Environmental racism predates its own name. The term entered public discourse in 1982, but the conditions behind it, namely exposure to hazard and unequal claim to safety, go back to slavery itself. Historian Carl Zimring traces this to a basic split in American thought: white meant clean, Black meant dirty. That split decided who did the dirtiest, most dangerous work, and who lived closest to pollution, for generations. In 1968, Memphis sanitation workers went on strike over exactly that: unsafe, degrading labour shaped by the same racial split. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while there in support of the very strike. That split still operates today. Writer and ethicist Harriet Washington shows how lead and other pollutants concentrated in segregated, neglected neighbourhoods measurably lower IQ in the children who grow up there. That same lowered IQ has then been read as evidence of innate racial difference, feeding the very prejudice that helped put the pollution there in the first place.

Ecocritical scholarship on African American nature writing already exists; Kimberly Ruffin and Carolyn Finney are foundational names here. But environmental racism itself has rarely been the point of that scholarship, treated in passing or in a single essay rather than as a sustained critical focus. This seminar takes up that gap directly.

Reading African American literature from slavery to the present, we ask: What did African American writers register about environmental racism, and how, before the term itself existed in 1982? What can fiction, poetry, drama, and testimony show about environmental racism that policy reports and data cannot? How does African American literature treat land, labour, disaster, and contamination: as background, or as forces that shape the story itself?

Sample directions include: slavery-era and Reconstruction literature, where land, labour, and racial terror function as environmental conditions. The Great Migration, read as an environmental story rather than only a demographic one, in which migrants traded rural hazards for urban industrial exposure. Drama’s staging of urban decay and environmental neglect. Contemporary ecopoetics of waste and toxicity. Disaster narrative, especially flood and hurricane writing, including Hurricane Katrina’s far heavier toll on Black communities, as a record of unequal loss. And environmental racism read where it isn’t announced: a driver’s job denied to a garbage collector for no reason but his race, a paint that needs a hidden dark chemical to turn perfectly white, an industrial accident treated as an ordinary hazard of the job.

We invite contributions on any period, form, or method that engages with African American literature’s treatment of environmental racism, from slavery to the present. This includes work extending the pattern into contemporary climate and speculative fiction.