Grover Hankins

Region: Coastal Plain

Topics: Law, Pollution, Environmental Justice


Mr. Hankins is an attorney who served in the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights and Criminal divisions, worked in private practice, acted as general counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and operated the Environmental Justice Clinic and taught  law at Texas Southern University in Houston. The Clinic has taken on a variety of cases for community and grassroots public interest groups, including challenges to large-scale hog pens, DDT incinerators, petrochemical tanks, refineries, smelters, landfills. Throughout, he has found a pattern in which environmental problems have become civil rights issues, where isolated communities feel that they've been taken advantage of by agencies and industries due to their color, income, and/or rural location.

Interviewed

October 6, 1999
Houston, Texas
Reels 2042 and 2043