[TV static drones]
[bright tone]
[serene music]
♪ ♪
- Growing up in Houston,
oil has always been synonymous
with what it means to be a true Texan.
[explosion]
In 1901, history was made with the eruption
of the state's first gusher at the Spindletop oil field.
It spewed black gold for nine days
and changed the economy of Texas forever.
But who really profited from this oil economy?
As the state with the largest Black population
in the country,
how has the Black community been impacted
living in the energy capital of the world?
Is oil an identity that we truly inherited,
or is the story much deeper than that?
[babbling]
- Is there something you want to say?
- [laughs] - Say hi.
- Yeah. - Say "my"..
- My...
- Name... - Name...
- Is... - Is...
My name is Alex Stapleton.
And for 20 years, I've been a Texan in exile.
My family has been here for seven generations,
so leaving home was a really big deal.
But I left because I wanted to become
a documentary filmmaker.
I filmed all over the world,
telling other people's stories.
But this is the first time I'm using my craft
to tell the story of where I come from.
It's really important to me coming back home
to get the perspectives and the point of view
and the history on camera and share with my people,
my family, and just Americans, you know.
We have to start incorporating different histories
into what we know about ourselves.
I want to know why my ancestors have been left out
of the history books
and how my family today can continue to live
in one of the wealthiest parts of the world
without ever having the same opportunities.
♪ ♪
Where is the Black story in Texas?
And where is the Black story when we talk about oil?
♪ ♪
Yes, sir. - [speaks indistinctly]
- Huh?
- I'm doing a documentary.
- 'Cause I'm talking about Black people and oil and gas.
- Exactly.
- Yes, sir.
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
[train-crossing bell dinging]
♪ ♪
In order to understand where Black Texans
fit into the oil and gas story,
we have to go back in time, before Spindletop.
This is the San Jacinto Monument.
In school, we learned this is the battlefield
where Texas independence was fought and won.
What we were not taught was that the Texas Revolution
was fought over the debate to keep slavery.
So I thought this would be a great place
to start the journey,
because, to me, it signifies
the tall tale of Texas, the partial truths.
And I met up with Larry Wright,
who writes about how this causes many of us
to struggle with our Texan identity.
- So much of Texas history revolves around,
you know, what happened to the Black story.
You know, it's gotten written out of our history.
And yet you've been a part of it since the beginning.
- I know.
Well, that's been the big part of telling the story,
and the journey of telling this story is--
you know, it's not in our schoolbooks.
- Mm-hmm. - It's hard to find.
Yeah, it's complex.
And I'm not proud of the ugliness of it,
but I feel compelled...
to share the story and that this needs to be written
into the history of the state. - Right.
Be folded into the narrative. - It needs to be folded in.
- And then you feel more at home.
- Yeah.
Coming home, thanks to...
to reading your book, actually,
it's like I'm being rehabilitated.
[laughter] - I hope for the best.
- I'm being rehabilitated.
But reading your book kind of made me think of Texas
in a very different way,
because through reading your book--
even though you and I have
completely different backgrounds--
- Totally, totally different.
- Completely different backgrounds.
But there's so much that you hit in your writing
and describing this very complex relationship
and identity, you know, that we have as Texans,
that we all struggle with. - Right.
- Or at least that you wrote about your struggle with it.
- Yeah.
- And that gave me comfort
because I realized that--
that there's something bigger that binds us all.
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
We are headed out to Crosby, Texas.
When I was 11, I went from being
in the inner city in Houston to moving out to the boonies.
There's, like, horses, cows, everything out here.
It was quite culture shock.
I want to go visit my mom today
because she's kind of the family historian
and she has managed to learn where our people came from.
My mom grew up when segregation,
you know, Jim Crow laws, were still in effect.
And in the early '70s, when she was in high school,
she was a part of busing and forced integration,
because the schools weren't mixing.
That's how she met my dad.
And then my mom had me.
And a few years later, my parents divorced.
And my mom revealed to my dad that...
she was a lesbian.
We just had a different type of Texan family,
but as nice as things were at home, you know,
I ran into a lot of problems
growing up in a state like this.
This environment, you know, being out here in Crosby,
it was pretty brutal to have gay parents
and to also have a mixed-race family,
but we survived.
[gentle music]
♪ ♪
Okay.
Okay, so I want to tell the story about Black people
and our history.
And we've been here for how many generations?
- I can go back to 1840.
- So out of all this stuff, like, where does it start?
- The story starts with Richard Willis.
Oh, here's Richard Willis.
And he came here from Maryland,
him and two brothers, and they sailed into Galveston
in maybe 1840. - Mm-hmm.
- And they just became merchants
and owned all kinds of businesses in Galveston.
He owned slaves. - Mm-hmm.
- And my great-great-grandfather
was his son.
On the slave records, he spent his whole life with him.
- Mm-hmm. - His name was Qype.
And this is Richard's slave record.
He didn't own very many, but here's Qype, age 10.
He has a 10-year-old mulatto.
Qype was born in 1840, so 1850, he would have been 10.
Qype spent his life being his carriage driver.
When I was growing up, I always knew
that Qype had children, which is my great-grandmother,
his daughter, Ella Willis.
- That's Mama Ella.
- It's one of the only photos I have of Qype's family.
I don't have a picture of Qype,
but, anyway, that's his daughter,
my great-grandmother.
- I'm conflicted hearing this history.
While I find great pride
learning that I'm a descendant of Qype,
the hard truth was that his father was his enslaver,
and that is very painful to accept.
After successfully tracking down this part of our family,
my mother was able to go back and trace our paternal line
to John Thomas.
John was enslaved by Michel Menard,
a white settler who founded the city of Galveston in 1836,
immediately after Texas became a republic.
His home, the Menard House,
is a historical site here in Texas
and is another place I visited as a young schoolgirl
on field trips to Galveston.
But as a kid, I had no idea this is where
my great-great-grandfather also lived.
- The founder of Galveston... - Uh-huh.
- That was his house. - This is the Menard Mansion.
- Yeah, where John Thomas... both: Was a slave.
- And they actually still have the slave quarters
in the back, if you go on a tour.
- And what do they say when you go to the slave quarters?
- This is where the slaves stayed.
- Wow.
Do they even have photos up or any recognition of the slaves
that came from there? - No.
- But, again, that's, like, my point.
Our history doesn't matter.
I didn't grow up with any of this history.
- Right. - Like, when you go
to these places, they never talk about slaves.
That's, like, one of the most famous buildings
on the Gulf Coast, and it's celebrated,
and you go there, and there's pictures
of all the slave owners and all the white people.
And we're just--
we have no history.
- Right. - [clicks tongue]
- When Texas was a republic,
it was a lot bigger than it is now.
It extended up all the way through parts of Colorado,
and it went all the way up to Wyoming.
Because there were slaves and labor was free
and cotton is incredibly labor-intensive,
Texas became a cotton state.
And once it became a cotton state,
there was an investment in keeping slavery.
Now, our days as a republic,
which was actually just a decade--
we had a choice.
We could have stayed a republic.
Great Britain, which had just outlawed slavery itself,
was willing to recognize Texas as a republic
if we renounced slavery.
And we chose not to.
It was a conscious decision
on the part of the white settlers in Texas
to keep slavery and enter the Union.
- Slavery was finally abolished in 1863,
when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
This is the history we've been taught,
but what's often left out is that many enslaved populations
remained in bondage.
Here in Texas, slaves were not freed
until 2 1/2 years later, on June 19, 1865.
Juneteenth was created to commemorate this moment.
And the campaign to make Juneteenth
an official state holiday was led in part
by my family,
the descendants of John Thomas.
So now slavery has ended.
Then what happens to our family?
- Okay, so our family's in Galveston,
and John Thomas is no longer a slave.
He drops the Menard name.
He had two children.
He had a son named William, who is my great-grandfather.
William married Maddy Peachy.
- Then we have Granddaddy. - Yeah.
So William Thomas-- this is my grandfather.
He became a Pullman Porter.
Then he had 10 children, and he lived in Fifth Ward.
- What kind of place was Fifth Ward?
- It was a Black neighborhood near downtown.
You basically had shotgun houses...
- Mm-hmm. - Or houses on stilts.
You didn't have foundations.
His kids grow up there, go to school.
And then I guess some developer
created a new neighborhood-- Pleasantville.
They moved there, I think, in 1949.
And Pleasantville was, at the time,
the step up for Blacks. - Mm-hmm.
What did it mean to Granny and to Granddaddy
that they could live in a community like Pleasantville?
- They felt like it was a great achievement.
You had a lot of professionals in Pleasantville,
like doctors and attorneys.
And you had everything contained
right there in the neighborhood.
You had a dentist, a Laundromat.
You could just walk down the street,
and everything was right there.
And they had a mortgage.
That was the difference.
That was one of the major differences.
You owned your home.
- There's me and Granny. - Mm-hmm.
- And this is Granny in Pleasantville.
- Yeah, that's her in Pleasantville,
at our house they bought.
- You love taking pictures of Granny.
- Mm-hmm. I photographed her for 10 years,
the last 10 years of her life.
♪ ♪
- Here's you and Granny. - Yeah.
- And you grew up in that house.
both: At first. - Yeah, until I was older.
Yeah, till we moved later.
- After World War II,
the GI Bill provided mortgage loans
that allowed veterans to buy homes,
creating the great American middle class.
We've all heard that story.
But what's often not talked about
is how Jim Crow laws kept Black vets out of the program.
In 1948, land developer Melvin Silverman,
who, like other Jewish Houstonians,
also faced housing discrimination,
partnered with Judson Robinson Sr.,
a Black businessman,
to create the first master-planned community
for middle-income Black Americans.
It was called Pleasantville.
Residents were able to choose
between a two-, three-, or four-bedroom home,
whether they wanted one bathroom or two.
Lawns were well-manicured.
Sewers were underground.
All things typical to a white neighborhood
now available to Black homeowners
for the first time.
♪ ♪
Granny, my great-grandmother, was one of the first
to move in on one of the first streets in Pleasantville--
Demaree Lane.
Her house was the center for our family
for four generations.
But as time passed on,
Pleasantville began to change.
The '70s oil boom turned a lot of men into millionaires,
but for Pleasantville
and other communities on the east side of Houston,
the local expansion of refineries and chemical plants
took a hard toll on this neighborhood.
[dramatic music]
- Thank you. both: Mm.
Thank you for doing this today.
- No problem. How y'all doing? Hello, hello.
I'm Tracy.
- This is Tracy, one of my cousins who I grew up with.
I spent every weekend in Pleasantville,
but Tracy actually grew up in Granny's house.
As kids, we had a tribe of cousins, second cousins,
third cousins, aunties, uncles, grandmas, and grandpas
all watching over us as we played all over this area.
- So yeah, man, so this Demaree.
- Demaree. - Yes, man.
One of the main streets, one of the first streets
in the neighborhood. - Yep.
- So yeah, we grew up here, man, playing baseball.
Everybody here knows each other.
You know, typical neighborhood.
- Oh, look, is that someone
pulling out from Mama Jewels' house?
- Yeah, but no one stays at Mama Jewels' house no more.
- Oh, well, then who's that? - I don't know.
They sold the house. - Oh.
- From here on down, it's all new people.
That's what I'm trying to state.
This Ms. Winfield house. - Ms. Winfield's House.
I'm actually named after Ms. Winfield's husband.
- Hold up. - Alex, Alexander.
- Oh, really? - Yeah.
- It's very believable. We did that a lot.
Yeah, man, this is the house, man.
- I wonder if it has gotten any flood damage.
- That was Granny's room... - Mm-hmm.
- Living room, the den... - Mm-hmm.
- You know, front door.
- I don't know if I put that sticker on there
or you did, but I remem-- - Yeah, that's our sticker.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. We put that sticker on there.
- That is our sticker, isn't it?
- And it's still there... - It's still there.
- Like, 30-plus years later. - Yeah.
[upbeat music]
- New residents live in this home now,
but just a few blocks away, some of my extended family
has remained in the neighborhood.
Today the home of my great-aunt Lela
is one of the last gathering spots we have left.
♪ ♪
She's raised four generations of kids,
including me from time to time,
in this home.
But it's more than a house.
It's sacred ground, a monument
to represent the pride of our elders.
- There you go.
- We moved here October 23, 1954,
on a Saturday.
- I felt like we had moved to heaven.
I was four. - Five. You were five.
- Five.
We had a front yard and a backyard,
a paved street, a full bathroom,
so I thought we were in heaven.
- So coming here was really nice.
- Very. - Yes.
- Very.
Everything was just perfect.
You think about it-- shiny new floors,
painted walls,
brand-new houses everywhere you look.
- It's a beautiful place to live, you know.
It really has been.
I see some changes now, but it's the sign of the times.
- When you come into Pleasantville
from Market Street on Pleasantville Drive,
they had apartments on both sides,
but I don't remember when they got rid
of all those apartments and everything
and all of these warehouses came.
- Warehouses went up everywhere.
- Yeah.
- There's been so much pollution.
We've had so many chemical fires
that have burned for days.
And all you do is step out and look up in the sky,
and you see all this smoke and debris.
[dramatic music]
- We're from here, and we're so used to the pollution.
I don't think you really realize
how polluted the air is until you travel, especially abroad.
And then you come back home, and then you realize,
what did I just come home to?
- But does it make you sad that--
I mean, this whole neighborhood means so much to us
and the fact that it's being eaten alive by industry.
- Right. - It's just so toxic.
- Right, right - Like, it's not normal.
- It's not supposed to be normal, but it is the norm.
- Yeah.
- It's not supposed to be normal, but it is.
- Mm-hmm. That's true.
- Industry changes everything.
♪ ♪
- Talking to my family reminds me of an event
we all experienced.
Back in 1995, a commercial warehouse caught on fire
down the street.
I'll never forget seeing
the thick cloud of smoke looming above
or the dark ash that rained down on us.
No one told us to take shelter,
so my cousins and I stayed outside,
marveling at what felt like Armageddon.
[siren wailing]
Residents were informed much later
that hazardous chemicals were inside the warehouses
that burned for weeks.
A city report also found
that at the time, there were 45 other hazardous sites
within 1,000 feet of Pleasantville.
Despite protests from the community,
these sites were not removed.
And now industry's presence has only gotten worse.
Houston's lack of zoning laws and regulations
have allowed oil and gas to expand
right up to the border of Pleasantville.
Today the city averages one chemical accident
about every six weeks.
♪ ♪
- 2016...
I had a flesh-eating disorder.
Stayed in the hospital 30 days.
Then I went to isolation at a rehab for 30 days.
And 30 days after that, I went to rehab
to learn how to walk again and to do things.
I've had the cancer,
two head surgeries,
both legs messed up.
- It just feels like you're kind of getting hit
with, you know, the flesh-eating disease--
- Necrotizing fasciitis.
- That could also be a result--
I mean, you don't know where it really came from.
- No, because we have been introduced
to so many different environmental issues
that could cause problems.
And there are a lot of respiratory illnesses
here in this neighborhood,
because I raised my two grandkids,
and they both have asthma.
My mom, my youngest sister,
my sister next to me, and myself
have all been diagnosed with asthma.
Talking about environmental issues that are close to us,
because on this particular letter that we got
from the city of Houston, it was talking about,
if you live within a half mile of this particular site,
you got these letters.
If you had wells that you were using for water
and you live within five miles,
then you got a certified letter.
This is something to alarm you.
What's going on in our neighborhoods?
♪ ♪
- Part of what makes Pleasantville so vulnerable
is its proximity to the Houston Ship Channel.
I drove over this place 1,000 times as a kid,
and I'll never forget the strong odors I smelled
when crossing the bridge.
The Ship Channel connects the bayous
on the east side of Houston to the Gulf of Mexico.
It was originally used to move timber and other goods
out of the state,
but after the Spindletop oil boom,
this natural waterway was deepened, widened,
and an official port was built in order to quickly move oil
out of Southeast Texas.
Today the Port of Houston
actually takes tourists around here
to showcase industry's presence.
But while some might see this as a crown jewel,
the communities that live here feel very differently.
I met up with another east side local,
Yvette Arellano, the founder of Fenceline Watch.
Yvette has designed their own toxic tour for policymakers,
environmentalists, and anyone who will listen
to show that communities here
are being harmed living next to this industrial area.
- Right here we're standing at the mouth
of the Houston Ship Channel...
The largest petrochemical complex in the nation.
Altogether, it represents over 300 energy firms.
When you're talking about chemicals, oil,
any by-products, liquid natural gas,
it's going to come into the Houston Ship Channel
to be processed, refined, stored, and then exported.
If they weren't here,
this entire area would be covered
in magnolias and wild fowl.
Houston's nickname used to be Magnolia City.
Now it's the Energy Capital of the World.
- And while energy companies make billions
from this sprawling, massive industry,
the rest of us benefit too.
A sophisticated highway of pipelines
transport oil and gas from all over the state
and bring it here to refineries, storage tanks,
and plants situated all along the Ship Channel.
Some of that oil and gas is then used to make things
like beauty products, car parts, computer parts,
water bottles, and thousands of other household goods.
As industry continues to expand,
the Ship Channel keeps encroaching further
into the surrounding neighborhoods.
- It is a Black and Brown issue
when we're talking about environmental justice,
because on one side, you have majority
immigrant-dominated communities
whose first language probably isn't English, you know.
And on the opposite side, you're gonna have
historically Black communities.
So I'm extremely aggravated
whenever oil and gas is perceived as Texas culture,
whenever people think of Texas
and all they see in their minds
are oil derricks and black gold
'cause that is one person's perspective from the top 1%
that get to dominate and actually benefit
from the wealth of extraction, of contaminating people,
and of killing our natural resources
and our communities.
♪ ♪
- It's not just the neighborhoods
surrounding the Ship Channel that are vulnerable.
You can find fence-line communities
up and down the entire Gulf Coast of Texas.
But one community in particular
stands out to me.
It's literally right next door
to the largest oil refinery in North America...
Port Arthur.
♪ ♪
- Here at Port Arthur, Texas, near Louisiana and the sea,
46,000 Texans say,
we oil the world.
Proud of the Lone Star State--
young city going places.
♪ ♪
- This looks like the neighborhood
that my family is from--
the same exact situation.
Once inside the community, I saw so many abandoned homes,
empty plots where homes used to be,
and an industry presence
that far superseded anything that I had ever seen before.
Every few years, a news outlet sheds light
on the plight of Port Arthur's residents,
but the situation only seems to get worse.
I met up with John Beard.
He runs a community-based
environmental-justice organization.
So, John, this is where you grew up.
- Yeah, grew up right here.
This is the west side of Port Arthur.
It's also known as Port Arthur Heights.
We're standing in front of where my childhood home
used to be.
And that's reminiscent of a lot of the city--
that what was here at one time is no longer here
because of what you see right here
with these refineries
and the environmental contamination
and all that comes with it.
Ms. Scott used to live next door there.
And the Millers lived where that driveway is.
And the tank farm was where this parking lot is now.
My parents told me at the time,
when they were so close to the fence line
near this tank farm,
they could reach out the bedroom window
and touch the fence. - Wow.
- And there were times, if you had a white house,
that you would see the side of your house stained yellow.
Well, that's because of something
that was emitted from that plant
during the night while you slept.
♪ ♪
- So tell me what you did for a living.
- Yes, I worked for ExxonMobil Corporation
for 38 years, and I was in the refining division.
And, basically, I served as a process operator
who makes those units that you see run
and do what they do and keep the profits going and all.
Part of my career was also spent in maintenance,
to keep the equipment running.
Without the equipment
and without the people running the equipment,
you don't have oil and gas.
These cars we drive don't go
and power plants and all of that.
- How do you feel being here and seeing your family home
not here anymore and with industry right next door
and knowing that you worked, you know, in the refineries?
- Well, Alex, when you're growing up,
you don't know what you don't know.
But as people have gotten older and things have gone on,
we found out that there are a lot of health risks
from breathing some of the air here,
from being in the plant with the fires, explosions.
And in some ways, because of what happened historically,
with white flight,
with the changes in urbanization and all,
from refocusing from downtowns in the cities
to the suburbs and outlying areas,
that's affected Port Arthur's population.
It's affected the way we live.
You look at the city's unemployment,
which is the second highest in the state,
with all the industrial expansion,
with 900 million at Valero, LNG's port expansion,
and all of this money flowing into the area,
and yet Black and Brown communities
don't get to share in this wealth.
We have the second-highest unemployment in the state.
The only area of the state that has worse unemployment
is down in the Valley,
where they have absolutely no industry.
- Nationwide, the statistics are not much better.
Despite making up 13% of the U.S. population,
Black people only make up 6% of the oil and gas workforce.
So what's it like for those who do make it
into the industry?
I decided to reach out to some family members
who work in plants and refineries,
but fearing for their jobs,
no one would go on camera to talk to me...
except for one of my cousins
who's an independent contractor.
This is my cousin Dennis,
a second-generation hot-shot trucker.
When a rig or a drill goes down out in the Permian Basin,
he's the guy you call to take a new part out to the patch.
His trips across the state can take up to 10 hours,
and that's just one way.
♪ ♪
- My dad actually owned a hot-shot-trucking business.
And ever since I was a kid,
I always used to ride with him on the weekends
whenever I didn't have school.
That's how I initially got started with my dad.
He taught me everything there is to know about hot shotting.
♪ ♪
- Down.
Down!
- Dennis is also a competitive roper
and has competed in rodeos all over the country.
It's a tradition that he picked up from my Uncle Kevin,
who was taught by my grandfather
Oliver Chachere, my mom's dad.
My grandfather was the Black urban cowboy of Pleasantville.
He even kept horses in his backyard.
He also started one of the first
all-Black trail riders associations in Houston.
While this tradition skipped over my mom and me,
Dennis ran with it,
and he even got a college scholarship for roping.
♪ ♪
- Relax.
- Down, down, down, down!
- Go ahead. Tie.
- Yes, sir.
- [grunts] - Finish it, man.
♪ ♪
- Good job.
- Right, but you got to put that arm out.
- Well...
And the guy came by my shop and told me
he was doing the hot shotting.
And he told me how much money he was making,
and I was looking at what I was making.
So I decided to change my line of work.
I sold off the paint and body, and I went into trucking.
Back when I started trucking,
there was very few Blacks in it.
The Black folks really didn't pick up on this for--
I bet you another 10, 20 years
before they picked up on what was going on.
- Yeah, but see, they didn't let them in.
Tell it like is. You couldn't get in.
And if you did get in,
they give you a job that either get you killed,
hurt, or made you quit.
- Yeah. - Tell it like is.
♪ ♪
- The boom era that Spindletop created back in 1901
attracted wildcatters,
otherwise known as independent oil contractors,
who scoured the land,
looking for black gold, trying to strike it rich.
There were roughnecks--
the men who drilled for oil in the patch
and tended to the derricks.
Then, of course, there were the lucky few
who achieved tycoon status
and founded companies like Texaco and Gulf Oil.
What these men all had in common
was that they were white.
Employment opportunities for Black men in the patch
were limited primarily
to things like hauling equipment to the rigs,
doing the dirt work,
and, occasionally, an assignment on the pipeline
or crew.
But by World War II, as the demand for oil grew,
more labor was needed.
Some Black men landed coveted jobs in plants and refineries
but earned much lower wages than their white coworkers.
And have you ever wondered why you've never seen
a Black J.R. Ewing?
Well, that's because,
among the largest oil and gas companies in America,
every CEO is white.
While other industries have been put on blast
for their lack of diversity,
the oil and gas industry has not had the same reckoning.
- That was the culture that we had to go through.
I mean, I went through a lot of places
that they told me I had too much voice.
You need to shut up and just kind of let things happen.
- I used to ride with him when I was a kid.
And I know he had one customer where we went, and it was--
I believe it was 2008,
'cause Barack was running for president.
And we had his hat on the dash.
- Yeah. - And before we--
look, before we rode in there, he said,
hey, grab that hat off that dash, put it on the side.
I was like, why, you know?
We need to represent, you know.
He said, not here. [laughs]
- That's the way the world is. all: Right.
- That's right. - You're right.
♪ ♪
- Dennis' job as a hot-shot trucker
takes him all over the state of Texas.
But because he travels alone,
he must carefully plan his routes
to avoid certain areas after dark.
Historically, these places
are known as sundown towns--
places where Black folks are made to feel
distinctly unwelcome...
run out of town...
or even worse.
You might think that they're a thing of the past,
eradicated by integration...
but they still exist to this day.
♪ ♪
- My mom used to always tell me,
you know, you're going through Orange,
you know, you're going through Vidor.
Don't never stop through Vidor.
You know, keep going.
You know, I never understood why, you know,
but, you know, she kind of explained to me.
I would say the scariest trip I had
was through Louisiana, though.
They got some little, small towns up there,
and these oil rigs be back in the woods.
You can just tell that, you know,
a person like me shouldn't be there,
you know, by just some of the stuff that they have written
on the, you know, gas stations out there.
You'll see on the sign "don't let dark catch you out here"
or something like that, you know.
That's one that I see a lot.
I kind of know where they're aiming at with it, you know.
I am smart, though, and I know when not to go somewhere,
and I know when not to stop somewhere, you know.
♪ ♪
- While Dennis faces danger on the road,
there are other threats to the safety
and well-being of Black people working in this industry
because of the nature of the jobs they tend to get.
♪ ♪
- Well, there's a contract worker
or a potential operator
for that refinery.
Every day you walk through that gate,
it's kind of like you're saying a prayer.
- This is Rooster, a friend of my Uncle Kevin's.
Like my cousin Dennis, he's also a cowboy and a roper
who grew up around rodeos and trail rides all his life.
Rooster's been working in the oil and gas industry
for two decades, doing equipment maintenance,
including chemical and tank cleaning.
You physically have been in contact
with chemicals and materials
that are very hazardous to one's health.
At what point did you realize that it was really dangerous?
- I noticed that it was dangerous...
when I first started.
My first day on the job, I was--
I was scared. - Yeah?
- Yeah, and to actually go in a hole,
to go in there and clean that tank.
- Mm-hmm.
- And if it's a, say, 300-foot tank,
it's completely dark, and you have to walk across,
and all you have are tank lights on the inside of it...
Yeah, it's--
you know, it kind of scares you because you got to sit there
and you're playing with your line.
And like I say, your life is depending on this plastic line
that's running through all of this sludge
to not saturate
and, you know, get in your lungs or anything
or breathe in any of that, so...
- Yeah. Do you ever think about the long-term effects
that your body might have absorbed?
- I do, and I just pray to God
that I haven't really... [chuckles]
Done too much damage to myself, but--
- Yeah.
♪ ♪
I feel like as Houstonians, I wish more Americans
understood the sacrifice
that people put into this type of work.
- Accidents--it's starting to be so common now.
It's real scary.
And that's just--sad to say, it's just a chance we take,
you know, to put food on the table.
- A terrifying chemical-plant blast,
leaving one person dead
and several communities outside Houston on edge.
- Officials say a transfer line ignited
a tank full of the chemical isobutylene.
- Me and a coworker had just went there
to talk to the maintenance people
about doing a tank-cleaning job there.
The same three operators
that were actually in the accident
were the same three operators
that we were over there talking to.
- Wow.
- And probably about 10 minutes
after we left there, we heard--
You know, you could hear it. Boom.
You know, we by refineries.
You know, it's noise all the time.
And then as we're getting on the beltway,
I get a phone call from one of my guys.
Hey, man, the plant just blew up.
We running. We trying to get out of here, man.
We don't know what's going on, man.
- So many of them went running for their lives,
going under, over,
and even through perimeter fencing.
- It was scary.
- As I'm driving, I look over my shoulder,
and I could see the black smoke.
♪ ♪
Back up a little bit.
As we were there looking at the job,
my coworker... - Mm-hmm.
- She specifically said,
they're gonna get somebody hurt.
- Yeah.
- And it's ironic.
30 minutes later, if that much...
- Yeah. - They have an explosion.
- Within Texas big oil lies a paradox.
♪ ♪
It is the lifeblood of so many,
while simultaneously wreaking havoc
on those same people's lives, the environment,
and communities directly around them.
♪ ♪
But if you depend on big oil,
it's heresy to bite the hand that feeds you.
♪ ♪
Now that I've been home for a while,
I can see that Houston is a city
that's cannibalizing itself.
Will it ever be possible to balance equality
and prosperity in a place like this?
You can't have one conversation
without the other.
♪ ♪
- Let's pull her up.
♪ ♪
- There's resistance to toeing the line of that old story
of rugged individualism,
and we did it ourselves, and you can do it, too,
and look at all of this going on right now.
This oil and gas economy--
it's been the greatest thing, great prosperity.
It has not brought prosperity for all.
It has not, you know, shared the wealth for all.
- Often referred to
as the godfather of environmental justice,
Dr. Robert Bullard, a professor,
author, and sociologist,
has been sounding the alarm
about environmental racism in Houston
dating all the way back to the 1970s.
He is currently a distinguished professor
at Texas Southern,
one of the nation's largest
historically Black universities,
located right here in Houston.
- I guess I'm called
the father of environmental justice
because way back in 1978,
I was asked to collect data and do a study for a lawsuit,
Bean versus Southwestern Waste Management Corporation--
the first lawsuit challenging an environmental racism
using civil rights law.
And what we found is that from the '20s up until 1978,
100% of all the city-owned landfills
were in Black neighborhoods.
Six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators
were in Black neighborhoods.
And three out of four of the privately owned landfills
in Houston were in Black neighborhoods.
So from the '20s up until 1978,
82% of all the garbage dumped in Houston
was dumped on Black people,
even though Blacks made up only 25% of the population.
- Wow. - That was an aha moment.
- And after decades of research and data collection,
he's now turned his attention to advocacy.
- Environmental justice basically says
it's a human-rights issue--
the right to breathe clean air.
In 1979, '80,
environmental justice was a footnote.
40 years later, it's a headline.
Environmental justice is a headline right now
because of the converging issues of COVID,
Black Lives Matter, police brutality,
killing of unarmed Black men and women, voter suppression.
You can almost name any social issue
and talk about justice.
- It's all connected. - It's all connected.
I mean, we can provide lots of resources
to harden the industries.
But if the communities somehow are left vulnerable,
then we have not addressed
the full complexity of the problem
and of the challenge.
- And we can talk about the fact
that, as a city, where we're geographically located,
we are susceptible to these volatile weather patterns
and susceptible to climate change
and why that's such a dangerous mixture,
with having so many plants and refineries also located here.
- Well, we are a hot spot.
We're on the knife's edge when it comes to climate impacts.
We're talking sea-level rise.
We're talking these more severe weather events
that will happen, that have happened.
You know, Houston had, you know,
three 500-year floods three years in a row.
- Harvey taking aim at Texas.
- A ferocious category-4 storm.
- Spiraling in off the Gulf of Mexico.
- I've never been through this,
and I don't wish it on anybody.
- Baby like this shouldn't be in the rain and cold.
- I've never experienced anything like this.
I didn't even imagine that it was gonna be
this catastrophic like this.
- The fact that we had a biblical flood
called Harvey that flooded the entire city,
but our communities of color on the fence line
had to deal with the flooding,
but they also have to deal with the pollution coming
from these industries into their backyards
and their front yards and into their home.
♪ ♪
- The rising floodwater not only forced
people from their homes.
It was also tainted
with potentially dangerous contaminants,
posing a threat to health and safety.
The water significantly damaged the homes of my family
back in Pleasantville.
- When we noticed the water was coming in the house
and I was still under the doctor's care,
I kept trying to get folks to come out
to look at the house to see what we needed to do.
Couldn't find a company anywhere
that was willing to come in because of the contamination.
My mother and I applied with the city of Houston intake
for assistance.
That was in 2017.
So when you hear about programs
that the city of Houston...
is willing to help the communities with,
why does it take so long?
- My family and other residents
have had to turn to leaders in the community
in order to navigate the bureaucratic process
of applying for aid.
Mary Fontenot, the head of the Civic League,
has been tirelessly pushing the city and the state
to make sure Pleasantville will finally get
the assistance it deserves.
- Harvey was one of those hurricanes
that literally affected everybody.
We were impacted because we have become a community
that is an aging community,
that's tucked away and forgotten in many ways.
♪ ♪
When Harvey hit and they had all those funds
and they came in and they said,
okay, yes, we're gonna fix your home,
things were happening so quickly
and so many people were affected
that they couldn't do the proper processes
to make sure that the people who were coming in
and repairing the homes actually knew
what they were doing.
We had a lot of seniors who had to dip into their pockets
because they could no longer wait
for somebody to come out and help them,
or they were being denied by their insurance company.
So you had homeowners insurance,
and it covered your roof,
and yet after Harvey,
the insurance companies would come out and say,
no, no, we're not gonna cover this roof.
And it's kind of like, why?
Well, it's kind of old.
But I'm still paying insurance
for the insurance to cover my roof.
Yeah, we know, but we're not gonna cover it.
And by the way, we're gonna drop you.
And that's exactly what happened.
There's a lot going on.
So that's what we're doing with Harvey...
- Yeah. - And how we're trying
to build our community, and it's a very, very long road.
- Disasters will further marginalize
marginalized communities,
and disasters exacerbate inequality.
♪ ♪
The way that our policies are in place today,
federal and state policies,
will provide benefits that oftentimes are skewed
toward the more affluent.
There are still people in New Orleans
trying to get their homes and lives back in order
after Hurricane Katrina that happened in 2005.
Harvey happened in 2017.
In some cases, it takes longer
for some communities and residents to bounce back.
- Before my family in Pleasantville
could fully recover from Harvey,
disaster struck again.
While filming this story,
the entire state of Texas
was hit with another catastrophic climate event.
- The entire state, for the first time in weather history,
under that winter-storm warning.
- In February of 2021,
Winter Storm Uri hit hard,
causing an estimated $295 billion in damages.
It's the single biggest insurance-claim event
in Texas history.
[people scream] - Oh, my God!
- And the storm killed more than 700 people.
- This week, there have been more customers
in Texas without power
than there were during Hurricane Harvey.
- It's cold. All the power is out.
People are just trying to stay warm.
- While the storm got national attention,
what was not reported on
was how disproportionate the freeze was
for fence-line communities like Pleasantville,
who were still trying to recover
from previous disasters like Harvey.
- People ask, well, why don't they move?
Well, some communities have been there a long time.
And in other cases, people will say,
this is my home.
This is my homeland.
Five generations have lived here.
Why should I be forced to leave?
I was here first.
These neighborhoods are surrounded now
by industry that's killing them
and killing the neighborhoods.
Some of them don't want to be relocated
because that's their homeland
and that's where they want to be.
♪ ♪
[truck beeping]
- After four years of waiting for help,
the state of Texas decided
that instead of using Harvey funds
to repair my great-aunt Lela's home,
they would tear it down and offer to build her
a cheaper, smaller shotgun-style structure
with no garage and no covered patio
for her to hold those weekly Sunday gatherings
that are so cherished by my family.
- Oh... [speaks indistinctly]
♪ ♪
[glass shattering]
♪ ♪
- It happens that this is where all the resources are.
America obviously needs an energy source.
And this is what it looks like.
- I feel like that's actually the big quagmire.
- I think the more we talk about Texas,
the more complicated it seems.
And it's a moral challenge.
- Yeah, and part of it is understanding
the people that are directly impacted by this conversation.
And I feel like those are the people
that are being left out. - Yeah.
- And I want to be a change agent.
I want to document the history
because that will live forever
and that is what goes down generation to generation.
It goes to my son and to his children.
And without that, like, we're nothing.
And specifically as a Black woman,
if I don't see people that look like me,
you know, and all I have are these giant things
that will never get destroyed in a flood,
that are full of old white guys...
- Yeah. - That we use all these words
to say that these are the people that did everything.
And it's just not true. - Yeah.
- It's just not true.
These people...
profited off of a lot of free labor, you know.
- Yes, they did. - And those are my ancestors.
- Right.
- And they survived in spite of.
♪ ♪
As the nation entertains what a future could look like
without oil or gas,
I wonder what will happen to my city.
What I know now is that communities like mine
must have a seat at the table.
You cannot write out our story.
We exist.
We are here.
♪ ♪
[bright tone]