“A Government Committed to Serving Everybody with Dignity and Respect” 

Public acts of violence are harmful to viewers as well as victims, particularly when the victims are powerless. They can leave witnesses helpless and angry at the dehumanization that is occurring. It is worse when the government is inflicting the harm. 

The announcement on April 11 by the Department of Justice that it would abandon a settlement agreement with local and state health officials in Alabama for a corrective action plan to rectify public sanitation conditions in Lowndes County is a public act of violence. We who are witnesses need to speak up. 

Many residents in this poor rural county suffer from poor sanitation. Hampered by impermeable soil, poor public infrastructure, lax enforcement of state laws and limited financial resources, residences have inadequate wastewater disposal systems —including surface pits, community lagoons and “straight pipes.” Following storms, human waste gathers above ground, homes flood, mold infiltrates walls, and chronic diseases proliferate. A United Nations rapporteur visiting in 2017 said that the problem was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world. “This is not a sight that one normally sees,” he offered in a diplomatic understatement. 

Public attention has been called to the conditions in the county for over two decades. After years of community organizing, private donations, high-profile visits and hearings, and an 18-month federal investigation, the US Department of Justice announced in 2023 a settlement in which the Alabama Department of Health committed to systematically addressing the situation, including conducting a comprehensive risk assessment to prioritize actions, creating an improvement plan, and facilitating public education and community engagement. A year ago, the department released its first self-assessment, pointing to slow but steady progress. 

Despite this, the Trump administration determined it would no longer enforce the terms of the settlement. “The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting DEI lens,” said Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the department’s civil rights division, in a statement. “President Trump made it clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.” 

The decision by the Department of Justice merits condemnation for at least three reasons. 

The scope of the harms is broad. As if raw sewage in one’s yard and house were not a sufficient indignity, the resulting mold exacerbates chronic health conditions, including asthma, and some studies have indicated a higher incidence of the hookworm parasite — which is transmitted through fecal material — in Lowndes County. The county sits amidst Alabama’s “Black Belt,” a string of 18 counties in south central Alabama with rich soil and poor health outcomes. Black Belt counties had a 30% higher death rate in 2020 from COVID-19 than the rest of the state. 

The victims have little economic or political power. Lowndes Country is poor, rural and predominantly African American. Black Belt counties have greater incidences of poverty, unemployment,  low education status and poor housing than the rest of the state. The state legislature has faced repeated legal challenges for drawing legislative districts that disenfranchise African American voters.  

The agreement was fragile and the federal government’s role was catalytic. Alabama Department of Health officials were long concerned by public health conditions in Lowndes County. Only with community advocacy and the threat of federal court action, however, could the political will and finances be mustered by the state government to act on that concern. With the withdrawal of the federal government, Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris, who willingly bore the brunt of the federal investigation in order to facilitate action, says, “It will make it much more difficult to obtain new funding” to carry out the commitments captured in the agreement.” 

The argument that Lowndes County residents themselves are personally responsible for yards full of raw sewage defies the geography and climate of the region and our social contract in the United States. Instead, public officials and the people who elect them bear the bulk of the responsibility. “Our state is not invested in a consistent, sustained way in trying to fix those problems,” Harris said. 

Sixty -five miles east of Lowndes County, on the other side of Montgomery, sits Macon County and Tuskegee, another site of infamous public violence: the United State Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. The violence there was more direct: 600 men were enrolled in a study without their knowledge, were lied to, and then denied curative treatment. The perpetrators were more identifiable, too: the government agency that conducted the study and the funders that supported it (including my organization). The foundations for the violence, however, are the same — Macon Country sits squarely in the Black Belt and its history of slavery, deprivation, and injustice. 

Justice began for the men in the study when affected communities organized and gained agency, the harms were acknowledged, contrition expressed, and a basis for trust re-established. The work of healing and of earning that trust continues. In Lowndes County, walking away from a legal agreement for invented, irrelevant reasons destroys whatever trust may have existed.    

The Trump administration did get this point right: Serving all people with dignity and respect is indeed the point of government. The people of Lowndes County, however, are still waiting to see it. Their state and their country owe it to them.