- We do not need this pipeline
and a spill will happen.
And the people who are gonna suffer the most
are people who had the least benefit
from this crude oil pipeline.
(upbeat music)
(gentle ominous music)
We're in the industrial park of Valero Memphis Refinery.
You can see up here, the toxins in the air that we breathe.
(cheering)
Right here in Memphis, the movement is alive,
the movement is in the people in this city
rising up for justice.
It's the movement happening right here
to protect our water.
This crude oil pipeline
is one of the most significant environmentally
racist projects and environmentally unjust
projects happening in the United States of America today.
(slow hip hop music)
In a very real sense,
it is a threat to the people in the community.
This pipeline would run a top the Memphis Sand Aquifer,
our drinking water,
supplies over a million people with their drinking water.
- This pipeline is gonna be a high pressure pipeline.
It's our understanding
that the pressure will be 1500 pounds per square inch.
That's twice the pressure that's required
for a fire hose to spray water 30 stories in the air.
Be wary anytime a for-profit pipeline company
tells you that pipelines are safe.
(cheers)
This general area of Southwest Memphis is an area
where the aquifer is vulnerable.
So it's like if you drink a milkshake through a straw,
the fluid is sucked down toward the bottom.
Now, if you put crude oil on top of your milkshake,
eventually it's gonna get down
to the straw and that's gonna be a big problem.
- Our community will not benefit.
Our country will not benefit.
The oil's going for export.
It's not gonna be used here in the United States.
And so that argument is not true.
And there's a need to recognize
that our economy is shifting away from fossil fuels.
We should keep it in the ground
and instead start preparing people for jobs
of the present and the future for electric cars.
This community is Westwood, and this is where my mom
grew up, my great-grandmother, Gwen,
lived and raised four of my uncles. (laughs)
So a really big family in this neighborhood.
Both of my parents graduated from Westwood High School.
My grandmothers both lived there
and in the Southwest Memphis community
and right where we're gonna be meeting
for a lot of our rallies is near the land
of my great, great grandmother.
Our ancestral connection to south Memphis is significant.
No matter where I am in the world
and for a lot of people who are from there,
we care deeply about what happens.
- [Clyde] Oh, that's four, that's three.
You said four feet, three and a half.
- You got elderly people sitting out here that have
worked all their lives for this property.
And you just gonna come up and take it?
She saved her money up and she bought that property.
So she wanted them to have something.
But we were thinking about doing duplexes down there
on that property.
At one while, I thought a church.
If a person tell you no,
I don't understand why it can't be accepted.
No is the answer, no.
- It's appropriate for the power
of eminent domain to be used to build public facilities
like schools or courthouses or water lines.
What we have here is out of state,
for-profit companies that are moving a privately
owned commodity across state lines.
And that is not a valid public use.
- They come over and drill on my property,
hole in the ground for somebody to fall in there
and break their leg.
It's 10 inches, I measured it.
Now I go on your property and dig,
drill holes on it and do what I wanna do
and didn't get your consent.
You ain't gonna be happy with it,
and I sure ain't happy with it.
(hip hop music)
- In Southwest Memphis,
there are 17 toxic release inventory facilities
that are pumping out toxins into the air.
And we have four times the average cancer rate,
and both of my grandmothers, God rest their souls,
are dead due to cancer.
Those are not separate incidents.
- There was a place that was a chemical factory over there
and so many people lived around it.
I got about 15 or 20 people I can name you
within blocks of each other that died
with breast cancer and the men
would develop prostate cancer.
So come on now, surely there should have
been a lung cancer or something in there somewhere.
All of them died with breast cancer.
So whatever that was was spilling over was real toxic.
It affected us and it affected our surroundings.
It affected us.
- Do not come and bamboozle our people!
And over filth for you to walk on my ancestors.
- Today, inform, educate and activate people for change.
It's a big day in Memphis history, I'd argue.
We're setting up for the Memphis Community
Against the Pipeline Rally with headliner,
former vice president Al Gore.
(applause)
- This pipeline project is a reckless racist ripoff!
(cheers and applause)
Reckless racist ripoff.
Why is it that 64% of the polluting facilities
of these pipeline companies are located
in or adjacent to black communities?
Why is that?
Because when they site the polluting facilities
they go for the path of least resistance.
This permit from the board of engineers can be rejected.
It can be modified if the administration
will ask the board of Engineers to do that.
But there's several ways to stop this.
- Protection's on the paper, but there's no protection.
'Cause if there was-
- Thank you, thank you.
(indistinct) (gentle music)
- For so long, my thinking about the environmental
movement and all that, it was all about trees, you know,
and polar bears.
But this is what it's about.
This is it right here.
- This young man would lead us in a fight for justice
that we might have clean drinking water.
- All the trips I'm taken to the hospital with my child,
all the money I have to spend on medicine for my uncle.
All these things start to add up
because somebody decided that my life was less worthy
than other people's lives.
Once those connections start to get made,
the system's gonna fall
because there's more people
who are suffering than benefited.
And that's what they know.
That's what they're scared of.
And that's what's happening here in the city
and it's gonna continue to spread across the country
as we get more informed about what's going on.
(upbeat music)