Last month, a federal jury in Ohio ordered the town of Zanesville to pay about $11 million in damages for failing to provide water to each of 67 plaintiff for nearly 47 years. Those people all lived in Coal Run Road, a mostly black neighborhood sits outside the city limits.
Like a lot of people in the neighborhood, Doretta Hale, 74, wept on the day the clean water first gushed through the pipes. “I could wash clothes whenever I wanted,” she said, as she sat on her tiny front porch. “I could go out and water the flowers.”
Ms. Hale and her husband, Rodney, had used an electric pump to bring water from a cistern in the front yard. But the water was fouled with crawfish, snakes and rats. The residue from old coal deposits, meanwhile, sometimes could leave the water as red as blood.
Others put buckets on the roof to collect raindrops, and gathered snow in the winter. Water was so scarce that children learned early that it was bad manners to ask for a drink in a neighbor’s home.
“They might not have any,” said Cindy Hairston, a 47-year-old nurse, “and you didn’t want to embarrass them.”
The town defended itself, of course.
Contending that race had nothing to do with water policy, Mark Landes, a county lawyer, said the real issue was geography.
“There is a reason it’s called city water,” he said. “It is water that is supplied to people who live within the city.”
The hollow, he noted, is about five miles beyond the city limit. And he estimated that perhaps 30 percent of county residents did without city water, “and almost all of them are white.”
…
Reed Colfax, a member of the Washington legal team, Relman and Dane, noted that the jury found evidence of racial discrimination, adding it would be difficult to overlook racism in a case where city water was extended “to the last white house.”
Moreover, he said, the state attorney general, Nancy Rogers, supported the suit and praised the judgment.
Mmmm, mmm, MMMM! Just how I like my discrimination: aged to perfection.
(photo from the NYT.)
