Failing Infrastructure Disproportionately Affects Black Communities

Black communities have been harmed by water supply crises in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi as a result of choices made by Whites living elsewhere.

A Flint, Michigan city employee flushes out a fire hydrant. Photo: Gladys Williams

Sixteen years after Brown v. Board, federal courts finally forced schools in Jackson, Mississippi to desegregate, which led to White families fleeing the city, shrinking the city’s tax base and the public funding of infrastructure maintenance. For decades, statewide elected officials who decide how to spend state and federal money have been White, while Jackson’s residents, over 80% of whom are Black, have lived with regularly contaminated water. In 2022, Jackson went months without any water at all due to a failed water treatment plant resulting from fifty years of disinvestment by White politicians.

From 2003 to 2009, severe financial mismanagement by the mayor of Flint, Michigan led to the governor of Michigan exercising his emergency power to appoint an administrator to run Flint, usurping its citizens’ democratic right to elect their leader. The governor’s appointed administrators made severe budget cuts including the decision in 2013 to stop pumping treated water from Detroit and instead use water from the Flint River to supply its residents. When the city failed to treat the water properly, lead started leaching into the water supply. Despite repeated complaints from residents of bad-tasting, murky, and foul-smelling water, officials insisted the water was safe.

Flint’s residents, over 56% of whom are Black, suffered nearly two years until the federal government intervened to begin correcting the problem. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission concluded that the response to the Flint water crisis was “the result of systemic racism that was built into the foundation and growth of Flint, its industry and the suburban area surrounding it.” In August 2020, Michigan agreed to pay Flint residents $600 million for failing to protect them from lead poisoning. In December 2022, Congress allocated $600 million for repairs to Jackson’s water system and the problems are still not fixed.

Recommended viewing: How Jackson, Mississippi's water crisis is a sign of larger racial inequities