Buck Blue fondly remembers growing up in Walltown, a tight-knit Black community in Durham, North Carolina, in the 1960s and 1970s. He would be out all day, playing football and basketball with buddies at the park near his house. They’d spend hours in the creek there, which turned different hues depending on a nearby textile mill’s dyeing work. They’d hang out in the tunnel that ferried the water across the road: “That was our clubhouse,” he said.
But his memories have been tainted. Last year, Duke University researchers found that some of the soil in Walltown Park, including sediment along the creek’s banks, is contaminated with lead. It’s a lingering remnant of the property’s days as a waste incinerator from around 1920 to 1942, one of five that the city operated.
At least four of those incinerators were located in Black neighborhoods. All four sites were eventually turned into parks, and three of them were cited in the Duke study as having spots with soil lead levels far exceeding those recommended by the EPA (the fourth site wasn’t tested).
As a neurotoxin, lead causes irreparable harm, particularly in kids’ rapidly developing brains. No amount of lead exposure is found to be safe, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have lowered the acceptable blood lead level threshold for children twice in the last three decades, most recently in 2021.
For Blue and his neighbors, the real betrayal was the fact that they didn’t learn the news from the city, nor from Duke. The researchers reportedly contacted Durham parks and recreation officials about their findings last November, but Walltown residents didn’t learn about them until a community member came across the information online in mid-May. No one had bothered to alert them.
“When did they know, and why didn’t they tell us?” asked Blue. Almost 60 years old now, he thought back to his childhood. Generations of kids have played at the park since it was established in 1953. “At the levels they are now, what were they then? Make this make sense to me.”
The park is directly behind Blue’s house, and his 10-year-old grandson now plays there, splashing in the creek just like his grandfather did. When Blue heard about the lead findings, he had the boy tested. His numbers were fine, but what about the other kids who go there?
Marie Lynn Miranda, chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago and a researcher who worked at Duke for 20 years, was shocked to hear about the Durham findings, but not surprised. She leads the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative, which focuses in particular on low-income populations, and she worked closely with Durham county health officials for over a decade to help them identify residents at risk of lead exposure.
Last month, Miranda released her own research about lead exposure in North Carolina children, including those living in Durham. The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that between the early 1990s and 2015, racially isolated neighborhoods were clearly associated with higher childhood blood lead levels. That is, kids in segregated Black neighborhoods experienced lead poisoning more frequently than those in mixed or white communities.
It’s long been known that low-income Black children suffer more from high blood lead levels, largely through their exposure to lead-based paint and lead pipes in older, often dilapidated homes, though many cities have taken concrete steps to reduce lead exposure since the 1970s. But the problem has often been explained as being the result of income and housing disparities. Miranda’s research ties it, instead, directly to racial segregation.
She and her colleagues started with this question: “To what extent is racial residential segregation driving these levels in neighborhoods that are racially isolated or keeping them there? Does that lead to higher levels of environmental or social stressors?”
The point Miranda wanted to illustrate was that this is a current problem. The word “segregation” sounds archaic, but it’s still very much a reality. The research shows that while racial isolation has remained roughly steady in North Carolina over 25 years, it has actually increased in Durham county. And across the nation, it has gone up in two-thirds of census tracts. Not only is it not a thing of the past, it’s getting worse.
Miranda studied blood lead levels because she’s worked on the issue for years and has ample data on it. But dozens of studies over the years have demonstrated the unequal access and wide range of negative outcomes experienced by residents of mostly-Black communities. The neighborhoods generally have fewer high-quality health-care facilities, transportation options, healthy food sources, good schools or conventional banks. Simultaneously, polluting facilities and hazardous waste – like the Durham incinerators and the textile mill’s effluent that flowed through Walltown Park – tend to be more frequently located in Black areas. The result has been higher rates of maternal and child mortality, more chronic health conditions and decreased economic mobility.
Race and income disparities are inextricably linked and almost impossible to tease apart when it comes to inequalities in the US. But Miranda’s research does hint at a solution. While removing remnants of lead-based paint from old homes in Black neighborhoods or bringing more grocery stores, banks or health clinics is useful, her work suggests focusing on desegregating neighborhoods instead.
That may seem like a simultaneously obvious and insurmountable task. A 2021 University of California, Berkeley study found that 81% of the nation’s large and medium-sized metropolitan areas have become more segregated since 1990. They argued that eradicating health disparities is unlikely to happen in a segregated society, where geographic isolation is increasing and has become a largely invisible part of life.
“It goes to something that’s probably so foundational in terms of how people live their lives,” said Chandra Taylor, who leads the Southern Environmental Law Center’s environmental justice initiative. “They don’t question who their neighbors are.”
Entrenched segregation can seem almost normal, especially when it’s been a result of many government policies, such as redlining, exclusionary zoning and urban renewal. “The US has a very long history of intentionally racist policy planning that’s directly segregated our communities,” said Christina Plerhoples Stacy, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute.
If Americans don’t question who their neighbors are and why, they are unlikely to question why some neighborhoods are less healthy places to live. In the case of lead exposure, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 helped boost awareness of the role residential segregation played. But government and public attention to it have largely waned since the 1980s.
Back in Durham, Blue is certain that the lead scandal wouldn’t have happened had Walltown not been a Black community. “It’s par for the course – nobody really cared. If it was a white community, we would’ve been informed a lot sooner. Or it wouldn’t have been a trash dump at all. And if it was there, it would’ve been taken care of properly,” he said, standing on his porch.
Currently, areas within the parks that showed high lead levels are cordoned off. In an email, a Durham parks and recreation representative wrote: “We’re confident as we work together to collect and analyze more data that the science will lead us to the best short term and long term solutions for remediation.” The agency’s website reveals that city leaders haven’t yet determined how they’ll remediate the problem.
Blue said he and his community have been kept in the dark about next steps. “Bottom line still is, what are the remedies? What’s the timeline?” he said. “I haven’t heard anything that says they have an actual plan in place.”
