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- [Summer Lee] This is the town that essentially built America.
Our steel is the steel that catapulted the United States into the
Industrial Revolution.
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- [Tony Buba] It's something that's just always there, you know.
Especially as a kid, you're growing up, and the mill was there,
and it was… You know, Dad would get up and go to work, but,
you know, you walk out from our house, you look down,
there's the mill, it's just spewing.
- [Isaac Bunn] When the plumes of smoke that are white now were pure black, as a child,
you really didn't think about it. You were just playing.
You didn't understand the effects that it would have on your body later on.
My family in Braddock dates back generations. They migrated from the South
to gain employment. My grandfather, great-grandfather, father worked in the
steel mills. The physical toll was devastating. They called them "man-killing
jobs," especially the jobs where the…African-Americans did.
They were basically doing the work that they would not dare send a human being
in to do because you were breathing many things that would, they probably didn't
know it at the time, that would actually just kill you
later on. When my father retired from the mill, he didn't have much time to enjoy
his retirement because at that point, it became a struggle to survive.
It was... he couldn't breathe.
- [Robert Gray] Living in Braddock has affected my respiratory health almost certainly.
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- [Summer Lee] Braddock is still a low-income community that is predominantly black.
We know that pollution has to go somewhere. Dirty industry has
to go somewhere. They're not going to do is throw them into affluent communities.
They're not going to go into nice suburbs with, you know, rich white kids.
They're going to put it in the towns that are forgotten. They're going to put it
into the places with the most vulnerable people who have zero political capital who
are always the one who gets left with those type of things.
- [Isaac Bunn] No one from any community that I know of works in the steel mill.
The steelworkers that work in the steel mill now don't live in the community
because they don't want to be around the pollution.
- [Summer Lee] You can look on the internet and you can find towns that used to be these old
industry towns, and they're ghost towns. Is that what we want for Braddock?
I don't want our town to be a ghost town.
We have to start looking to the future here.
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