Robert D. Bullard

Robert D. Bullard (born December 21, 1946, Elba, Alabama, U.S.) is an American sociologist and environmental activist, often referred to as the father of environmental justice.

Early life and education

Bullard was born and raised in Elba, Alabama, a small town in the southeastern region of the state. His father was an electrician and a plumber, though he was unable to gain a license to work, owing to his race. Bullard’s grandparents, however, owned several hundred acres of timberland, and the income they made from raising and selling timber paid for him and his four brothers to attend college. Bullard went to Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College (now University), where he graduated with a degree in government in 1968. He was subsequently drafted into the U.S. Marine Corps, on account of the Vietnam War, though he was never deployed. He went on to earn a master’s degree in sociology (1972) from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), followed by a Ph.D. in sociology (1976) from Iowa State University. As a young man, he consciously tried to model his career after that of his hero, sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois.

Career in environmental justice

Bullard became interested in environmentalism in the late 1970s, while teaching sociology at Texas Southern University. In 1979 his wife, Linda McKeever Bullard, an attorney, had filed a class action lawsuit to stop a private sanitary landfill from being established in a middle-class Black neighborhood in the Houston suburbs. She wanted to make the case that it would constitute an act of discrimination, and she asked Bullard to help her by mapping out Houston’s other landfills and showing the demographics of the neighborhoods where they were sited. She suspected that they were concentrated in communities of color. Bullard enlisted the students in his research methods class to help. After a thorough research process, they learned that, although Black people made up only a quarter of Houston’s population, all five of its city-owned landfills, six of its eight city-owned incinerators, and three of its four privately owned landfills were located in Black neighborhoods. The case, known as Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., was litigated for eight years. In 1987 the private landfill project was approved.

During the 1980s Bullard extended his research to four other Black communities—in Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia, and Dallas, Texas—to see whether the same pattern held in other parts of the South (a region where more than half of all Black Americans lived). He found that, even controlling for economic status, Black neighborhoods were far more likely than white ones to be located within the vicinity of landfills, chemical plants, smelters, and other environmental hazards. Bullard explained his findings in Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (1990; 4th ed., 2022), a book that has since become known as the “environmental justice bible.”

Bullard became an activist for environmental justice. In 1992 both he and clergyman Benjamin Chavis, another leading figure in the movement, were asked to advise the incoming administration for U.S Pres. Bill Clinton on how to advance the cause of environmental justice. They were both present at the White House in 1994, when Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, requiring federal agencies to address issues surrounding environmental justice in areas with minority and low-income populations.

In 2011 Bullard cofounded the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) Climate Change Consortium, which hosted an annual conference that united faculty, students, and researchers from HBCUs to “bridge the gap between theory and the experiential realities of climate change.” In 2020 Bullard and other activists relaunched the National Black Environmental Justice Network following the death of George Floyd. The organization had originally been established in 1999 as a means of mobilizing Black people to fight environmental racism in the United States, but it disbanded in 2006 following the death of its director, Damu Smith.

Awards and major works

Bullard was recognized for his efforts to mitigate environmental racism with several major awards, among them the United Nations Environment Programme’s Champions of the Earth award for lifetime achievement, which he received in 2020. The following year he was appointed by U.S. Pres. Joe Biden to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He also served as chair of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University, a position established in his honor in 2021.

Bullard wrote and edited multiple books on sustainable development, urban land use, housing, transportation, and related subjects. Among the major works that he edited are Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity (2004; edited with Glenn S. Johnson and Angel O. Torres), The Black Metropolis in the Twenty-first Century: Race, Power, and Politics of Place (2007), and Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina (2009; edited with Beverly Wright).