Faced with COVID-era civil rights complaints, Chicago commits to environmental justice
By Wajeeha Kamal, Great Lakes Echo
Published: February 13, 2024
Chicago is joining a nationwide trend of large cities incorporating equity or justice goals into preparing for climate change’s impact on public health. The idea is to better protect Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other socially vulnerable and marginalized communities. That hasn’t always been the case. The civil rights complaint alleged the city discriminated by helping relocate an iron scrapyard from Lincoln Park, a majority white neighborhood, to a Southeast Side majority Black and Hispanic neighborhood. It said that constraining polluting land uses to majority Black and Hispanic areas and relocating them from predominantly white areas is discriminatory.