Standing on a dead-end street in Spartanburg, S.C., Harold Mitchell can plainly see the history of injustice in his community. On one side lies the remains of his childhood home. On the other, a shuttered fertilizer plant that was operational when Mitchell was growing up. He distinctly recalls smells of ammonia and sulfur emanating through the neighborhood that “were so pervasive, you didn’t even think about it.” He remembers his father regularly cleaning white dust off their cars, and workers emerging from the plant gates “looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy” covered in fertilizer dust from head to toe. Sometimes, he’d walk with the plant’s night watchman, strolling alongside neon green sewage lagoons located not far from his bedroom window.
Perhaps his most vivid memory, though, was the day he went with his parents to a doctor’s office and learned that his father had terminal lymphoma. He was 59 years old. “You never forget hearing the doctor tell your father he’s going to die,” Mitchell recalls. “I’m driven to make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone else.”