Lawsuit targets St. James Parish Council for Decades of Discriminatory Land Use Practices

Oct 7, 2024, New Orleans – Today, before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, groups representing residents of the area known as Cancer Alley argued that longstanding land use practices of St. James Parish Council are discriminatory and that the remedy should be a moratorium on the construction and expansion of petrochemical facilities in the majority-Black 4th and 5th Districts. 

Inclusive Louisiana, Mt. Triumph Baptist Church, and RISE St. James sued the Parish Council in 2023, charging that the disproportionate placement of hazardous plants in majority-Black districts violates, among other federal and state laws, the 13th Amendment as a vestige of slavery and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Last year, the district court judge dismissed most claims on grounds that a one-year statute of limitations had expired, pegging it to a 2014 ordinance zoning large portions of the 4th and 5th Districts for industrial use.

But in today’s oral argument, plaintiff’s lawyers, from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic, argued that the ordinance merely codified discriminatory practices that long preceded it and that have since persisted. 

“Our community is surrounded by industrial facilities sucking the life out of us daily with excessive cancer causing pollution,” said Barbara Washington of Inclusive Louisiana. “These pollutants have affected our health causing lung, prostate, liver, pancreas, and breast cancer. Our federal, state, and local governments have failed us time and time again. We are at flood stage! Our lives are worth more than another plant in the community!”

The district judge also found the plaintiffs lack standing to bring a claim under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act and the Louisiana Constitution’s protection of historic linguistic and cultural origins. Any harm to sites of historic, cultural, and religious significance is, said the judge, traceable not to the parish council but only to the petrochemical companies. Today, plaintiffs’ lawyers countered that, on the contrary, the parish council itself has made decisions that have, for example, predictably resulted in the destruction of the graves of people once enslaved in the area. 

“We ask for a moratorium because enough is enough,” said Pastor Harry Joseph of Mt. Triumph Baptist Church. “If they keep putting more in our area more children are going to get sick, and we’ve already lost too many people.”

St. James Parish is packed with the kind of petrochemical plants that give Cancer Alley its name, but the districts do not share the burden equally. Since the construction of the first plant in the parish in 1958, at least 20 of 24 have been built in the 4th and 5th Districts. That amounts to one plant for every 250 people. In such areas, dubbed “sacrifice zones,” the majority-Black residents face increased risks of cancer, respiratory ailments, and newborn health harms. 

“The Parish’s decades-long policy, practice, and custom of not only steering and luring lethal petrochemical plants to majority-Black districts, but doing so while implementing protections only for majority-white districts is discriminatory and unlawful,” said Sadaf Doost, attorney and Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Our clients are now seeking relief from the court, after having to endure the devastating consequences of the Parish’s actions for years – including those that have placed the majority-Black 4th and 5th Districts of St. James Parish in the 95th-100th percentile for cancer risk.”

For more information on the lawsuit, please see the Center for Constitutional Rights’ case page. 

See more on the groups’ websites:

• Inclusive Louisiana`
• The Center for Constitutional Rights