Local Treasure: Rita Harris

A Memphis pioneer of the environmental justice movement.

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Even in retirement, some folks remain so committed to the work that still needs to be done that they continue lives of service. Rita Harris is a good example. Having stepped down from her work with the Sierra Club three years ago, she still stays up-to-date on current environmental struggles in Memphis, her hometown.

Thinking back to a recent event, Harris says, “Marquita Bradshaw was a leader against a proposed landfill in Whitehaven. One night they were having a rally that you could watch on Facebook Live. And I knew everything that was going on! I was texting people, saying, ‘Ask them this, and ask them that.’ These problems are not going away, that’s what people have to understand. And I try to stay involved, but at the same time, I am retired ...”

She trails off, a little wistfully, but in her voice you can also hear traces of relief, and perhaps the satisfaction of a job well done. For over a quarter of a century, she has been on the front lines of the local struggle for environmental justice. Indeed, she helped the Sierra Club define in practical terms what environmental justice should entail in the Mid-South.

“It was work that moved very slowly,” she reflects. “I tell people it was kind of like trying to turn a giant ship. You have to be very slow and precise about what you’re doing.” Considering the magnitude of the course change she helped bring about, it’s hard to believe that the work all started with iced tea and cookies.

I started as a volunteer for the Girl Scouts,” she says. “At the time I lived in the Bethel Grove area of the city. I wanted to give my two girls an outlet, so they could do something healthy and wholesome. And you know, all Girl Scout leaders try to recruit parents. Well, I had called the council about something, and a lady said, ‘Uh, do you make good iced tea?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do!’ And she said, ‘Well, I’m coming over. I want you to fix me a glass and we can talk.’

“So that’s how my Girl Scouting career started, with some iced tea. She talked me into taking on a Girl Scout troop. And the jobs just sort of evolved. Eventually I became cookie chair and then I became a day camp coordinator, and then organized different programs for the council. I got really, really deep into Girl Scouting. I think they kind of liked me. So when a job became available, I applied and got hired. And I worked there for about five years.”

Of course, any fan of Thin Mints understands the importance of the cookie chair. Indeed, Harris took that position as seriously as any work she threw herself into over the years to come. “I think I was a social justice advocate before I even realized it,” she says. “I had two daughters, but I have always advocated for women, and for girls to grow up to be strong women. Sometimes people say, ‘I can tell you really like what you do.’ I say, ‘Yes, I do.’ I just love scouting. I think it really helps children blossom and find out what their strengths are.”

As it happened, working with the Girl Scouts was but a prelude to a lifetime of activism. By the early Nineties, she was taking on more sobering issues for the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center (MSPJC). “They were looking for a South Africa task force coordinator,” Harris says. “I was willing, but I didn’t have a lot of background in it. But I started researching and finding out a lot about apartheid before I went to my interview. Long story short, I got that job.”

From there, she became the MSPJC’s local issues coordinator. Being an African American in Memphis, she was well-suited to tackle perennial racial problems by focusing on practical matters like fair banking advocacy.

“Banks in Memphis didn’t have full-service banks in a lot of the poorer communities,” she explains. “Or they were not giving people loans to buy homes. Or if they did qualify for a loan, they were steered toward buying a house in a poor part of town. We analyzed home mortgage disclosure data that showed the kinds of loans that banks approved, how many they did not approve, in certain quarters of the year, that kind of thing.” As she worked in underdeveloped communities, other insidious, and even deadly, forms of systemic racism became apparent.

“We started hearing about environmental issues across the state, so we decided we were going to have a toxics task force,” she says. “Since that fell under local issues, that was another hat that I had on my head.” This was a time when the concept of “environmental racism,” popularized by the sociologist Robert Bullard, was gaining currency as a new frame for ecologically minded organizing. It was a natural extension of Harris’ work on economic racism, and soon the toxics task force overshadowed other work at the MSPJC.

When we started doing that work, it became bigger than any of the other things we were doing,” Harris says. “All of the work we were doing was important, but the toxics work expanded into monitoring the toxic data from local industries. Data about pollution in rivers and streams in the area, or complaints that communities had about health problems associated with living near a factory. There were a lot of issues related to this one general term of ‘toxics.’ In time we got funding to hire a part-time person to work on toxics with me, and that person was Larry Smith. Larry and I worked together very closely. Now he’s the assistant manager of air pollution control for Shelby County.”

In one of their first actions, the pair documented the abuses of a company with leaking barrels of waste on Grimes Street in South Memphis. As Rita recalls, “Larry and I got together on a Sunday afternoon, the only time they were closed, and went down there and took photos of as much of this mess as we could. We even took pictures of the labels on the barrels. Stuff was just running across the street. While we were there, a little boy rode his bicycle right through all this stuff. We’re talking about very toxic chemicals. So we took these pictures and packaged them up with a letter and sent them to the EPA Region 4 office in Atlanta.”

One can still find traces of their handiwork online in the archived records of the Environmental Protection Agency. “Memphis Drum Recycler Sentenced for Dumping Hazardous Waste,” is the heading of one report, dated March 28, 1997:

Johnnie James Williams of South Memphis, Tenn., was sentenced on March 21, to 41 months imprisonment and two years of supervised release by the U.S. District Court in Memphis, Tenn., for his jury conviction on two felony counts of violating the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) by illegally storing and disposing of hazardous waste in a South Memphis neighborhood which has environmental justice issues. This is the longest prison sentence handed down in an environmental case in Tennessee. Williams owned and operated W&R Drum, a drum recycling facility, from 1983 until July 1994 when EPA closed the site and began a Superfund cleanup that cost taxpayers $1.5 million. Levels of heavy metals, acids, organic materials and solvents were as much as 2,000 times the regulatory limits.

This was but one action of many highlighting the propensity of dangerous operations to locate in areas not only burdened with poverty, but with the additional handicap of systemic racism. As such, Harris and Smith were foot soldiers in the burgeoning movement in service of what is now called Environmental Justice (EJ).

Such work was not without its risks. “The guy had friends,” Harris recalls of Williams. “I remember we got some bad calls at MSPJC because people were angry that this man was going to jail. But he was endangering the community, for goodness sake! That was probably one of the biggest things we did during that time. We did a lot of different work. We rang the alarm bell for a lot of illegal things going on that were hazardous to folks’ health.”

At the same time, the MSPJC started hosting weekly brown-bag suppers for local environmental activists of all stripes. A network was starting to coalesce. “People would come to these meetings and talk about the big issues they were working on,” Harris says. “And one of the things I’ve always bragged about over the years is that the people in environmental circles in Memphis know each other. I got to know Sierra Club members, and people in different neighborhoods. That was a really wonderful thing. Sierra Club members started showing up at protests and public hearings all over the city. Whether it was North Memphis, South Memphis, wherever. There was a real solidarity and the unity of people trying to help each other. So that’s the way we started building environmental communities, from those brown bag suppers.”

It’s a solidarity that remains to this day, but by 1999, Harris decided it was time to move on. As it happened, that’s precisely when the Sierra Club embraced the EJ cause in a more official capacity.

“The national Sierra Club had gotten some multi-year funding to locate environmental justice offices, and there was a grant for a Memphis EJ office,” she says. “A couple people came to me and said, ‘Rita, you have got to apply.’” And so Harris came to be one of the Sierra Club’s first EJ organizers, leading the local office until her retirement in 2017.

“Memphis was the first location [to have an EJ office],” she notes. “Then there were others in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Louisiana, around the ‘cancer alley’ area, and in Minnesota. We’ve had five locations. It was a really wonderful investment that the Sierra Club made. Now there are a number of large, green organizations on the national level, but the Sierra Club is the only one that has had a sustained, full-time EJ program for two decades. We’ve sustained those locations over many years. These are not issues that you can work on for a year or two and clear it up. These are things you have to stick with, because it takes time to confront these issues, they’re so ingrained.

“What we’re doing in 2020 is to try and incorporate environmental justice principles and practices throughout the organization,” she continues. “So we’re not just working in little pockets where we have program offices. We have many, many organizers all over the country. And they are being trained to work in communities that maybe didn’t know about it in the past. Trained how to work with low-income people or people of color. To be respectful. I think we’ve been very successful in doing that.”

In fact, the organization’s commitment to inclusiveness was so strong that Harris took on another role, beyond local organizing.

“Starting in 2004, I was also an anti-racism trainer,” she says. “Over the years we did a lot of diversity training and workshops all over the country, and I was appointed by the Sierra Club national director at the time, Carl Pope, to the Sierra Club’s first diversity council. That went on until 2009, then it evolved into a diversity department office with a staff, which came to include a director of inclusion and justice.”

One official recognition of Harris’ role in this came in 2011, when she received the Sierra Club’s Virginia Ferguson Award, for employees who have “demonstrated consistent and exemplary service to the Sierra Club.”

Looking back, Harris puts her initial successes in activism down to her roots in the local milieu. “One thing the Sierra Club tried to do was hire organizers from the community that they served, and not import people from way off,” she says. “It’s a great benefit, because you know the ‘lay of the land.’ That’s a term that we use a lot among organizers. You not only know the people, you know the community politics. You know who’s doing what and where they’re doing it in a certain neighborhood. Because I grew up in South Memphis, I was familiar with Whitehaven, Westwood, even Boxtown. And Orange Mound. My husband came from Orange Mound and actually had a business there.”

Harris gives her late husband, Alex, much credit for helping her activism thrive. “My husband passed away in 2014, and that might have had something to do with me retiring as early as I did,” she says. “When you have a lifelong partner and that partner passes away, it leaves a void. He’d been in the Air Force for three or four years, then worked in the post office the rest of his life. I miss him! During Thanksgiving and Christmas, that’s when you start thinking about all the people that you no longer have around. It can be a sad time. But I try to think about the good times and laugh instead of cry.”

Yet Rita is hardly alone, whiling away the hours. If you’ve noticed that she still refers to the Sierra Club as “we,” that’s not an accident: She’s still very much involved in the organization, the massive ship that she helped to carefully, slowly pivot into a new alignment. And as of 2020, she’s become one of its 15 co-captains.

This past spring, she was elected to the national board of directors. “One of the main reasons I wanted to be on the board,” she says, “was to continue to shepherd the work of unity and inclusion and justice in the organization.” Now, for both the Sierra Club and Rita Harris, even as she enjoys her golden years, it’s full steam ahead.