Hazel Johnson was jolted by deaths of those she knew and loved throughout her life.

Her mom died of tuberculosis when she was 12, her little brother died before his 2nd birthday, and her baby sister died before she was 1. That was when she lived in Louisiana — in an area not far from the infamous Cancer Alley, nicknamed for its high rate of disease and proximity to petrochemical plants.

After Hazel came to Chicago — soon settling in Altgeld Gardens, a public housing complex on the Far South Side — her husband, John, died at 41 from lung cancer.

It was John’s death in 1969 that opened her eyes about her surroundings. It was a leak at a nearby chemical storage facility in 1974 that put a spotlight on the pollution threats all around her community. Altgeld residents were evacuated and dozens were treated at a hospital.

Later, her public health and environmental activism persuaded President Bill Clinton to recognize “environmental justice” in an executive order. A proposed city ordinance, promised by Mayor Brandon Johnson in September 2023, is expected to be named after the legendary Chicago activist.

The year before Hazel Johnson, founder of People for Community Recovery, died in 2011, her daughter Cheryl stepped up to lead the movement. Cheryl says her mother still inspires her.

“I’m being challenged and just trying to live for what she fought for,” Cheryl Johnson says. “She was my best friend.”

With a stroke of a pen in January, President Donald Trump ended that 1994 order signed by Clinton. Trump declared that the document, recognizing poor communities that often bear the brunt of pollution, amounts to “illegal discrimination” and is “radical.”

Environmental advocates say Trump is creating a new narrative to demonize programs and policies aimed at helping vulnerable communities.

Environmental justice was born in Chicago, and Hazel Johnson is remembered as the movement’s “mother.”

Trump’s attempt to end the fight doesn’t faze Cheryl Johnson.

“We’ve been knocked down before,” she says from her office in Altgeld Gardens, where People for Community Recovery has been based for more than four decades. “I’m going to carry on to my last breath in my body, and I’m going to continue to fight for the inequalities that happen in our neighborhoods.”

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In Chicago, it’s often referred to as environmental racism because of the locations of polluting industries in Black and Brown communities on the South and West sides. Across the country, environmental justice matters to poor whites as well as people of color.

Hazel, who died at age 75, had said she worked for all vulnerable people plagued by toxic pollution.

Cheryl, who turns 64 on Tuesday and worked with her mother since her teen years, says the same thing about helping vulnerable people. She also is active on national environmental causes.

Trump is cutting jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency, and he’s all but eliminated the Office of Environmental Justice within the agency. That office grew sixfold under former President Joe Biden. Trump equates environmental justice to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which he has disparaged and sought to end.

The term environmental justice became better understood after horrific examples, including the Flint, Mich., water crisis.

When Hazel started out, there was no name for the movement.

“She said many times I didn’t know what the hell I was getting into, but I felt it in my gut that it wasn’t right,” Cheryl says. “If it don’t feel good, you fight against it.”

Cheryl Johnson is leading efforts to improve health, environmental and economic conditions on a number of fronts and was pivotal in a federal civil rights complaint that became an investigation and now a binding agreement to change the city’s zoning and land-use policies.

How it began: the toxic doughnut

Altgeld Gardens is in the majority-Black Riverdale community on the Far South Side. It’s one of the poorest areas in the city.

The Chicago Housing Authority complex is just west of the Bishop Ford Freeway on the north banks of the Little Calumet River and just south of a major wastewater treatment plant along East 130th Street.

The public health campaigns took decades, from the 1970s to Hazel’s death in 2011.

Sun-Times file

Asked in a 1990 WTTW forum what it’s like to live in Altgeld Gardens with chemical companies and “sludge-drying beds” from a wastewater treatment plant, Hazel replied: “It’s like living in hell because of the odor that makes you sick all the time.”

She described the pollution-related health problems in detail.

“We have infants that are born with deformities, we have a lot of respiratory problems, we have cancer, we have people who have to live on oxygen tanks in their homes,” she said.

Her accomplishments are numerous.

After years of working on complaints about peeling paint, Hazel led campaigns to rid Altgeld Gardens and all public housing of lead paint.

When she learned that dangerous — now banned — chemicals known as PCBs were dumped on the grounds of Altgeld Gardens, she worked to remove them.

Early on, she identified all the landfills, chemical companies, a water treatment plant and other sources of harmful pollutants.

In the 1990s, it was discovered that Altgeld, built as housing for Black veterans returning home from war, was itself built on a toxic dump once controlled by industrialist and luxury train car titan George Pullman.

The area surrounding Altgeld became known as the toxic doughnut, and cleanup continues to this day — decades after the pollution and health risks were well known.

The Lake Calumet Cluster is one of three Superfund sites on the Far South Side, and it is the one that has taken the longest to clean up. Begun in the 1990s, the remediation of the nearly 90-acre site seeks to remove pollutants that date back to the 1940s.

Once wetlands, the land was the site of numerous legal and illegal dumps.

In the 1980s, Hazel sought help from environmental lawyer Keith Harley, who is still representing Cheryl and other organizations that need the legal expertise to work the system.

It’s the messaging that Hazel perfected and Cheryl has replicated that has helped the Johnsons succeed in a number of challenging environmental fights, Harley says.

“I used to go around with Hazel when she would speak about environmental justice,” Harley says. “One of the things that always impressed me was that she just told the truth about how people were living.”

As for Cheryl, Harley says, like her mother, she has a gift for creating alliances with other organizations.

“Her message was not accusatory,” Harley says. “This is a situation in which we live. Join us in figuring out how we can have clean air, how we can have clean water.”

Sun-Times file

Cheryl takes the reins

Since Cheryl became fully in charge of the organization her mother founded, she’s waged campaigns related to environmental concerns, affordable housing, clean energy and climate change.

She joined other community organizations to protest the proposed move of scrap metal business General Iron from Lincoln Park to the Southeast Side.

That protest led to a complaint and petition asking for a federal civil rights investigation into the city’s zoning and land-use practices, which activists said placed polluting businesses in the same communities of color on the South Side and West Side. After a long fight by Johnson and other community activists, the city decided not to allow General Iron to open on the Southeast Side at East 116th Street and the Calumet River. That decision is still being fought in courts.

Under Cheryl, People for Community Recovery joined another civil rights complaint related to affordable housing. That investigation, begun six years ago, determined that aldermanic prerogative has kept affordable apartment units from being built in certain areas of the city. No resolution has been found.

The group is pushing for a city ordinance that will change land-use and siting policies that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has deemed discriminatory.

Johnson often references her mother and praises her.

“I don’t think there was ever a time she didn’t refer to her mother in some connection to what we were going to talk about or meet about,” says Peggy Salazar, a longtime Southeast Side environmental activist now retired.

Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times

The Obama connection

When Barack Obama set out to organize a campaign at Altgeld Gardens that included asbestos removal, he met Hazel, Cheryl says.

Hazel was impressed with the young Obama and helped introduce him to people.

When then-Sen. Obama campaigned for president in 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported a rift between him and the Johnsons. The article referred to excerpts from Obama’s earlier memoir, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” that didn’t acknowledge Hazel’s role in the asbestos removal.

Hazel endorsed Hillary Clinton over Obama.

Matthew Tejada, who worked in the EPA’s office of environmental justice under Obama, Trump and Biden, says the Johnsons’ focus on health and pollution changed the environmental movement.

While many decades ago, environmentalists were focused on conservation and wildlife protections — think Save the Whales — Hazel and Cheryl stress the impact pollution has on people’s lives.

“It’s about people and public health,” Tejada says. “Even at EPA, people still struggle. We’re not just here to make forests greener and water bluer.”

It’s a legacy that more people should know, according to those working in the environmental movement.

“It shows what just one person who tells the truth can do,” Harley says. “This happened in Chicago. We were one Hazel Johnson away from none of this happening.”

Cheryl Johnson, who allies confirm is undeterred despite Trump’s actions, counsels younger community organizers to have patience.

“She reminds us that she’s been doing this for generations and not to lose sight,” says Gina Ramirez, a Southeast Side environmental activist for the past 10 years.