This is part two of a three part series featuring an insider look at the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico - including environmental practices, worker-related injuries and deaths, and the industry’s economic and political influence - through the lens of thirty-five-year oil worker Randy Comeaux. See part one here.
This is my full speech from the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, March 9, in commemoration of the 50th Commemoration of Bloody Sunday. Due to time constraints, the original was cut down to one minute, so I am sharing my full thoughts here.
For weeks, Adam Williams had been looking forward to his son’s first t-ball game of the season.
So much so, that when he had what was the latest in a long string of seizure-like episodes before the game, no one was surprised that he still made it to the park in time for the first inning. The seizure’s after-effects left his speech slurred and his brain foggy, but even that didn’t prevent the proud father from cheering on his son on an otherwise picture-perfect day on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
This post was originally written for the Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek film website but seemed fitting for Bridge The Gulf because it's about how the story of a community on the Mississippi Gulf Coast is impacting communities in other parts of the country.
I had a Professor of Economics in college tell his students "there is a lot of money to be made when dealing with poor people and children. Neither are in control of their own future and both allow others to make decisions for them. Businesses are allowed to build and tear down housing projects to move them around like nomads all in the name of good. While those in charge of solving the poverty problem are not interested in doing so because if they did their jobs would disappear.
In a segment of MSNBC’s the Ed Show focused on the ongoing human health effects of BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, Ed read from what he referred to as “BP’s Public Health Fact Sheet”, which states,
This video was made in April 2014, at a US Human Rights Network hearing on human rights abuses, part of the Mobile Center for Fair Housing’s Regional Justice Leadership summit. I told the story of Africatown’s founding, the introduction of the paper industry and pollution in the 1940's, decline of the industry in the 1990's, and attempts to bring in new industry in 2014.
Africatown's Magazine Point Neighborhood is situated on both the Mobile River and the Three Mile Creek. The part of Magazine Point that sets on the Mobile River is where that last shipment of slaves in America actually landed, whereas that portion that sets on the Three Mile Creek has a spiritual connection because it is the place where that last slave shipment would baptize themselves.
This is part one of a three part series featuring an insider look at the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico - including environmental practices, worker-related injuries and deaths, and the industry’s economic and political influence - through the lens of thirty-five-year oil worker Randy Comeaux.
