We call this Shingle Mountain.
That's not a mountain.
Those are roofing shingles that come off the house.
Roofing shingles.
A staggering pile of toxic waste looms just behind Marsha Jackson’s backyard.
She says her doctors warn it could kill her.
My life has changed because of Shingle Mountain.
It’s fiberglass going down our throat.
And my pulmonologist told me that the only way you're going to clear up
is unless this stuff is gone, I move or I die.
In some ways, you are giving people a death sentence -
not providing them an opportunity even to breathe fresh air.
Here in Dallas, the quality of the air you breathe
depends on where you live.
And race has a lot to do with it.
Marsha lives in a majority Black and brown neighborhood.
They wouldn’t have did this anywhere in a white neighborhood.
This environmental nightmare is the result of racist zoning policies,
the city’s negligence
and white businessmen who saw it as a perfect opportunity to make money.
There’s no other way to term Shingle Mountain
than a modern-day monument to white supremacy.
Stop! He's real wild.
Before Shingle Mountain came, I didn’t cough up black smoke.
I didn’t have to clear my voice often.
I didn’t have the itching and the stinging and burning in my throat from the fiberglass.
When Marsha first moved to the neighborhood of Floral Farms in southern Dallas,
she imagined green space and fresh air for her children and animals to run around in.
But now, walking her dog is the only time she’s outside.
I’ve been here 25 years.
It didn’t look like this at all when I first moved here.
Everything changed in January 2018
when Blue Star Recycling started illegally grinding up shingles.
And now her 12-year-old granddaughter’s asthma is only getting worse.
You know, when you have a child have to increase their inhalant
just to breathe, that is alarming.
Blue Star Recycling never actually had a permit to dump the shingles,
but the city initially ignored both the growing dump and Marsha’s cries.
If they had listened to my calls,
they had responded to me,
this would have never happened.
And I often wonder, is the City of Dallas trying to tell us
that they do not care about Black and brown neighborhoods?
As Marsha staged a legal battle against the company and city,
the dumping finally stopped in 2019.
But Blue Star Recycling CEO Chris Ganter
filed for bankruptcy, shut down the company
and walked away without cleaning up after the mess.
Ganter declined our requests for comment.
This right here? Shingle Mountain?
Right next to me?
They let Blue Star Recycling walk away.
I’m so furious about the City of Dallas.
They’re not paying not one cent.
With no one taking responsibility for the waste,
Shingle Mountain and its toxins sat there,
eating away at Marsha’s health.
We went to visit Marsha the next morning, and her symptoms were obvious.
Happy birthday to you!
Marsha is not alone.
She introduced us to her neighbors, who all say they are suffering from the waste.
We just want our access to fresh air,
to be able to enjoy our kids here without having any worries.
It’s just that it’s flooded everything.
As you can see, it’s like really muddy all the time.
I get sick, my wife then got sick, the three girls.
And most of the time, they’re sick.
For years, community members protested the dump
and demanded a cleanup from the city.
After years of inaction, the district finally began a cleanup operation in December 2020.
Coincidentally, the district’s council member Tennell Atkins is running for reelection this May.
The timing isn’t lost on Marsha.
They were taking photos ops over here
of the Shingle Mountain and saying
they're getting ready to get started.
I do think it’s strange that the elected officials are up to reelection
and all of a sudden they pushing this.
We tried multiple ways to contact the district’s councilman, Tennell Atkins,
but he declined our interview requests.
The mailbox belonging to...
His team shared a press release with us, saying the dump will be gone by March.
While Marsha is glad the cleanup has started,
she’s not convinced Shingle Mountain won’t happen again.
My biggest fear, also, when they clean this property,
what's going to stop another company coming in here doing the same thing?
According to a study, Marsha’s district has
in Dallas.
In one year, it saw more than 400 tons
of particulate matter pollution,
while this white neighborhood emitted close to zero.
And that’s because apart from Shingle Mountain,
the area is home to a massive landfill,
truck sites and concrete plants.
Pastor Michael Waters says the pollution is a product of the city’s racist history.
We are segregated by design.
So when you look deeply at Black and brown communities in our city, in our community,
you see a multiplicity of issues that at its root continues to be white supremacy -
which makes sense for a city that had the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter in America
at the time of the turn of the century.
The city’s design goes back to zoning laws.
Take a look at this map of Dallas.
These areas in blue are where majority
Black and brown people live.
And here are where pollutant sites
are allowed to be located.
There’s no other way to term Shingle Mountain than a modern-day monument to white supremacy,
because we know that that would not have been allowed to take place in other parts of the city
where the pigmentation and socioeconomic levels were different.
While air pollution is certainly not the only contributing factor,
it’s noteworthy that the life expectancy in Marsha’s district is 71,
while in this white neighborhood,
that number is more than 10 years higher.
It reflects a nationwide phenomenon
where studies have shown
What a crime before God that we live in a city that,
based on your zip code, determines your life expectancy.
Evelyn, are we talking at 5 o'clock?
5 o'clock? Meeting?
Yup, yup. Should be good.
Evelyn Mayo is an activist with an environmental group
that works with residents in southern Dallas to change zoning laws
to prevent another Shingle Mountain.
She took us to a street across Marsha’s home
to show us how industrial activity has affected other homes in the area.
We’re on Bermuda Road, which is what appears to be fairly residential,
you know, what you’re seeing on this side.
But this entire street is zoned industrial,
which is problematic because really harmful uses can come into this community by right.
As you can see, we have this 18-wheeler coming by because at the end of the street,
there’s an industrial operator.
And that’s only possible when you have industry and homes mixed together.
During the time we were on the street, we witnessed the pollution almost every few minutes.
Evelyn says the trucks that have disrupted this street of mainly Latino families
is evidence of racist zoning policies.
Cities concentrate things they don’t want to see, whether that’s Black and brown people or poor people,
with uses that they don’t want to see, such as industry.
You would never see this mixture of uses in a white neighborhood in Dallas.
To prevent another Shingle Mountain,
Evelyn and Marsha are pushing for the city
to adopt a neighborhood plan
where they hope to build more recreational spaces.
We’re hoping that the city, once they clean up all this,
look, we have nowhere to go down here, the kids have nowhere to go.
Clean it up and make a community for our neighbors over here.
But Evelyn says the city has not yet shown willingness to accept the neighborhood plan.
We’re inviting the city to our table instead of going to their table.
And I think that that’s uncomfortable for them.
And unfortunately our city has not yet quite learned
that you cannot be a great city
if you fail to listen to those who are in the greatest need.
While Marsha’s medical bills are stacking high,
what she wants isn’t financial compensation.
And I'd hate to see anybody else go through this what we’re going through right now.
Three years is too long.
I want people to understand —
environmental injustice, environmental pollutant —
it is a slow killer.
And it does kill.