and fight
discriminatory academic "tracking" in the North Carolina schools.
It was in 1992 that Ms. Brown began focusing on environmental justice, when
she founded the Youth Task Force of the Southern Organizing Committee, a
network of youth organizations spanning ten states and 85 universities. By
organizing disenfranchised youth and communities of color to fight for
environmental justice, Ms. Brown is empowering them to seek out and sustain
a decent quality of life.
Ms. Brown is part of a growing grassroots movement that is effectively capturing
the attention of the U.S. government. A June 1995 report from the United
States General Accounting Office acknowledged the urgency of environmental
inequities: "The issue of environmental justice -- the question of whether
minorities and low-income people bear a disproportionate burden of exposure
to toxic pollutants and any resulting health effects -- has been the subject
of growing concern over the past decade. The issue has become one of the
top priorities of the Environmental Protection Agency."
Ms. Brown's successful organizing work with Greenpeace and the Youth Task
Force resulted in preventing the installation of a PVC plant in Wallace,
Louisiana, and halting the construction of a hazardous waste incinerator
in Noxxubbe, Mississippi. Earlier this year, the Youth Task Force co-sponsored
a march in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest the opening of a garbage transfer
station in a minority neighborhood and kick-off a campaign called "Peace
in the Streets, Unity in the Community for a Strong Black Nation." Ms. Brown
and the Youth Task Force are currently working to create a National Black
Youth Agenda.
Mirror Image, Inc. and
Broadmeadows Middle School