American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 13
Part 13 of this Series
Anniston, Alabama, 1929-present
“Monsanto did a job on this city.”
- Opal Scruggs
“Thanks for these, Jamie. I would just say that “(Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the town’s citizens, a Monsanto plant had been poisoning their land and water since 1935.)” is too big of an awful story to be slotted into parentheses. I had no idea. I hope other people followed the link,” Starr Cummin Bright.
“I totally agree, Starr. I was just checking something about Anniston, and I came across this. I’d also never heard of it before, and while it was not on the topic, it seemed too big and too ironic to simply ignore,” Jamie.
Anniston is the county seat of Calhoun County in northeast Alabama. Founded shortly after the Civil War as Woodstock (for the iron company of the same name), it was soon renamed Annie’s Town after the daughter-in-law of the company’s cofounder, Daniel Tyler, a former Union Army general who had surrendered his division to Stonewall Jackson at the Battle of Harper’s Ferry. His granddaughter would later marry Teddy Roosevelt. Anniston was a meticulously planned community, from which it got its nickname: “The Model City of the South.”
It is probably best known, however, as the site of the horrific firebombing of a Freedom Riders bus on Sunday, May 14, 1961, which also happened to be Mother’s Day. After stopping and disabling the bus, the KKK-led mob attacked and firebombed it and then barred the doors to prevent those inside from getting off. An exploding gas tank forced the attackers to retreat, but they beat the escaping riders with pipes, chains, clubs, and crowbars.
Just. Before he left office, President Obama designated the site “Freedom Riders National Monument.”
It turns out that virulent racism was not the only toxin in Anniston. “Once, from 1929 to 1971,” wrote Harriet Washington in A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind,* “Anniston was a company town.” The company for almost all that time was Monsanto, the maker of such illustrious products as DDT, Roundup, Agent Orange, and PCBs. As a result, “the townspeople had the highest recorded levels of PCBs in the nation.” In 2002, 60 Minutes declared Anniston one of the most toxic cities in America. O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, Johnny (“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”) Cochran, subsequently brought the largest class-action lawsuit in U.S. history. The victims got on average $7,725. The lawyers got $142 million.
In 1978 Anniston was named an All-American City. In 1979 Monsanto closed its plant. In 2022 Anniston was called “the most dangerous city in America.”
To which a reader responded: “I grew up in Anniston when the city was at its peak (1960s and 1970s). It was as prosperous a blue-collar town as any. After the '70s, however, businesses and factories started to close up, notably Monsanto . . . [which] has resulted in Anniston losing more than one-third of its population. [In 1970] it had a population about 80% white and 20% black; today the ratio is about 60% non-white and 40% white. There are two main parts of Anniston – east Anniston, which is predominantly residential, and west Anniston, where the factories, plants, mills, warehouses, and lower-income housing are/were located.”
Such paeans to the 1950s and 1960s overlook the reality beneath the white residents’ illusion of paradise – and ignore 50 years of chemical poisoning. It is that amnesia that Ron DeSantis and other Republican governors are promoting in their states’ new history standards.
It should be unnecessary to point out that the vast majority of the victims of Monsanto’s poisoning – as of Anniston’s racism – were people of color.
Note: A technical snafu delayed publication last week. It also cut off the video of the March on Washington fort Jobs and Freedom, which culminated in Dr. King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial 60 years ago today. You can watch the 15-minute speech by clicking this link: https://vimeo.com/35177221.