Segregation's toxic past re-emerges in North Carolina's lead-poisoned playgrounds

Buck Blue fondly remembers growing up in Walltown, a tight-knit Black community in Durham, North Carolina, in the 1960s and 1970s. He would be out all day, playing football and basketball with buddies at the park near his house. They’d spend hours in the creek there, which turned different hues depending on a nearby textile mill’s dyeing work. They’d hang out in the tunnel that ferried the water across the road: “That was our clubhouse,” he said.

But his memories have been tainted. Last year, Duke University researchers found that some of the soil in Walltown Park, including sediment along the creek’s banks, is contaminated with lead. It’s a lingering remnant of the property’s days as a waste incinerator from around 1920 to 1942, one of five that the city operated.

At least four of those incinerators were located in Black neighborhoods. All four sites were eventually turned into parks, and three of them were cited in the Duke study as having spots with soil lead levels far exceeding those recommended by the EPA (the fourth site wasn’t tested).

As a neurotoxin, lead causes irreparable harm, particularly in kids’ rapidly developing brains. No amount of lead exposure is found to be safe, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have lowered the acceptable blood lead level threshold for children twice in the last three decades, most recently in 2021.

For Blue and his neighbors, the real betrayal was the fact that they didn’t learn the news from the city, nor from Duke. The researchers reportedly contacted Durham parks and recreation officials about their findings last November, but Walltown residents didn’t learn about them until a community member came across the information online in mid-May. No one had bothered to alert them.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/10/durham-north-carolina-lead-playgrounds-black-neighborhoods