FINDING REASONS FOR PROGRESSIVE OPTIMISM.

• Date: 01 October 2022
• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Author: Hightower, Jim

From corporate polluters to political bosses, power elites try to create a myth of inevitability to make workaday people feel too helpless to change the injustices of the system. "Don't bother" is their message.

But the feisty residents of Boxtown, Tennessee, definitely did bother when they learned that profiteering fossil fuel giants were targeting them. Boxtown, a historic Black neighborhood in Memphis settled 160 years ago by formerly enslaved people, was considered by Valero Energy and Plains All American Pipeline to be politically powerless, so when these multibillion-dollar pet-ro-powers decided to ram a dirty and dangerous pipeline through the Memphis area, Boxtown was their chosen route. The rich Texas oil barons even sneeringly called the lower-income community the "point of least resistance."

Boy did they get that wrong! Those "small" people of Boxtown resisted fiercely and smartly. Most flat-out refused to sell their family land at the thieving prices offered by the oil slicks. They forged a unified grassroots coalition called Memphis Community...